This practical resource is suitable for anyone responsible for developing teaching, learning and assessment in your team, across your school, or with colleagues from different schools.

As well as chapters explaining how AfL works and how to use it consistently, Assessment for learning: embedding excellence and consistency contains:

• 22 lesson observations across 10 subject groupings, showing teachers and students using a range of AfL methods according to circumstance and capacity
• a training session for the leadership of AfL that helps you engage your leadership team in considering strategies for embedding AfL across your school
• a training session for teachers that helps you work through activities designed to extend and enrich teaching, and can be used by individual teachers or teams on their own.

Chapter Breakdown

Section 1 – Approaches to AfL

• Background
• Examples of lesson activities involving formative assessment
• What it means to highlight standards and criteria
• Answering common objections

Section 2 – Leading development in your team and across your school

• What do you want to achieve by developing formative assessments?
• What will you do to monitor and evaluate developments?
• Who will perform what roles?
• What will be done to change ethos, policies and systems?

Section 3 – Examples of Assessment for Learning across the curriculum

• English and media studies
• Mathematics
• Science
• Information communication technology
• Physical education
• Humanities and religious education
• Modern foreign languages
• Art and music
• Design technology
• Vocational and business education

Section 4 – Teaching towards autonomy

Section 5 – Things to work on

• Decide ground rules and know what to expect
• Be clear about purposes and standards
• Answer questions, ask questions
• Reflect critically on lessons
• Recap and mind-map
• Use criteria
• Use templates and models
• Use feedback and decide how to improve
• See rationale and relevance
• Develop resilience
• Work towards autonomy
• Be a coach, be a mentor

Section 6 – Helping your students learn to learn

Section 7 – Further research

Section 8 – Training resources for leadership of AfL

Section 9 – Training resources for teachers