One of my challenges is balancing the need to stay on top of marking whilst still making time for reflection on how to improve my actual teaching. I think this is a pretty universal situation for most teachers. Mock season creates intimidating piles of assessments and it is an inevitable by-product that lessons suffer. So often the lessons themselves become irritating disruptions to the conveyor belt of marking.

This time around, as much for my mental health as anything, I have made a conscious effort to avoid descending into assessment slavery. Twitter and Facebook have helped as fellow teachers continue to post and share ideas and resources that spark my curiosity and return my focus to teaching.

I’m fortunate that my line-manager enthusiastically consumes educational discourse and we over the last few weeks we have commonly returned to Mark Enser’s ‘Teaching is Simple’ post. RIAT makes so much sense as a recipe for learning and has become the blueprint for what I am trying to achieve consistently in my own teaching and, in time, across my faculty. However, my weakness is definitely the ‘application’ phase. Once I have ‘delivered’ the instruction I am in too much of a rush to get to the test phase that I am not facilitating the opportunity for understanding to ferment. Time pressures have a habit of overriding what I know to be the most effective method for achieving actual learning.

As a result of this, I have been deliberately seeking out ideas and resources to build in thought-provoking activities to my lessons where the knowledge can be applied without the spectre of assessment. I want my students to think without a numerical outcome. A couple of approaches I have tried out with encouraging results has been the Rubiks Cube (c/o @MrFitz) and the Extentometre (c/o @KKNTeachLearn). These are deceptively simple strategies that engage students with making decision about how to deply the knowledge they have collected and ultimately making evaluative judgments based on their understanding. They are accessible for all students and have led to really interesting outcomes.Put simply; these activities encourage students to ‘think.’

Now that has to be more valuable than having all my assessments marked in a week.