During my initial teacher training, Teach First introduced me to the Teach Like a Champion technique of ‘begin with the end’ which I mistakenly thought meant that every lesson should build up to an exam-style essay question on the topic of the day.
After all, if I ultimately want pupils
to critically evaluate the impact of an indirect tax to deal with a negative
externality, then surely pupils should complete an essay on this? That's what they will need to do in the exam after all.
I would then mark it and pupils would get feedback to
improve it with comments like ‘you need to extend your chains of reasoning’ or
‘you should consider both sides of the argument in your evaluation.’ These
lessons and corresponding DIRT tasks got excellent feedback in lesson observations,
but pupils were not improving.
It was reading Daisy Christodoulou’s ‘Making Good Progress’ that transformed how I considered assessment for learning, and the idea that formative assessment does not have to be the same as the final assessment pupils complete.
Pupils don’t achieve the end-goal of writing an essay evaluating the
use of an indirect tax by writing lots of essays but by practising and getting
feedback on each component part, like a football training session practising
each skill rather than always playing a match.
Then I had to think, what are the component parts for what I am trying to teach which I broke down into:
Each of these requires independent practice and specific feedback so that pupils can master each component part. This is my equivalent of a football coach doing drills on dribbling, tackling etc
1.
Knowledge of an indirect tax
After explaining and modelling the impact of an indirect tax
and through questioning establishing a high success rate or re-teaching if
needed (a la Rosenshine) I would then get pupils to complete a large number of
short answer questions to ensure they understand the concept and can show it in
a diagram.
Pupils then get instant feedback so if this knowledge isn’t
clear this is corrected with very specific feedback rather than waiting for
this lack of knowledge to come up in an essay later on. This feedback is either
when circulating as pupils complete independent practice or through giving
answers to the entire class.
2.
Logical Chains of Reasoning
Having explicitly taught the impact of an indirect tax, I
now want to assess if pupils can explain the full impact of an indirect tax.
Every topic in economics is interconnected and so establishing these knock-on
impacts is a crucial skill but as Daisy explains in her book these skills are
domain-specific so it is no use teaching a lesson on developing chains of
reasoning or providing feedback like ‘develop your chains of reasoning’ – they
need to be told exactly how they show these chains of reasoning for this
specific topic.
The way I would not do this is by gradually fading guidance
so pupils complete a partially filled table explicitly assessing their chains
of reasoning for this specific topic as shown below:
This way pupils get precise feedback on what chains are missing and if this highlights knowledge of prior topics that are weak then this can be strengthened. Thus pupils understand how to develop chains of reasoning in the topic rather than just being told they should develop their chains of reasoning.
Later on they complete a similar exercise without any
prompts, this also works well as a spaced retrieval activity a few weeks later.
3.
Application to context
Next pupils need to show the impact of an indirect tax has a
different impact for different industries. I used to give pupils a case study
and then be constantly surprised that pupils give generic analysis without
reference to the extract.
I realised that the issue was that there were few worked
examples for them to understand how this should be completed. So instead I
would provide examples of how products with inelastic demand or products where
an externality is hard to quantify renders an indirect tax less effective.
Then rather than making pupils write a page-long essay to
assess this skill, I would give pupils a small extract and ask specific
questions like ‘what makes a tax on sugar less effective than on a good with a
more elastic PED?’ to test if pupils understand how the concept differs for a
particular context.
It is far more precise to give feedback on 10 different
examples like this to improve pupils ability to apply this to context than to
tell them ‘use the extract more’ on an essay they have spent an hour drafting.
4.
An evaluative judgement
At this point, pupils should have had feedback on their
knowledge of the concept, their overall impact, when it is not effective and
how it differs according to different contexts. As long as this knowledge is
secure and regular retrieval is used to strengthen this memory, then this
should be in pupils long term memory meaning that pupils free up the space in
the working memory to consider solving the problem of if a tax is an effective
way to correct the market failure in question.
Now what I would provide pupils are some worked examples of
how conclusion can be structures to help them understand how some factors can
be of greater importance than others.
As each of these are quick-fire examples of formative
assessment they don’t take as long as it appears when written down but by being
specific feedback for each component part of what I am trying to teach, it has
had a transformational impact on my teaching.
I only wish I read the book earlier!