Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice

Author: Harry Fletcher-Wood

Publisher: Routledge

Details: 168pp, £16.99, paperback

ISBN: 9781138296893

The middle of exam marking season may not be the best time to challenge how you think and feel about assessment, but this was the task set to me in my reading of Responsive Teaching.

Although thoughts of September lessons may be far from your mind, Dylan Wiliam and Doug Lemov offer cover support for this text, urging you to embrace this practical guide and end some of the inefficient and futile practices commonly called “formative assessment”.

Primarily a blend of teacher-friendly practical advice and cognitive theory, this book is clearly targeted for wide consumption and hopes to revolutionise teaching in this time of heavy workload and rising pressures for students to “progress”. Admirable intentions.

It opens strongly with a foreword by Wiliam, who throws an interesting historical slant on the education world of the past 30 years. For teachers at either end of their careers, it’s always worth reading how a forefather of assessment for learning (AfL) looks back and dissects the word “assessment” and how it relates to learning. With a tinge of sadness, Wiliam sets the stage for Responsive Teaching by exploring how AfL became a model to monitor progress rather than a responsive teaching tool during a lesson.

And so we begin our journey into responsive teaching - a concept you may or may not be aware of - and with our guide, Harry Fletcher-Wood, we learn how we can make teaching responsive to students in a world where AfL, or formative assessment, has become one of the most misinterpreted and ill-used phrases in education. If you’re confused, this book aims to clarify things for you.

Fletcher-Wood is determined to establish his credibility as a teacher and educator of teachers, and his credentials support his tone of determined evangelism. It is within his detailed introduction - the opening justification for his argument - that he outlines why responsive teaching is necessary: it “blends planning and teaching, based on an understanding of how students learn from cognitive science, with formative assessment to identify what students have learned and adapt accordingly”.

His premise centres on three “confusions” found in research into teaching practices: that assessment seems to hinder learning; that skills seem more important than knowledge; and that assessment for learning is a bunch of techniques. In his convincing hypothesis, assessment is driven by three factors - and we get it wrong. We want to know how students are doing, we want to teach them the right things and we want to identify gaps in learning, but we end up subjecting them to fruitless, seemingly arbitrary testing.

A greater criticism lies in the use of summative (end-of-course) practice questions and tests to fill the role of assessment within the middle of the term or year. For Fletcher-Wood, “response teaching uses assessments for formative purposes to identify what students have learned”, not to simply record progress. The second confusion allows him to throw a grenade into the ongoing debate of skills vs knowledge. He firmly sides with the need for knowledge as the foundation that allows students to show skill.

Third, responsive teaching must be defined by what it is not, and much is placed on the space between what has become the “letter” of AfL in schools and its lack of resemblance to what was the “spirit” at the beginning - another nail in a coffin filled with lollipops, traffic-light cards and mini whiteboards.

Boldly, the book attempts to remove these confusions and provide solutions to six “endemic problems”. And as a guide, it takes you through theoretical and practical steps to adopting responsive teaching with a clear attempt to avoid the “lethal mutation” of a practice accepted and used without knowledge or remembrance of the principle behind it.

Each chapter details a realistic problem and is divided into stages. At each stage, Fletcher-Wood is keen to show his working out and provide the cognitive research and case studies to back his statements. He invites you to work differently and not harder, with the goal of creating autonomous students as a trade-off for your initial investment of hard work and effort. As Fletcher-Wood states, responsive teaching offers “a path to improvement”.

The practical advice and examples are clearly presented and the tone is determined and confident. The last chapter attempts to answer the question of how we can make this work in reality. With an explicit understanding of how schools and teaching experiences vary, as well as the workload issues intrinsic in modern education, Fletcher-Wood attempts to offer simple, effective tips for teachers to use across subjects and key stages. In that sense, the book offers “a path to improvement” that teachers should explore and consider for themselves before a version comes winging its way via CPD or an external consultant.

It works as a guide, and does exactly what it sets out to do. But, undoubtedly, it does need further scrutiny to see whether responsive teaching follows AfL in losing much of its spirit as it slowly becomes education law.

Sam Draper has been head of English in three inner-city London schools and has been teaching for 15 years