'Create something interesting to show that you have learned something'

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

Oliver Knight is an experienced Advanced Skills Teacher who has taught in four different secondary schools, three of them multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-cultural and at least two wrestling with significant problems arising from social deprivation. Here he critically reflects upon his own learning journey as he grappled with his desire to build autonomous learners. Attached to this desire to build learner autonomy was his anguish at the state of current assessment practices as they were not aligned with his aspirations and vision for his pupils. The article starts with an attempt to build a conceptual framework within which to analyse orthodoxies in assessment practices. In particular, he points out how ‘AfL' has, in many schools, turned into a set of procedures, rather than a process. The principles it was designed to enshrine have been lost. He then explains how he has used this framework to experiment with learner autonomy, giving an example from his practice as Head of History. Knight hopes this article will launch an extended dialogue between teachers on how best to enable pupils to become autonomous, lifelong learners - a professional academic dialogue that explores ways of taking assessment beyond the repetition of procedures that some theorists, managers and policy-makers expound. Teaching History 115, Assessment Without Levels Edition presented many practical approaches to assessing without recourse to Level Descriptions. Knight goes well beyond this, with a more radical theoretical framework, one that he is exploring through research into his own classroom practice.