SBAfL Professional Development Program

By: Atifah Osman

{WRITING IN PROGRESS}

On 19th July 2012, the nine days of Professional Development Program for School Based Assessment for Learning (SBAfL) has come to an end for Group 2. A total of seven teachers including myself were sent to attend the program. Now, the program has ended, we are expected to share with the rest of the teachers in the school and try to implement SBAfL tools in our lessons as part of the SPN21 requirements.

In between the first wave (started on 2nd July until 7th July) and the second wave (14th July to 19th July) of this Professional Development Program, we as the pioneer of this program for our school were given a follow-up task to complete in school. We were asked to try out these SBAfL tools in our own classroom for four days. 

Some of the SBAfL tools used during the 4-days implementation:

(A) Traffic Light Cards

Basically, the colour of the traffic light cards imitates the traffic light colour that can be seen on the road. Therefore, introducing this to the students were a breeze as they relates it well to their existing schema of knowledge. This is actually used to indicate their level of understanding to the teacher in order to immediate feedback or actions to take place.

When the students were asked to assess themselves using the traffic light cards, not all of the pupils showed the green cards.  Some of the pupils put up the yellow and the red cards. This means that they have some problem understanding the instruction or explanation that has been given.

After clarifying everything that needs to be done, the pupils were asked to assessed themselves once again and as shown in the picture above, all the pupils showed the green cards in the 'after' picture. This allows for the next stage of teaching and learning to proceed.

Youtube videos on SBAfL in secondary schools - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqss5BSKwOA

A different set of traffic lights was also prepared by the other teacher who is teaching MIB. Though it may look different but it is still used the same way.

(B) Strategic Questioning

Strategic questioning is a good tool to challenge students' previous knowledge. This is highly effective for students with higher ability. Therefore, when using it as a whole class approach its best to have the students grouped in a mixed ability group. Otherwise, the students can be assigned different tasks to do in class as an alternative to the previous.

In the previous lesson, the pupils were taught on how to add and subtract like fractions. The way to answer such questions is completely different from answering questions of unlike fraction and so, the pupils were asked to answer the questions without first teaching them on how to. 

Of course, there were some frustrations among students as they just could not get the answer. But, when one of them succeed in answering the question, everyone jump for joy! Seeing them going through each stage of comprehending the question definitely make everything worth it though this kind of lesson is always time consuming.

Here is another way of how to ask questions to the students (carried out after SBAfL PD ended) - the question and the answer is given to the students and they'll be asked to find a way to get to the answer. As before, the student have not yet taught on how to solve such questions. There were given enough wait-time to solve the question as a group......

(C) Self-Assessment

After the 

-----insert pictures-----

Once we returned for the second wave, we were expected to share our success stories as well as challenges that we faced while implementing SBAfL tools in our everyday lessons. However, I declined to share my experience as it was too embarrassing to speak in public. Besides, my little experiment was full of failure! 

Many factors had contributed to that i.e. minimal time to properly plan the lesson since we had to prepare for a school event on the same week and the introduction of a new topic *in desperate need to catch up with the syllabus* makes it difficult to apply such tools in my lesson. 

Moreover, half of my class had to go for a field trip which left me with not much of a choice but to do something simpler instead. When everyone returned the next day, the students had difficulty in assessing themselves as well as their peers especially in using the traffic light cards (the students loved to play with it during instruction time - they lost their concentration.) and coming up with some comments to write for two stars and a wish was difficult to most of them and so much more.

Thankfully, most of us had the same difficulty when trying to implement such follow-up task! Therefore, not sharing with the whole group these challenges was not a big loss to me. :) Suggestions and advised were given to overcome such problems by our facilitators and the main thing to bear in mind was that, each and every SBAfL tools are not to be used in everyday lesson - use only when appropriate and time is definitely needed to make things closer to perfection. For the time being, we were advised to practice something that is simple to do for everyday lesson i.e. writing lesson intention and success criteria on our lesson plan and sharing it with the students is the most essential - for now! As time goes by, and when the time is right, it is perhaps time to move up a level and use other suitable SBAfL tools.

[...to be continued]