Measuring What We Value

This project evolved out of a desire to create a structure to drive us towards what we all want to do anyway, put children first. We have had a set of school values for some years without feeling they were fully embedded in school culture. It is widely recognised that assessment skews teaching priorities and we are hoping to mitigate against this by assessing the values we care about in the hope that this raises their profile.

Our values are the 5Cs: Caring, Curious, Confident, Creative and Celebrating. Children can articulate their understandings of these values to varying extents with many conflating celebrating with parties. We created a simple 5 point scale for each of these values and I modelled to my class how I would assess myself against these values. They then assessed themselves on a sliding scale, this meant their assessments didn’t appear to them as numbers, decreasing the likelihood that they would compare assessments with each other.  There was also space for them to put brief comments. These allowed children to add caveats, for instance that they were lacking in confidence except in sport. These were then plotted against assessments by their parents and by me as their teacher.
It is important to note two things this process is not meant for:

Measuring or tracking progress – Decreasing scores may indicate increased levels of reflection and high scores may suggest overconfidence.

Analysing how good a specific teacher is at fostering a particular culture – Same reasons as above.

Given the bias implicit in making subjective judgements the numbers are not very important. What we are interested in the conversations and the reflective process the numbers provoke. 
The first thing I found interesting was how hard it was to assess my class. For many children I would have been able to tell you whether they could use a fronted adverbial or an expanded noun phrase but not how caring they were. This made me think about how I could restructure my classroom to give greater prominence to the whole child. Once I saw how children had assessed themselves this helped me go further beyond the surface in my judgements of those children and what they might respond to.
Here is a sample of 4 radar graphs we used to compare assessments:

There are statistical differences, I suspect that most parents started with a score of 5 and adjusted from there whereas I started at 3 before adjusting up or down. What is particularly interesting however is the stories they tell, for examples the first graph shows the child and I agreeing they have a very low level of curiosity while their parents thought they were quite curious. This led to a valuable discussion of how they showed curiosity at home so I could attempt to encourage it at school. Differences in the other graphs also led to deep conversations at parents evenings, as an NQT I am unable to compare these discussions to typical parents’ evenings, it will be interesting to hear another teacher’s reflections.

Parents seemed receptive, although sometimes there was a lack of buy-in when another parent was the one who had assessed their child as this meant they had no connection to the numbers. This will hopefully decrease in  the future as parents become more aware it is something to expect. Another issue was lack of understanding of what they were being asked by some parents who do not have English as a first language, hopefully as the profile of the 5Cs is raised in the school this will decrease. I felt that a slightly longer parents’ evening might help give more space to these conversations although this could be my inexperience as an NQT.

My next step in this was to create a radar graph for myself. I rated myself, asked my year group partner to assess me (which they kindly did after numerous reassurances I would not be offended) and got a random sample of the children in my class to assess me. My class was very varied in their assessments which was interesting in itself, I am not sure if this represents their different interactions with me or differences in how they approach the system. This reminds me of a need to continually monitor my interactions to ensure I model all of the 5Cs to all children. This reminder will hopefully help me decrease the range in future iterations. The other priority arising from the graph is to model my curiosity more often as I see myself as more curious than my class do.

These are the kinds of reflections I have had with one iteration of this system. I hope with more conversations the children’s self awareness will develop and the conversations will become ever more valuable. Care needs to be taken in implementation to keep the focus on the conversations and the process as a tool for reflection rather than on the numbers but there is potential to invigorate conversations throughout the school about what we really value.

@MrEFinch has also written about this, see here: https://mrefinch.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/measuring-what-matters-5c-dashboard/