Setting Targets For Setting Targets

Over the past 4 years of working in schools, my understanding of the word ‘differentiation’ has evolved. As a Teaching Assistant it meant 1:1 emotional support, differentiated resources and intervention. Now, as a Newly Qualified Teacher, it means all of this and much, much more. In a recent induction session at my new school, one of the Lead Teachers and Development Coordinators led a very informative and inspiring talk on differentiation strategies. They shared some of their most successful approaches and asked us to apply them to our own teaching and then reflect on the outcomes.

With end of unit assessments approaching, I decided to focus my research on marking and feedback. With marking, come targets so it only seemed appropriate to set myself 3 targets that were aimed at improving the use of marking and feedback as a differentiation tool in my classroom.

Target 1: To get to know the students and to find out what their individual strengths and weaknesses are.

In order to achieve this target, my aim was to gain some sort of baseline data for each student and then build differentiation around this understanding. This baseline data came from various formative assessment strategies. The main strategies I used were:

• Questioning
• Feedback (through marking)
• Peer and Self–Assessment

I also used starter and plenary activities along with my lesson objectives to monitor progress during the lesson. These tasks are useful because you can continuously refer to them and students are able to display their understanding in a quick and simple way throughout the lesson.

When teaching, I mostly use these strategies without any conscious planning, but after our induction session, I decided to set myself a target to use these strategies with a more directed and personalised approach to ensure I was differentiating effectively.

Target 2: To communicate effectively with support staff and students themselves to discuss targets, intervention and progress.

Communication and feedback are probably the two most important aspects of monitoring and assessing progress. They require little planning and can be easily personalised and focused. My second target was to make sure that I was communicating with SEN support staff that work with me. In the lead up to summative assessments, this communication allowed me to adapt my teaching and guide my SEN students at the appropriate level. I emailed staff the assessments/lessons I was going to be using and together we devised scaffolding to use in lessons. This communication provided me with a better understanding of individual students and the class as a whole, allowing me to make suitable changes and adaptations to my lessons and feedback.

Individual feedback and communication with students was another main focus of this target. For formative assessment to work well, students need to take an active role in their learning and a student-teacher dialogue needs to exist, not just when giving feedback, but also when deciding what learning will take place and at what level to aim for.

Feedback can be given orally in class or in writing, and over the past few weeks I have been able to use both approaches. I found that verbal feedback was more effective with older students (A-level especially) this is probably because they have a better understanding of their own work as most of it is done independently. With the younger years, I found it a lot harder to have these kinds of discussions because they are less likely to understand where they have gone wrong. I found that the best approach was to give detailed written feedback and to highlight parts of their work that were particularly strong/weak. This clearly identifies the area of their work that needs working on and the written targets can be referred to again and again.

Targets are a powerful way of implicitly differentiating work and involving students in their progress. They give students a clear indication of what they need to improve and they give teachers a clear understanding about what they need to teach. I set targets in English by taking into account the students’ strengths and weaknesses and then identifying ‘the next steps’ they need to take in order to improve a common error or extend their current work. In order for students to respond to these targets ‘the next steps’ need to be modelled and scaffolded. This led me to my third and final target:

Target 3: To plan and deliver a personalised D.I.R.T session to follow up on the feedback students had been given.

Whichever way it’s given, it’s essential that feedback is specific, personalised and that it is acted upon as soon as possible. This is so students can digest the comments and use them to productively improve their work, which will be more beneficial to their progress than a grade or even simple comments such as “well done”. When planning and delivering an improvement lesson for a mixed ability class, it’s difficult to make sure each student’s target is modelled and it is also difficult to make sure all students are reflecting and responding to comments. Advice from other teachers was to model how to improve the most common targets in the class and then to let students reflect and respond independently. This then gave me the opportunity to work 1:1 with some of the low-starters and SEN students who had more specific targets.

On reflection, I would agree that this is an effective way of getting a mixed ability class to independently respond to their targets. However, I still found that some students were not able to access ‘the next steps’ or were lacking independence and confidence. In order to try and develop my D.I.R.T lessons in the future I will be trying some other approaches such as group work and student teachers/“experts”.

In the same way that it is important for students to reflect on their targets, it is just as important for me to take this approach in all aspects of my teaching. By taking a more conscious and careful approach to differentiation and feedback I have been able to learn a lot more about my students and their progress, which will in turn, improve my future planning to make sure learning is more personalised.