Part of the rationale behind Assessment for Learning seems to be ongoing formative assessment, rather than after the event post-mortems.
There’s a link, I think, between that and what John Kay has called Franklin’s Gambit. Franklin’s Gambit is described by John Kay here:
In a letter to the English chemist Joseph Priestley, the 18th-century polymath Benjamin Franklin outlined a procedure for making decisions: “Divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then, during three or four days’ consideration, I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives, that at different times occur to me for or against the measure.
“When I have got them all together in one view, I endeavour to estimate the respective weights… I have found great advantage for this kind of equation, in what may be called moral or prudential algebra.”
…
Franklin himself knew that moral algebra was generally a rationalisation for a decision taken otherwise, setting out not just Franklin’s Rule, but Franklin’s Gambit – the process of finding a weighty and carefully analysed rationale for a decision that has already been made. Everyone who has ever worked in a large organisation has seen frequent examples.
And Kay goes on in his book Obliquity to say that this Gambit is why:
we come to have ‘impact assessments’ that are prepared after, not before, the favoured policy has been chosen … why we use models in which most of the numbers are made up and which can be reworked to generate any desired outcome. We devote hours to staff evaluations, quality assessments and risk reporting, but these hours are not really devoted to evaluation, assessment or reporting: they are spent ticking boxes, and our personal judgements, our assessments and our risk management are based on other criteria.
After just finishing a set of reports where children’s marks do not always tally with the sparks and liveliness they show in class, I think that seems to be true. I also think I need to be doing more with Year 6 form teachers in an ongoing way, testing small initiatives, feedback, improve or ditch etc. Ho hum. On the list of to do’s to get right next year.