264 Rita Berry
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between teachers and students. Teachers are encouraged to allow ‘Students
to Take Part in the Assessment Process’ (Principle 6). Classroom activities
should be designed to allow students to self- and peer-assess their work.
‘Making Marking Criteria Accessible for Students’ is designed to facilitate
self- and peer-assessment (Principle 8). Teachers can ‘Use Diff erent kinds of
Assessment Strategies to Uncover Students’ Learning’ (Principle 7) and use
them to ‘Assess Students Continuously throughout the Learning Processes’
(Principle 5). Then, it is suggested that they ‘Analyze and Report on Their
Students to Understand How Students Learn’ (Principle 10). The report is
used as a means to ‘Provide Feedback to Students to Facilitate Learning’
(Principle 9). To support learning, feedback needs to be constructive and
timely. With marking criteria provided and explained to them, students are
informed about the expected standards of their work. To teachers, marking
criteria can also be used as a basis for giving feedback and communicating
results to diff erent parties. To help teachers further consolidate their understanding
of the ten guiding principles, 50 AfL indicators were developed
(see Table 15.1).
A total of eight one-day seminar/workshop sessions were held periodically
in the fi rst phase of the project (fi rst year). All the seminars and
workshops aimed to provide teachers with a basic understanding of the
fundamentals of AfL and strategies/methods. Real classroom examples
such as questioning skills, self-assessment and peer assessment and giving
quality feedback were given to the teachers at the seminars and workshops
to help teachers link AfL theory to classroom practice. Activities of the AfL
PDP also included a number of executive meetings for school representatives
for planning, communication and project evaluation purposes.
The second element was a heightening of teachers’ agency in relation to AfL
practices, as the process dimension. The process by which the project sought
to eff ect these changes was via school-embedded teacher learning communities
(TLCs), which were perceived to have the potential to provide teachers
with the information and support they needed to develop their practice in
deep and lasting ways. They were allowed to choose one or multiple aspect(s)
of AfL they would want to try out for their teaching. Hargreaves et al. (2013)
suggest that choice, initiation by the participants and relevance to their own
situations are important ingredients for the eff ectiveness of the development
process. Each training event included a TLC session to allow teachers
opportunities to share their experience in implementing AfL with their
project counterparts and to draw on feedback from their peers and researchers.
To help teachers internalize their understanding in AfL, the researchers
paid four visits to each school in the fi rst year of AfL implementation. Each
visit included peer lesson observations of the three participant teachers at a
project school and a post-lesson school-based teaching learning community
meeting (SB-TLC). SB-TLCs, while sharing similar vision as TLCs, had a
specifi c mission—to create a learning community in individual schools. The
intention was that these budding school-based learning communities could