AfL and Responsive Teaching and what these say about how schemes are introduced into schools

I am reading Responsive Teaching by Harry Fletcher Wood. Here are a few key extracts which made my eyes roll with utter delight at the sheer obvious nature of our world written by an academic with a platform.

Here is a squashed section of the book which I think is key, inspired by both Wood 2018 and Kirby 2014

Items like lollipop sticks, colorful party cups, red-amber-green traffic light systems used multiple times per lesson, thumbs-up-or-down signals, starred self-confidence post-it notes, scribbled emoticons to capture end-of-lesson feelings, and obscure acronyms such as WALT and WILF all became a form of reductio ad absurdum. Many senior leadership teams began to focus on the letter of the AfL policy rather than its intended purpose. This led to school-mandated lesson plans, observation rubrics, and progress checks conducted three times each lesson, along with endless mini-plenaries. Objectives were shared in rigid and often counterproductive formats across all subjects, using phrases like “By the end of the lesson, students will be able to…”. Peer assessments were divided into levels that typically resulted in comments like “5a because he tried hard and wrote neatly”. Teachers marked in green ink instead of red to avoid harming students’ self-esteem and displayed posters with tiny, illegible, and incomprehensible level descriptors. Prescriptive yet flashy AfL techniques, such as the use of mini-whiteboards, became the OFSTED-enforced norm, with inspectors becoming fixated on whether pupils could identify their current level.“ (Paraphrase Kirby 2014)

“A gap had emerged between the ‘letter’ of teacher’s actions and the ‘spirit’ underpinning Assessment for Learning ( Marshall and Drummond, 2006 ). As a result, much Assessment for Learning practice in schools applied techniques which achieved little, detached from the principles Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam sought to promote. This was a shame, because formative assessment, embodied as Assessment for Learning, promised much. Students seem likely to learn more when evidence of their achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited. (Black and Wiliam, 2009, in Wiliam, 2016 , p. 106)”

The most recent round of PISA international tests found that

the biggest impact on student achievement in science was the affluence of the parents. The second was the ability of teachers to adapt instruction to meet student needs. . . . There is literally nothing else that can increase student achievement by so much, for so little cost. (Wiliam, 2018)

The Assessment Commission concluded that, almost twenty years after the introduction of Assessment for Learning, “formative classroom assessment was not always being used as an integral part of effective teaching” ( Department for Education, 2015 , p. 13).

Purchase Responsive Teaching Here

How did we get so lost?

I think this extract above perfectly captures teaching in the modern age. The Black Box was a seminal piece of work which impacted by teacher training from 2011 to 2016. AfL was supported by APP (assessing pupil progress) APP went out of the window because it was unsustainable and AfL was never truly implemented. It is so fascinating that we can so completely miss the point of actions and still feel as though we are meeting the purpose behind them. It is reminiscent of COVID-19 performance actions, such as washing shopping items. It makes us feel like we are doing it right but we are not really sure what we are doing. AfL, as Wood points out, is only useful if you do something with the data gathered. We can do all of the whiteboards in the world but if we don’t adapt the lessons based on the information we gather, what is the damn point? However, I would argue that, based on the schools I have worked in, few people do anything with formative assessment data. It is simply too difficult and tiring to keep replanning content based on previous lessons.
I wrote so many lesson plans which planned in AfL opportunities, ruining the AfL completely. We started taking summative, end of lesson tracking, because we were not doing anything with the AfL data, which was never recorded anywhere, so what was the point? We patted ourselves on the back and said, “We are doing AfL.“

Recently, I was in a meeting where we were asked, “When do you do AfL?”
”Constantly,” was our reply, “hands up, whiteboards (replaced with jotters, due to budget constraints.) talk partners, etc“ But none of these are responsive teaching, they are just opportunities for children to demonstrate knowledge into an empty well which changes nothing.

But. Let us get more broad.

How did we miss the trick with AfL? Reduction to simplicity.

A very clever group of people found that adapting lessons improved those lessons. Low stakes assessments and adjustments made from them resulted in improved teaching. Teachers said, be specific. Experts were then very specific, but they communicated the actions but leaders neglected the intent behind them. Lists were made of effective strategies, the lists circulated but their original meanings were lost entirely.

But the real crux of the matter is that AfL was never meant to be a rigid checklist of do’s and don’ts. It was conceived as a responsive, adaptive approach to teaching: one that requires a constant conversation between teacher and student. When that conversation is reduced to tokenistic gestures (thumbs-up here, quick whiteboard poll there), its transformative power is lost entirely.

Evidence Yourself Doing Nothing

Once leaders demanded evidence of AfL, the focus shifted towards the appearance of compliance rather than a commitment to its spirit. No matter how well intentioned the initial policy or advice, it became trivialised into rigid lesson plans and unthinking practices. A teacher can present a kaleidoscope of ‘AfL strategies’ throughout the day, but if they never adapt their lessons in light of what they discover, then they are not truly practising formative assessment. Instead, they are just ticking boxes.

That is precisely how we missed the trick. We craved simple solutions: measurable, observable tokens to prove that we were ‘doing AfL’. Yet AfL, at its core, is about noticing what pupils do and do not understand, then taking the next step accordingly. It is responsive by definition. If you throw away that responsiveness, if you fail to adapt your approach based on the evidence at hand, you are left with empty mechanics.

The pity is that formative assessment has so much potential to change classroom practice for the better. When done well, it sits at the heart of a dynamic learning environment in which teachers notice nuances in students’ understanding and respond quickly. It enables teachers to shape their lessons in real time, anticipating pitfalls, capitalising on readiness, and nudging learners forward. Most crucially, it allows us to address misconceptions before they harden, making every interaction count.

Finding out what is in The Black Box for us

So what should we do instead? Remember the central principle: gather information about pupils’ learning in order to modify teaching. Any technique, a whiteboard, a traffic light system, a quick quiz, is valid if (and only if) it triggers a teaching response. We must resist the urge to checklist our way through strategies. Instead, leaders should encourage a culture of professional curiosity: rather than asking “Have you used mini-whiteboards today?” they should be asking, “How did you respond to what you discovered about your pupils’ understanding?”

AfL was never the problem; the problem was our collective tendency to substitute shallow compliance for meaningful change. Yet formative assessment remains one of the most cost-effective and impactful ways to boost learning (Wiliam, 2018). If we can restore its original spirit—using continuous assessment to genuinely shape our next steps—then we stand to realise its remarkable promise, and move beyond those empty, mechanistic rituals that do little more than check a box.

The Future

There must be current practices that we do which we will one day look back on as misinformed, just as with AfL. The most frustrating part of this adventure is that, we knew at the time this did not make sense. Countless teachers parroted this work yet we did it anyway. I believe that a reckoning may come for the writing curriculum, we continue to be unable to assess non-Year Six work accurately, even by any measure, surely someone with power and influence will recognise this?