Number Agents

If you are reading this blog post, I am absolutely that like me, you did a little dance and leap for joy when the demise of National Standards was announced. If you have been reading my blog for a while you will be well aware of my views on assessment or to be more specific 'testing'.  I have also talked a little about this in my last book My Journey into Play which is available in PDF through TPT in my Number Agent Store. In my opinion assessment has taken over many schools, it has made the teachers role one of box ticking and created stress for children and adults alike.  It has taken a way a lot of the freedom and innovation and led us to believe that there is no other way. I won't go much further into this, because this blog post is not intended to be full of my opinion, but to share what we are doing and where we are up to at the moment. I did however want to share with you a little story that made me cringe...I am still hearing too often about visual assessmen...

We must trust ourselves, we must trust our instincts, but most of all, we must trust children. Children are competent, capable human beings.  They are born competent, unfortunately we have created a stifling education system that instead of growing this competence, strips it away, layer by layer, until they themselves believe that they need to teachers direction in order to learn. When we finally expect to see this competence as they get older, they disappoint us by struggling to be independent and we wonder why. We have robbed children of the gift of trust and it is long overdue that we gave it back. I am not blaming anyone here, I think it is so engraved in our psyche that we don't even know what we are doing.  We have absolutely come to believe that children need our supervision and guidance 100% of the time, because they are not capable of competently looking after themselves without an adult hovering somewhere in the vicinity. We have developed a system based ...