Outstanding Formative Assessment - Culture and Practice by Shirley Clarke

This is the second Shirley Clarke book I have had the pleasure to read. A few years ago my school was nearing inspection time and we wanted to freshen up our formative assessment approaches. This book was and still is brilliant. It is full of ideas and explanations. It gives strategies and ideas for developing whole-school growth mindset culture, as well as a wide range of ideas for lesson culture and structure as well as effective lesson starts and ends, It guides you in how to build an environment where pupils can become active learners, constant reviewers and self-assessors. I’ve gone back to it a number of times since studying it as a school book group reader and each time I find something else of interest that I want to try out. I always nudge my teaching students to read it as well as showing a range of ideas and strategies I’ve implemented.

If you are looking for a book to help guide you in ideas to build a happy and hard working classroom environment then this book has lots of ideas for you. It has a wide range of ideas that you can implement such as ‘Talk Partners’ and effective questioning techniques. It has online video clips you can access via QR codes which help to illustrate key points. All the ideas are well explained and can be easily implemented into your classroom/learning space.

In a nutshell, this book can enable anyone to be an even better practitioner, whether you’re fresh out of uni or nearer retirement, it will hone in on the things that you are doing well and help you to make this more visible and explicit for the pupils as well as give you ideas to try out. This book is a real gem. If you read it, I hope that you love it and find it as interesting and motivational as I did and still do.