Teachers’ Collective learning for more reliable assessment

Purpose From around 1990 until today, Sweden has implemented a series of educational reforms. On one level the changes can be described as part of decentralization and democratization while on other hand they can be characterized in terms of centralization and deprofessionalization. What ever you prefer to call these changes they obviously have affected the structure and content of teachers daily work. This means that the teachers themselves must take more responsibility for their assignment, interpret and understand e.g. the content of the new rating system, demands for new assessment procedures etc. Research shows that teachers in Sweden have difficulties in implementing all these changes in their practice in general and specially in those of assessment. Traditionally teachers plan their lessons, different tasks and how they are assessed entirely themselves. This is now slowly changing not at least due the governmental approaches, which mean demands on for more formative assessment practices. This paper is a part of a research project, which took place in Stockholm University in 2013-2014. The project aimed to improve education for teacher students and in service-teachers by creating some new courses in assessment. Courses included practical examples and exercises in some pre-schools and schools and covered whole process of assessment. These examples consisted real classroom and teacher planning events which all were recorded on video. One of these samples consists a series of teacher discussions of formative assessment process. While discussing this process teachers actually plan and create their assessment process. Through these discussions teachers were offered opportunities to develop professional skills in a collegial and mutual cooperation. This paper aims to study how some teachers through collegial and didactic discussions create a process for more formative assessment practice. Method A case study is pursued. In this project, video textual analysis of teacher discussions are used as empirical sources. Findings Teachers learned through the discussions the meaning and advantages of discussing their work together. They experienced that the whole assignment for assessment got easier to manage by collective learning. The results show that school organizations are in great need of creating tools and arrange structures and give space and time for collegial and collective learning for all teachers in order to create understanding for not at least for the assignment of assessment in order to keep it equivalent and legally secure for the pupils. Collective learning expands and renews teachers' understanding of the formative assessment process. Research Limitation The major implication of the study is that it includes only one school and one subject. Originality/Value of paper The study makes a contribution to the knowledge about collective or collegial learning in school