Developing teacher formative assessment practices through professional dialogue: Case studies of practice from Queensland, Australia

A new national curriculum and standards-referenced assessment in Australia is enabling teachers to revisit formative assessment as a philosophy of interconnected pedagogic, curriculum and assessment practices through which students make meaning about their learning. This research investigated how Australian teachers made meaning of the new national assessment standards, as a prerequisite for the formative assessment practice of sharing expected standards with students in responsive ways that respect their diversity as learners. Formative assessment involves teachers and students recontextualising vertical discourses of official or schooled knowledge, and horizontal discourses of local knowledge that are “context dependent and specific, tacit, multi-layered” (Bernstein, 1999, p. 159). This research examined how teachers recontextualised new assessment standards by annotating exemplars to inform their planning prior to teaching. Data were collected through audio recording professional dialogues and interviews with teachers in five Queensland schools. Thematic analysis incorporated Bernstein’s (1999, 2000) concept of recontextualising to understand how teachers navigated between vertical and horizontal assessment discourses. Teachers needed to develop shared understandings of assessment standards grounded in student performances before their teaching commenced. Findings indicate that opportunities for facilitated professional dialogue need to be incorporated as an aspect of professional practice as teachers develop shared understandings of a) the policy context in which they work and b) the processes and practices that will include students in democratic processes of knowledge production and meaning making