Assessing the curriculum

At Henry Green we have created a broad, balanced, rich and vibrant curriculum, to excite and motivate our children, enabling them to develop confidence in themselves as independent, enthusiastic life-long learners. We aim to provide opportunities that will enable all our children to become successful learners who enjoy learning, make progress and achieve.

We encourage our children to be creative and imaginative and develop a lifetime love of learning. We believe the key purpose of assessment is to move all children on in their learning in order for them to reach their full potential.

Continual monitoring of each child’s progress gives a clear picture of what each child is achieving and their next steps. It is important that each teacher knows what has been remembered, what skills have been acquired, and what concepts have been understood. This enables teachers to reflect on what children have learnt and this informs future planning. The outcomes of our assessments will help children become involved in raising their own expectations.

Through assessing, recording and reporting on pupils’ work, we aim to:

• enable individual pupils to make progress in their learning
• be underpinned by confidence that every child can improve
• involve both teacher and pupils reviewing and reflecting upon assessment information
• provide feedback which leads to pupils recognising the ‘next steps’ in their learning and how to work towards achieving these
• include reliable judgements about how learners are performing, related, where appropriate, to national standards
• enable teachers to plan more effectively
• provide us with information to evaluate our work, and set appropriate targets at whole-school, class and individual pupil levels
• enable parents to be involved in their child’s progress

SOLO TAXONOMY AT HENRY GREEN

 'SOLO Taxonomy provides a simple and robust way of describing how learning outcomes grow in complexity from surface to deep understanding'

(BIGGS and COLLIS 1982)

Solo taxonomy provides a simple model for moving students from surface to deeper learning. At Henry Green, teachers incorporate this approach into their lessons.

Main points to consider

• In SOLO, understanding is considered as an increase in the number and complexity of connections children make as they progress from ignorance to expertise.
• Each level is intended to exceed the previous level
• The two stages (unistructural and mutli-structural) are both levels of surface learning, in which knowledge is gained in greater quantity but does not result in depth of learning.
• The last two stages (relational and extended abstract) is where children deepen their learning

Wow Moments at Henry Green

At Henry Green we use wow moments to help children create memorable experiences at the beginning of a new topic.

If you would like to find out more about our curriculum, please contact Ms Chemma at office@henrygreen.org.uk.