Spotlight 2: TAP overview

The TAP course is an online workshop of nine weeks duration, aimed at providing teachers with strategies to change existing resources to better meet the needs of students and to explore diverse and valid ways of collecting evidence.

If you participate in this online workshop, you will look at ways to change existing resources to better meet the needs of your students, explore strategies to enable you to create or adapt a variety of new assessment resources, and explore diverse and valid methods of collecting assessment evidence to meet the varied needs of your students.

During the workshop, you will work through a variety of modules. These modules have been designed so that they can be undertaken in any order. However, we recommend that they should be done in the order provided, which should provide a meaningful progression through the material.

Within each module, there are a variety of possible activities. The activities include professional readings, hearing from students and teachers, looking at case studies, completing online quizzes, and participating in forums.

This workshop is about helping teachers to take the next step of their assessment. You will hear from teachers who have taken steps in new directions and trialled different things. They talk not only about the successes they had but also the challenges.

Instead of doing end of topic tests, which are totally unrelated to their final assessment, we're just doing small little milestone check-ins along the way. And then the students hand in their understanding for all three assessments at the end of about a sixteen-week period. The idea is they hand it in in a way they’re the most confident. I'm definitely improving with the students choosing their context and integrating the assessments together so some students are starting to use pieces from each one to explain something somewhere else. And the big positive from it was the students actually getting to choose a topic themselves, that can link to all three types of analyses. Some of them have even recorded their own data or collected their own data. It can be on a topic they're really interested in, and that has been really valuable and has shown a great improvement in grades.

Another very popular feature of the workshop is the opportunity to hear students talk about what they feel helps them do well in assessment. 

Student 1: The things in general that I find motivating for me are topics that I'm really interested in. So when we are allowed to have a lot of choice about things that we do it on, and when we also have a choice about the medium in which we present our internal, that's kind of saying “I’m open to ideas. If you wanna present yours in a film, you wanna present yours in a PowerPoint, that's okay.” 

Student 2: I think it would help me a lot if my teachers showed me exemplars so I understood the success criteria of what I actually need to do to achieve at a higher level. 

Student 3: Every time we talked about the actual assessment, she kept saying that we could do it, we have the capability of gaining the excellence marks. And then I fully came to a realisation that I was able to.

In every module, you will have the opportunity to do some professional reading. These are generally optional extras. However, they may also be linked to an activity. The forums associated with each module are important features of the workshop. These enable participants to share their thoughts on what they've seen, heard, or read. Participants are able to ask questions of others, share their own experiences, and their ideas for moving forward. Sometimes resources are also shared, and often people’s reflections stimulate and motivate others.

You will have the opportunity to see case studies of how schools and teachers are doing things differently and hear about the benefits and challenges. This workshop will provide you with resources to assist you with making changes to your assessment practice, changes which will better meet the needs of the diverse students you meet in your classrooms.

Thank you for watching this video, and we look forward to seeing you on the TAP course.