Performance is not Progress
Q. I've got an observation coming up and I've been told I need to show that my students have made progress in my lesson. How do I do that? A. Well that depends on what you mean by 'progress'. Q. Go on. A. Well, I think progress means that a student knows more about the subject than they did when we started. It's basically synonymous with learning. Q. So, what's a good way of checking for progress? A. If you want to know what someone knows, you ask them questions about it. If you want to see what someone can do, you ask them to do it. But progress is something different. Progress is change over time, not simply a snapshot. So if you want to see if someone has made progress you need a starting point and a destination. You can then compare knowledge at the start of a term, say, and again at the end. As long as your assessment methods are appropriate then you've got yourself evidence of progress. Q. This all seems pretty straightforward. But I need to