Phase 5: Interpreting and sharing the analysis
A moderation session has four goals:
- Identify similarities and differences in judgments
- Resolve any differences
- Achieve consistency of judgments
- Achieve shared understanding of consistency of the relevant Standards and language used to assess
Teachers engage in professional discussion, perhaps asking questions, such as:
- Do you need to gather other evidence from this child?
- How typical is the sample of work for this child?
- What surprised you?
- What are you unsure about?
- How well does the work show evidence of the success criteria?
- What will you do next to help the child’s learning?
As in moderating assessments, teachers will need to come to OTJ moderation meetings with open minds, with the possibilities of adjusting their opinions, expectations and their way of making judgments in the future.
Preparing for moderation sessions as a team or year level group:
- Each teacher makes available the range of evidence from one student, according to what was decided (for example, an ‘at’ or for whom there is a level of uncertainty about the OTJ). This could be portfolios or e-portfolios. (If moderating as a school, each team will select one student’s work to take to whole-school moderation.)
- Annotated sheets are made available for teachers to identify where work meets the standard.
- Team leader photocopies/photographs contents of the moderation folder for each team member. (This is not needed with e-portfolios as all that is required is a log on.)
- Resources are made available, such as the relevant National Standards, the Literacy Learning Progressions, Numeracy progressions and stages.
- Recording sheets are made available for the moderation meeting.