Phase 5: interpreting and sharing evidence
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 criteria and language used to assess.
Teachers engage in professional discussion, perhaps asking questions such as:
- 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?
Teachers will need to come to 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 evidence from one student, according to what was decided. 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.
- Resources are made available, such as the Literacy Learning Progressions, Numeracy progressions and stages.
- Recording sheets are made available for the moderation meeting.