A further strategy to make pupil self-assessment valuable in the

classroom is to involve the parents. Teachers need to develop

opportunities for parents to become involved in the assessment process
as a normal part of the weekly or monthly routines. Parents need to be
clear what they are being asked to do and if teachers are going to involve
them in the assessment process they need to give them some help and
support to undertake it successfully. In practice this may need a parent`s
meeting to introduce the idea but it also needs some guidance on the
piece of paper that parents write on, e.g. When you have had a look at
the work and talked about your child`s comments on the work please
could you add a comment about an aspect you fell has been done well or
that you were especially interested in. it does not invite negative
comments.
Getting started is often the hardest part because we are talking about
changing the culture of the classroom if this is really going to work. The
first step is to encourage children to refine their global statements into
more specific and achievable statements such as I will read my work
through when I finish to check the spellings, or I will make all the tall
letters go higher than the ordinary ones.
As children get more used to assessing their work, being asked their
opinions and being clear about their expectations for the work, they
begin to refine the targets they set for themselves. Increasingly their
comments relate to the content of the work or their skills in carrying it
out, e.g. I will make sure that I check my measurements in science
before I write them down. Or I will write my next story so that there is
a real ending not just `and I went to bed` .
As teachers move around the classroom commenting on children`s work,
they can refer to the purpose of the lesson and ask children their views
on how well they feel they have been able to tackle the work. This helps

to give further insight into their current stage of learning. The change
here may be that teachers spend no more time with each individual child
than before but the teachers talks less and listens more as children
explain how they see themselves progressing rather than the other way
round. In this way children are talking a more responsible role in the
learning process and the teacher is showing that the child`s views are
valued and significant.
If teachers want to develop formal review times for each child, they need
to find times when the rest of children are working and will not normally
interrupt. One such time is silent reading. Another way is to encourage
all the children to review their work once a week at certain time, for
perhaps a quarter of an hour before lunch one day a week. They can
discuss their work with one another and write their weekly reviews. At
same time the teacher can talk to individual children, perhaps talking to
one or two children each week.