Assessment for learning: The Plenary

When planning lessons, we are ALWAYS encouraged to have a hook at the start, an activity which grabs the attention of the students and allows us to assess what students know about the topic of the lesson. The plenary of a lesson is just as important as students need to understand what progress they have made and demonstrate what they have learnt.

Therefore, some form of assessment needs to take place. The end of the lesson may be an appropriate moment to do this and a performance task specifically related to the learning objectives may be the appropriate means to carry out this assessment.

Consequently, a plenary that will extend the learners’ knowledge of the content taught becomes an essential part of the lesson. However, in spite of their usefulness, plenaries are often not given enough time and as a result become the weakest and least active part of the lesson (Ofsted, The Key Stage 3 Strategy: Evaluation of the First Year of the Pilot. Ref: 349 (London: Ofsted, 2002).

What makes an effective plenary?

 In order to be really effective, a plenary needs to have the following features:

1. It has to be planned into the lesson at the most appropriate time, quite often at the end of the lesson but not necessarily. Mini plenaries can be introduced at transition points during a lesson.
2. It should allow teachers to assess all the class at once but also individual learners.
3. It has to be differentiated and include some challenge to assess not only what learners know but also what they still don’t know.
4. It should highlight misconceptions and these misconceptions should be addressed immediately or in the next lesson.
5. It should give learners the opportunity to reflect on the content they have learned and how they have learned it, how successful they have been in achieving the aims of the lesson and what, if anything, they need to improve.

Here are some examples of useful plenary activities.

Imagine you are doing a unit about dinosaurs. Before we start with Lesson 1, we can do a K-W-L activity. Draw a K-W-L table on a large sheet of poster paper and ask learners to copy it onto paper or in their notebooks. Ask learners to write what they know (or think they know) about dinosaurs in the first (K) column. In the second column, they write what they would like to know about dinosaurs in the form of questions.

At the end of the lesson or at the end of the unit, review the questions in the W (What I want to learn) column and ask learners to add statements to the L column (what I have learned). Are there any questions that remain unanswered? Thinking back on the information they have learned, can they predict what the answers might be?

Exit tickets: they are linked to the objective of a lesson or activity and can pose one or more questions. Questions can be Wh- questions, e.g. What did you learn today? What are you still unsure of? What do you still need to review?, or multiple choice questions, e.g. The most interesting thing I learned today was + a choice of items to tick off. Learners can be asked to write X number of facts they know now that the lesson is over.

Tweet a Friend: Can your students sum up a point of the lesson in 280 characters? There’s no need to get any mobile phones out, just give them sticky notes of index cards and ask them to write a Tweet, e.g. i.e. write what they have learned and / or  what they still feel unsure of.

Give me 5: this is a well-known technique in which learners draw a hand on a sheet of paper and assign a label to each finger, e.g. Thumb: In this lesson I have learned …, index finger:  I have used + a skill, middle finger: Today, I found … hard, ring finger: Today I have improved on …, pinkie: For next time, I need to remember …

Quiz time! You can ask learners to work in pairs or small groups and write quiz questions. Then they challenge the rest of the class. Learners can come up with different kinds of questions, e.g. True / False, Wh- questions. You can also turn a quiz on its head and instead of asking questions, why not ask learners to write the answers and get their classmates to guess the question?

Two Stars and a Wish: If you want your students to reflect on the lesson and what they’ve achieved, this is a great plenary idea. They simply write down two things that went well, e.g. Did they get a good score on a quiz? Did they complete an activity before the deadline? Did they manage to get their spelling right? Then they need to write a wish about what they want to achieve in the next lesson, e.g. Did they get something wrong and want to try it again?

Definitions on cards: Hand the definitions out and students have to move around trying to find their partner word/definition; use them to play bingo. The cards have words and the teacher reads the definitions; place them on a table and see how quickly students can match them all.

Plenary Pyramid

Draw a pyramid on some paper with six boxes. In the bottom three boxes, ask learners to write three things they already knew before the lesson. In the middle two boxes, they add something new they have learned. In the top box, they write something they want to know or an aim for the next lesson. This way, students reflect on what they have learned and you can plan ahead and include everything in the top boxes in your future lesson plans.