By Katryna Snow, CIS Associate Director of Higher Education Services

 

Since the first CIS Summit of school and university leaders in 2019, the topic of new and evolving forms of student assessment has been at the forefront of our conversations. In collaboration with Melbourne Metrics at the University of Melbourne, we have taken an exciting next step to advance this topic by launching the New Metrics International Schools (NMIS) program. In this initial year, the NMIS program brings together 23 first-mover CIS member schools from 13 countries to rethink assessment in their schools.

 

How can schools better value and assess a broader range of student competencies?

Through this new community of practice, we are eager to see how our schools begin to utilize the deep knowledge, research, support, and tools provided by Melbourne Metrics as they start to evolve assessment practices in their individual school contexts.

We are fortunate that the CIS schools in the NMIS program can learn from and build on the deep, intentional work already underway in the local Australian context through a related Melbourne Metrics research initiative, New Metrics, where 40 schools have worked for several years to adapt and expand how they assess students.

During the NMIS launch event at the University of Melbourne last month, the international NMIS cohort visited several local Australian cohort schools to learn more about their assessment evolution journeys and find inspiration for their own work.

Visiting three diverse schools myself—a government primary school, a comprehensive private school, and a Catholic girls’ school—I was able to see and hear commonalities in what it takes for this work to be successful.

 

Here are some takeaways from schools that are well along their assessment evolution journey:

• It's crucial to create a shared language around competencies and skills that will be used at all levels of the school—with students and their parents, with teachers and leaders.
  
  Students will start to internalize this language and use it themselves, giving them the vocabulary to talk more robustly about their own learning journeys and capabilities.

• The adoption of new assessment models works well when it is organic and more bottom-up than top-down.
  
  Schools can select which competencies they wish to focus on from the options researched and validated by Melbourne Metrics, making the program customizable to a school’s unique context.
  
  For example, finding the entry point where there may be a desire to start assessing student competencies and skills differently—this might not be in the classroom.
  
  I visited one school where they introduced the use of Melbourne Metrics competencies during an eight-week off-campus residential learning experience. In contrast, another school uses the metrics in their year nine experiential learning program.
   
• Student agency emerged as an important competency in every school we visited, for students at all grade levels.
   
• This work is not a fad. The idea that we are creating real long-term systems change came up in every conversation we had.
  
  CIS member school Glenunga International High School, part of the Australian-based New Metrics cohort, inspiringly noted to the NMIS group of schools that 'transformational change takes time.'

The NMIS launch program in Melbourne found our 23 CIS schools inspired and ready to take the next steps in this transformational change in their own schools.

The visits to Australian schools that are several years into this work clearly showed the results of their efforts. They shared valuable advice on what they wish they knew when they started engaging with the Melbourne Metrics competencies, and they readily offered to serve as resources to the NMIS schools moving forward.

The energy and enthusiasm of the school leaders and their generosity in sharing were a perfect start to our launch event, providing a foundation for our ongoing work.
 

Image: Schools in the initial cohort of the NMIS program

 

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Related content:

Read additional reflections from the NMIS launch event in this blog by Louie Barnett from Amala School.

Key questions this post answers:

1. How can international schools better value and assess a broader range of student competencies to help them succeed in education and life beyond secondary school?
2. What practical steps can schools take to evolve their student assessment practices to help them succeed in education and life beyond secondary school?
3. What are the long-term impacts and challenges of transforming student assessment systems?