How do we best succeed in preparing our children for this future? What do they need to survive in a world that is changing faster than ever before?

Instead of knowledge acquisition, the acquisition of competences is now at the centre of education. Many countries in Europe and worldwide are far ahead of the German-speaking countries in this respect. Above all Finland and New Zealand.

These competences cannot be taught well in classical learning settings. Frontal teaching places the focus on the teacher whilst the focus needs to be on the learner and their individual needs (Wildt and Wildt 2011).  The role of the teacher has changed from an imparter of knowledge to a facilitator. The OBS has already successfully adapted to these new requirements. Pupils are at the centre of the learning process and receive feedback (in the form of feeding forward). Each child has their own individual learning path. Significant changes have already taken place at OBS which can neither be compared with nor evaluated against our own experiences of school, as the circumstances and requirements are simply completely different.

However, in order to bring this change to a full conclusion, there is still one component missing in the triangle that makes up education. In his model of Constructive Alignment, John Biggs called for the coordination of three areas. For him, learning goals, the teaching and learning environment and assessment should form a unit. (Biggs 1996)

We have reformed two of these areas, but are reluctant to tackle the third, for fear of abandoning a familiar form of comparison/benchmark.

However, we are basing our fears on outdated criteria. We expect our children to sit a graded assessment at the end of a unit which we believe tells us what our child knows or doesn’t know, highlights their mistakes and tells us how successful they are. Educational research over the past 20 years agrees that a paradigm shift must be implemented in the area of performance assessment, but here many educational systems are lagging behind enormously. Old examination forms no longer do justice to the new learning objectives and teaching methods. After all, it’s not about what you know, but what you can do and how you can apply your knowledge, make connections, question critically, form your own opinion, etc. All this cannot be tested in one end of unit assessment. (Witt and Czerwionka 2013).  We need other forms of assessment. Forms that give positive feedback and don’t purely focus on the mistakes. When I was at school I had Russian as a foreign language and although I was a very good student, I hardly dared to speak because every grammar mistake was immediately exposed as such. The desire to speak passed and even today, many years later, I still have inhibitions about speaking Russian.

We want to encourage our children to make mistakes, to reflect, to evaluate and learn from them. We want them to identify their next steps in order to reach a new level in their learning. This requires clearly communicated learning goals and open forms of assessment that accompany this process in order to make it transparent.

A child who can see his or her progress is motivated to continue learning and further strengthen and deepen their knowledge, skills and understanding. However, if a traditional grading system is applied to this child, which usually has a social reference norm, i.e. reflects the level of achievement within a class group and may be insufficient, the grade is demotivating and does nothing to encourage intrinsic motivation. Had my Russian teacher motivated us to speak by either ignoring the mistakes or correcting them by repeating back correctly, our self-confidence in using the language would have been quite different. And let’s be honest, what is foreign language teaching all about? Is the focus purely on grammar? No, it is about the competence to enter into dialogue and make yourself understood, to be able to convey a message and not to fail because you can’t quite remember the grammar rules at that point in time. Yes, I am still able to use the correct personal pronouns today, but what good does that do me? If I meet a native speaker, I fail because of my own fear of simply attempting a conversation. This fear should not accompany future generations. They should just try, make mistakes, learn from them and face the world with an insatiable curiosity.

This is what authentic assessment is all about. Students should be assessed individually, based on their competences and learning goals. If we take this long overdue step together we will create the learning environment needed to enable the next generation to face the challenges of their future and become confident and successful global citizens. It is time to tread new ground.