New Development Matters options for early adopters

[millhill]

Is it possible to add assessments just for the areas of learning with no age refinements so we can keep track of the areas of learning we have observed for each child?

At the moment we cannot add assessments for our observations because we have to add an age band for the 2012 DMs

Edited September 19, 2020 by millhill

[Jules]

Hi millhill,

Now that the new Development Matters document has been released, we have been in discussions with its author, Dr Julian Grenier, and with Gill Jones and Wendy Ratcliff at Ofsted, to help schools develop a new way of assessing their children. We're working on a way to honour the ethos of avoiding another ticklist for the new DMs, whilst providing an effective method of recording and celebrating children's learning and development. It's a tricky one!

We have been asking for feedback from our users, so your thoughts are really helpful to us as we think about the way forward to support practitioners with their good practice. I have made a note of them to add to the discussions we are having. 

We have just released the recording of Dr Grenier's contribution to our vodcast and you can find it here. 🙂 

If you have any other thoughts, questions or ideas about the new DMs do continue to add them here, or alternatively you can contact our product support team at customer.service@eyfs.info

 

 

[millhill]

Thanks for the update. I have never agreed with using DMs as a tick list. I also did not like the fact that we had no choice but to select a DMs statement on Tapestry when assessing an observation.

What I would like is to be able to have an overview of which areas of learning have been observed for each child. It would simply be assessments for the 7 areas of learning with no refinements, no statements, just the area.

It's quite frustrating that we have nothing to use as an assessment at the moment.

[Jules]

Hi millhill,

Helen, Director and co-founder of Tapestry, has written an article about the opportunity for change provided by new ELGs and new DMs. 

Thank you for giving some more feedback about how you would like to see the new DMs added to Tapestry. I've included this in our collection of responses to feed into our discussions about how to do this. It really is helpful to hear all the different thoughts that educators have. 

Following discussions with the education team, the Tapestry developers are busy working on this. We appreciate that users are keen to have something to work with as soon as possible. 

Once we have added them, we will let everyone know, in our newsletters, as well as on our social media platforms. 

Take care. 

[millhill]

Thank you Jules for the reply and for considering my request.

I have read Helen's article and as mentioned in my previous post, I also don't agree with tick lists for the DMs. 

In my school we have never used Tapestry for tracking children's learning based on the tick list approach, I have always respected my staff's professional judgement. However, my staff would like the option to record the areas of learning covered in an observation, to keep track of the breadth of the children's learning experiences across the year.

Edited October 8, 2020 by millhill

[BenTapestrySupport]

Have you thought about using Tagging at the moment to keep observations together? 

You will then be able to get all the relevant observations together using filters and use professional judgement to assess the children.