Last year I was part of a recorded conversation with my colleagues James Croxford and Jane Headley. We recorded what was meant to be a fifteen minute discussion as a resource for our PgC Teaching and Supporting Learning, but it ended up as 45 minutes. Well there is a lot of ground to cover in this topic! I was prompted to release it more widely after an #LTHEChat on X on podcasts and the media of audio.

The conversation covers three main questions:

  1. What is authentic assessment?
  2. What are the strengths and challenges of this approach?
  3. How do we achieve authentic assessment?

Listening to it back I can hear some of my own critical questions and concerns surfacing. Since this James and I have gone on to write a paper on this topic (currently under review) but what is interesting to me is that that ideas for writing were clearly being formed through discussion. Colleague engagement is incredibly important for fuelling thought and redeveloping or evaluating our own positions.

As with most things – the views expressed are our own. I hope it is of some use to others. Between ourselves we called this our ‘Loose Women’ discussion – after the UK lunchtime TV chat show! `Who know’s maybe we’ll do another!

Here’s the link to the recording in the National Teaching Repository