ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by examining why assessment for lifelong learning must underpin the improvement of teachers’ professional performances. Teachers must perform their professional roles within existing communities of practice, in which learning is ‘socially constructed, participative, embedded and necessarily contextualised’ (Boud and Falchikov, 2006: 408). Continuing professional development courses should equip teachers, as members of their practice communities, with the necessary self-assessment skills to reach informed judgements about their own performances, which improvements are necessary, and how to enact them. The development of the chapter illustrates a means of achieving this through combining, in course planning and delivery, three assessment purposes – formative, summative and sustainable. Sustainable assessment injects a longer-term perspective and thus implies a shift in emphasis or focus as opposed to an increased burden of assessment or the ‘invention’ of new techniques. The manner in which this is done is intended to be seamless and persuasive to participants, and to take full cognisance of the nature of their professional learning.
