"The challenge of getting all teachers, from different schools to the same place, at the same time, with enough material to allow the sessions to run smoothly was always a logistical nightmare. This triggered the search for a different way - a change to the status quo."
In 2017 AssessProgress was founded to facilitate Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ) sessions across UK schools (we still do this). WeModerate is our 2nd assessment product and one that focuses on improving the quality of teachers’ writing moderation. WeModerate is an ‘on-demand’ moderation platform for schools. Our key focus in our initial stage is rolling the platform out to primary schools, helping schools and teachers to discover how the platform can save time, costs and teacher workloads.
Our vision is to change the educational assessment landscape, disrupting the educational status quo and facilitating the simplification of criterion/rubric-type assessment using our innovative online app. We’ve developed WeModerate to simplify and standardise rubric style assessment.
We’re on a mission to make a compelling argument for a change in how teachers currently assess and moderate pupils’ work, facilitating collaborative teacher-led moderation on your terms, in your own time, all qualified by your peers and support networks – simple.
Our founder has been a Headteacher at a large city primary school since 2013 and has spent more than 20 years teaching in nursery, primary and secondary schools. As Headteacher in lead schools for partnership primary moderation and a Local Authority moderator, we have been involved in primary school writing moderation for over 15 years.
Managing and running moderation sessions between partnerships of schools for several years taught us two things: Firstly, the benefits of getting teachers from different schools with different ideas, curricula, and a range of different work is enormous. Secondly, getting everyone together at the same time and place with pupils’ work so the session can run in the first place is a logistical nightmare.
Once there, though, the conversations and feedback on children’s work were always developmental and supportive. However, teachers could sometimes be biased in their judgements when they know the children or school from which the work had come.
Additionally, there wasn’t the opportunity to look at lots of work from across classes in a portfolio. Most teachers would only bring a few pieces of work or one or two children’s books as we wouldn’t have the time to moderate anymore than from each school. Feedback, therefore, for teachers to take away was limited to only a few pieces per teacher per class at best.
This triggered the search for a different way – a change from the status quo. That’s how WeModerate was conceived and built.
An intuitive online app packed full of useful features that can scale from one school to have hundreds of schools moderating together at the same time. WeModerate supports all teachers to be involved in supportive, collaborative moderation and assessment, with all of the benefits of mass moderation but in their own time and all from the comfort of their chair.