Assessment and teaching methodologies: the approaches to name in your plans

Two boxes on every plan slow teachers down more than any others: assessment and teaching methodologies. You know what you do in the room. Writing it out fresh for thirteen subjects, on the long-term plan, then again on the fortnightly, then again on the Cúntas, is where an evening disappears.

There is a faster way, and it is also the safer way. Most of what belongs in those two boxes is already named for you in national guidance. If you use that shared language, your planning is quicker to write and harder to pick holes in, because you are describing your practice in the exact terms the Inspectorate and the NCCA use.

Here is the list, where it comes from, and how to use it without retyping it for every subject.

Assessment: the NCCA continuum

The NCCA Assessment Guidelines set out a continuum of assessment methods, arranged from those the child leads to those the teacher leads. These are the recognised methods for primary classrooms:

• Self-assessment (the child reflects on their own learning)
• Conferencing (teacher and child, or peer to peer)
• Portfolio assessment (a collection of the child’s work over time)
• Concept mapping (a picture of what the child understands)
• Questioning (which underpins all classroom assessment)
• Teacher observation (spontaneous or planned: noticing, recognising, responding)
• Teacher-designed tasks and tests
• Standardised testing

You are not expected to use all eight in every subject. You choose the ones that fit the learning, the age and the stage. Naming three or four of these in a subject plan, honestly matched to what you actually do, is exactly what the guidance asks for.

It also helps to frame them the way the guidance does: assessment of learning, assessment for learning, and assessment as learning. Most of the methods above sit on the “for” and “as” side, which is where the day-to-day work happens.

Teaching methodologies: the recognised approaches

There is no single official checklist for methodologies the way there is for assessment, but there is a recognised set that runs through the curriculum. For subjects still on the 1999 curriculum, these are the named approaches:

• Active learning
• Guided discovery
• Collaborative and co-operative learning
• Talk and discussion
• Problem-solving
• Skills through content
• Using the environment
• Integration

For the redeveloped 2025 specifications, each one names its pedagogical approaches directly, and they share a common core:

• Inquiry
• Dialogic teaching (talk, discussion, peer questioning)
• Playful pedagogy
• Explicit teaching (modelling, scaffolding, guided practice)
• Integration across the curriculum
• Story
• Place-based and outdoor learning
• Digital technologies

Pick the curriculum your subject is actually on, then name the approaches you use. A single subject usually leans on three or four, not the whole list.

Why this stands up to inspection

When an inspector reviews planning, they are working from Looking at Our School 2022, the quality framework for primary and special schools. Its Learning and Teaching dimension describes effective practice in the same language you see above: teachers selecting approaches suited to the learning, using a range of assessment methods, and using what they gather to inform their planning.

So when your plan names methods from the NCCA continuum and approaches from the curriculum, you are not guessing at what will satisfy an inspection. You are writing in the framework’s own words. That is the difference between a plan you hope will pass and one that is built from the same references the evaluation uses.

One caution worth stating plainly: there is no government-mandated national tick-list that every school must copy. What exists is authoritative guidance you can point to. “Drawn from the NCCA Assessment Guidelines and aligned to Looking at Our School 2022” is a claim you can stand over. “The official standard list” is not, because no such single document exists.

How to write it once, not forty times

The real time-saver is not the list itself, it is not writing it out again for every subject and every plan.

Your assessment approaches and your teaching methodologies are largely stable. Teacher observation, questioning, self and peer assessment, active learning, talk and discussion: these are how you work, across most of the curriculum, all year. Typing them out subject by subject is the waste.

A better method:

1. Decide your usual approaches once, from the lists above.
2. Apply them across your subjects in one go.
3. Adjust the few subjects that genuinely differ (a Science plan will lean on inquiry and investigation; a Visual Arts plan on process and response).
4. Leave every box editable, so where you want your own wording, you write your own wording.

That turns a page of typing per subject into a few ticks, and it keeps your whole folder consistent, which is itself something an inspection looks for.

Doing this in Pleanáil

This is exactly how planning works in Pleanáil. On your long-term plans, your fortnightly plans and your Cúntas, assessment and methodologies are tick-box choices drawn from the lists above, matched to the right curriculum for each subject, so you pick from a menu instead of typing from a blank box. Set your usual approaches once and apply them across every subject, then tweak the ones that differ. Everything stays editable.

For a whole school, the principal can set the school’s agreed approaches once in the school’s curriculum plan, and they become a one-click option in every teacher’s plans, so the language is consistent across the staff and nobody starts from a blank page.

The point is not to write more. It is to name what you already do, in the words the system recognises, and to do it once.

Planning for September? Start a free trial of Pleanáil and build a long-term plan with the assessment and methodology choices built in, or read our working method for long-term plans.