Sarah Sheikh

I am Sarah Sheikh, and I have been an educator for the last 13 years and a mother to two beautiful boys, aged 16 and 7, who attend Repton School Dubai. I completed my Masters in Education in 2023. I spent two years researching formative assessment and its impact on student learning. As I researched formative assessment, I stumbled upon the “Professional Learning Community” topic, which steered my research differently. I combined the two topics, “Formative Assessment” and “Professional Learning Community,” to understand if a professional learning community had an ennobling effect on student attainment in all grade-level classrooms when teachers discussed their students’ formative assessment data. My research was pivotal in my deep belief that student progress is predicated on the continuous use of formative assessment embedded in lessons and not conducted separately to assess students.

I also developed a formative assessment progress tracker used in my last school’s early years section, where I was an early years assessment coordinator from 2021 to 2023. The progress tracker tracked student progress on each objective and over time. The progress tracker was hugely praised by the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) in the previous two schools I worked in. I am transforming the progress tracker idea into a web application for schools that will allow teachers to seamlessly track student progress over time and act as a springboard that leads to higher student attainment.