Formative Assessment

What is a formative assessment?

Many educational experts have provided definitions but, in summary, using the perspective that “formative assessment can inform teacher and student where the student is now so both can know what comes next in the learning” (Stiggins 2015) is the most instructive.

Or, as many explain, formative assessments are for learning and summative assessments are of learning. (Stiggins, Arter, J. Chappuis, and S. Chappuis, 2006, Caaspp 2015)

Why use formative assessments?

• To create useful formative assessments, we need to use clear learning targets. This step allows teachers and students to “ know where they are headed from the very beginning of the learning. Just start instruction with student-friendly versions of the target and watch what happens.” ( Richard J. Stiggins, 2015)
• A formative activity gives us a quick understanding what we still need to teach, reteach, or review.
• “For teachers, formative-assessment tools are far more important than summative tests because they offer real-time insight into students' understanding.  (Marianne Perie, 2015)  
• An in class formative assessment can lighten the homework practice time but still hold our students' accountable for assessing their content and skill acquisition.
• Specific feedback to students to help them understand and assess their own learning about the specific tasks and expectations needed for mastery. This process is crucial practice for learning how to learn and the growth mindset we want to provide our students.
• Some formative activities can be crafted to provide assessment practice to further address our students’ different levels of previous and outside of our class experiences.

How to begin to introduce formative assessments?

1. Create a safe classroom that honors the learning process.
2. Clarify the learning targets, and equally more powerful, clarify the learning progression.
3. Choose a format that serves your calendar and classroom constraints. ( see examples below)
4. Review your format to be sure you are getting accurate information from language learners.
5. Review edtech options for easy and engaging tech formats. Example: Socrative

Sample formative activities:

·    Role play: Write a Postcard from one person, character, property, formula  to another

·    Short summary: Write a summary for 5 min only.; later allow 2 more minutes.

·    Illustratration: Create a graphic depiction of the new concepts. Draw a storyboard, multiple axis timeline, or progression of learning, events, order of operations, process, rules.

·    Anonymous Assessment: Hand in, pass out, share: Write answers to one or a list of questions, students do not include their name on the paper, turn it in, hand work out to other students, score, poll results. Students can take notes on the response they are scoring and keep it for reference.

·    Diagram/Compare and contrast: Venn diagram 2 to 3 new concepts.

·    Check off: Provide a list of expectations or learning targets and students, using symbols, indicate what they have accomplished (√),  what they are sure they can do (+), what they currently have questions about (?).

·        Metacognition: Respond in a doc, form, exit card, journal write, summary to notes to the metacognitive “w”s : What did we do? Why did we do it? What did I learn? What can I apply? What are my questions?

·    Signal: Red (stop:I need more info) yellow (slow down), green (got it) cards or use all white cards with colored circles on one side so that only the teacher sees the indicator.

·    or: Thumbs up, to the side, or  down, again in front of the student’s chest to keep the response private.

·    Collaborative Conversation: Ask your elbow partner a question about what was just covered, listen to the response, reverse the roles, record and submit this work. This conversation can be conducted verbally or silently, all in written form, or as individual or a shared document.

·    Quick write for journal writes, exit cards, or pre collaborative conversations:

What are you square with?

What is rolling around in your head?

What are 3 key points to remember/act on?

            

or:

3 things I learned, 2 things I will apply/remember, 1 question I have.

More Resources:

Ask to see your course team colleagues' for samples they have used, Steve Kahl offers a list in his new teacher training,  David Wees provides a list of formative assessments, the CAASPP digital library focuses on this strategy, and Marzano’s explains both the research and theory that supports and clarifies Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading in his 2010 text.

Please add a comment with your favorites and feel free to contact Joy to help find or create some for your units.

Speaking and Listening: The Power of Pronouns, the Strength of a Salutation

We have now completed the first quarter of teaching and learning for the 2015-16 school year. These posts focused on building a community to serve as a foundation for the content and critical thinking skills we  teach and our students learn during the first month of this academic year.  With a strong and safe community started, the second month of posts focused on verbs and nouns that can be used to elevate students understanding and mastery of the 21st Century college and career skills they need when they leave us.

This week I am turning to pronouns to merge both tending to our community while using powerful language that will enable our students’ intellectual growth.  

How might a salutation sting or a pronoun be powerful?

Many of us address our classes with “Ladies and Gentleman.” The salutation is meant as a form of respect - letting our students know that we don’t see them as children.

But to honor the diversity, including gender identity, in our community, it it time to review and potentially revise our choice of nouns and pronouns.The respectful language we expect and employ can protect and build the identity safety students need to grow.

Use a student's name instead of the potentially incorrect pronoun. Speak of “adults in your lives” rather than of parents, to honor those students who do not live with their parents. Substitute participant for citizen.  Perhaps even greet the class as Academic Aztecs, Educated Eagles, or Scholarly Spartans to respect gender diversity.

Changing our common nouns and pronouns will protect and honor some of our most vulnerable students and model thoughtful speaking and listening for all of our students.

MVLAUSHD does a great job of caring for and about all of our students and purposefully fostering a safe community, but painful language use persists for our students.

Data as a call to action

In their February 2014 publication, the California School Boards Association policy brief, the authors cited a study illustrating the common experience students have hearing hurtful speech:

In a national study* of students in grades 6-12, the majority reported hearing homophobic remarks frequently or often: 85 percent frequently or often heard “gay” used in a negative way, 71 percent heard other homophobic remarks and 61 percent heard negative remarks about students not acting “masculine enough” or “feminine enough.”

*Kosciw, J.G., Greytak, E.A., Bartkiewicz, M.J., Boesen, M.J., & Palmer, N.A. (2012). The 2011 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in Our Nation’s Schools. New York: Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. Available athttp://bit.ly/1ekZRv9

Our own words as teachers – while never intentionally painful – are particularly poignant for students. Potentially easier than the homework and revision policy discussions, we can also review the messages we send through our language.

One purpose of public high schools is to have one more chance at developing positive and powerful participants for our democratic society.  Purposeful pronouns and inclusive nouns can be a start as we continue to build a safe community and model our own growth mind set for our students.

Thank you to my many colleagues in the MVLAUHSD  who helped to articulate this concern.

A few more sources:

Teaching Tolerance’s Best Practices: Creating an LGBT-inclusive School Climate and

Teaching Tolerance's posting "the Problems with  Pronouns

If we can’t make a mistake, we can’t make anything.*

At the start of the school year, we simultaneously focus on building community in our classrooms, while fostering the culture of learning challenging curriculum.  Being comfortable in a classroom does not exclude rigorous curriculum; in fact, the greater the safety, the greater the confidence to challenge oneself. By creating norms and processes for learning from mistakes, we encourage growth as well as a safe learning community.

How can BYOD support academically safe and challenging classrooms? In Identity Safety Classrooms, Steele and Cohn-Vargas, provide a few examples of how to “encourage students to ask for help” that we can adapt to our learning with devices as we provide challenging curriculum.

Encouraging Self-Assessment and Growth Mindset to Improve Performance

Steele and Cohn-Vargas describe one teacher who points out her own mistakes, a safe classroom norm that may be useful as we model “growth mindset”  when trying a new Learning in the Cloud and GAFE strategy.  Another teacher, they note in their chapter on Challenging Curriculum, has created a game which includes her students presenting errors to the class, followed by the whole class working to find and correct the “mistake in thinking”. This public analysis is is an indicator of and can promote a safe classroom.

Opportunities with Technology

One modification, more private and thus perhaps more appropriate at this time of year, would be to comment using our teacher device on a student’s work without walking up to the student. Many of our colleagues use this process, and students appreciate getting feedback without the rest of the class knowing they are getting help.  And many teachers are differentiating their feedback process by both responding from a device and also walking around the room to monitor, support, and extend student learning with a face to face conversation.  That dance between responding digitally and in person seems to create a safe, engaged, and challenging learning environment.

Using split screens can encourage student’s independent assessment and improvement. Using scissors and glue or other options described in earlier posts (add link here), ask each students to open their original work in one screen, and make a copy in a second screen. In the second screen they can make changes and explanations for the changes, possibly in a new color.  Once they have completed their revision, they should paste their original work above their revised work and turn in that second document.  If more useful, the shared or opposite screen can be the assignment's rubric that the student can use to inform their revisions.  

If appropriate, students can do this revision process in pairs. I have allowed students the choice to revise their work on their own or do this work in pairs, getting feedback from a peer.

This second document, now with 2 versions of a response, can be kept as a part of a journal or learning log or turned in to you.  You should have better work to review and both you and the students will have documentation of their academic skills and content growth.

Our Goals

Encouraging editing and improvement supports Autonomy and Competence, using pairs honors Diversity as a resource, and using devices and collaboration supports 21st Century college and career expectations.  

There are many ways to use devices to support student peer and self assessments; watch for more posts and professional development opportunites.  But for now, just using a split screen is an easy way to use devices for revisions.

In closing, here is another anecdote I just read that supports making mistakes to help us make something:  From the ubiquitous Humans of New York and Iran:

“(My father)’d bring me to work with him and trust me with jobs. He’d take apart mechanical devices and ask me to reassemble them. If I made a mistake, he’d never punish me. He’d even help me hide my report card if I made a bad grade. He was mainly concerned with building my confidence to attempt new things, so that I could always learn by doing. Now as an adult, people call me crazy for attempting things that seem ‘out of my depth.’ This bridge is one example. Nobody is prouder of this bridge than my father. He collects all the newspaper articles.”- Leila Araghian

---------------------------------------------

Leila Araghian and Alireza Behzadi are the young designer and builder behind Tehran’s recently completed Tabiat Bridge. Construction of the bridge was completed in 2014 despite the difficulties of international sanctions. The bridge has become a cultural and physical centerpiece of Tehran, and Leila captured the imagination of the architecture world by winning the right to design it at the age of 26. (Tehran, Iran)

*a poster in a favorite Kindergarten classroom.

To begin the year using Google classroom or Google Docs to extend Reading strategies

Common Core Reading strategies using Google Classroom or Google Docs

BYOD: After a week, what does the D stand for for you: device, demands, delight, doh*? (* See the Oxford English Dictionary,  Homer Simpson, or the Google Dictionary you have on  your toolbar                                                                                                                                            

Why BYOD? Over 80% of Fortune 500 companies post job openings exclusively online. Over half of today’s jobs require technology skills, and nearly 80% of jobs in the next decade are projected to require digital skills. Closing the broadband adoption and digital literacy skills gap is critical to the future of our economy.  FCC Chairman Genachowski, 2/14/13

The MVLAUHSD BYOD program has a unique potential to address the opportunity gap, a crucial key to the “achievement gap”.

When assigning a reading or new problem set, to access prior knowledge, implement compare and contrasting expectations, build community, and promote the “d” (diversity as a resource) of the “abcde”s of identity safety, and to involve all students at this time of year with whatever they bring to our classrooms, prompts can be:

Read … and respond to one of the two questions:

How is this reading/problem set  similar or different from a reading you remember from last year?

or

What is new information, information you have questions about, and/or information that is review for you?

For those experimenting with Google Classroom you can still use the split screen ( available by using the scissors add on, also on the toolbar ) to allow students to complete a reading on one “side” of their screen  and respond to these questions using the “add class comments” on the other “side”. ( see the image below) Consider the difficulty of the questions; students can see their colleagues’ responses or you can use the mute function on a student’s comment so only you can see their comments.

You can also have students submit their answers on a doc they share with you, on the reading you push out, or even in a form.  More on these options later this quarter.

The power, potential, and fun of the first week

Consider for building your classroom community:      

Building community in our classroom is an on-going project for us. We are also committed to supporting identity safety and addressing stereotype threats in our schools. Given our support for equity  and the CCSS for Speaking and Listening,  many of us use equity or participation cards.

On the participation cards I often ask students to write their name in one corner, their birthday in a 2nd corner, and their specific goal in the 3rd corner, after spend a brief time clarifying the value of identifying a specific, task or activity and not simply choosing a grade as a goal.  I often wait to do this project until after my students have learned about our course and our classroom expectations.

Many of us have our students create some art on the the “blank” side.

Research by G. Cohen (Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap, Science, 2006, 2010 ) and applications in local schools have encouraged me to ask students to note another item about their core values or what they care most about on the 4th corner of their card. In studies and classrooms where students were asked to write about their own core values or “re-affirm their self integrity” the racial achievement gap was reduced by 30-40%.  

This reflecting, recording, and sharing of a student’s core values can be optional, connected to a classroom activity or expectation, or added into that first week’s letter to the teacher.  Participation or equity cards are not the only place for this activity.

Learning about our students’ values and goals goes a long way in adding to our ability to develop community, honor each student, and grow our own growth mindset as well as  diminish stereotypes.

For more ideas from our colleagues: Sophia Caramagno, Carla Gomez, Carson Rosenberg, and Alma Ruelas created a plentiful Resource Guide to Community Building Activities.  

Enjoy the start of the 2015-16 year,