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Month: January 2020

Why Formative Assessment?

Why Formative Assessment?

I am really excited about assessment! It’s my thing. It’s what I’m passionate about. It may sound to you as if I need to get a life. But I’ll tell you what really gets me excited about formative assessment–it truly has the power to transform learning. It also has the power to make better teachers, which is what we’re always striving to be. 

Now, I have been assessing kids ever since I’ve been a teacher. For a long time, assessment seemed like a necessary evil. I felt almost apologetic when I said to my students, “Okay, you’re going to be taking a test today”.That’s because, for me, assessment was a summative act, and was meant for reporting. Therefore, if a student did poorly, that was the grade they were going to have on their report card. It would also be a big bummer for me, as I looked at certain student’s test and wondered, “Where did I go wrong? How did I fail this kid?”

“Formative Assessment is not a tool, it’s a process”

As I became more experienced and learned more from my peers, I discovered that assessment is not one thing, it is many things. By now, you all have probably heard about the difference between assessment of learning, assessment for learning, and assessment as learning. Assessment of learning is what I was doing a lot of before. It is summative, and is mostly used for reporting. Assessment for and as learning are terms which describe meaningful formative assessment practices. According to the State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards for Formative Assessment for Students and Teachers (FAST SCASS) formative assessment is “[…] a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning to improve students’ achievement of intended instructional outcomes” (xxx). This is a very good definition of formative assessment, but this is not how I understood it for many years, In fact, I think I only caught the “a process used by teachers during instruction that provides feedback” part. I was giving formative assessments to my students, but I wasn’t using the data those assessments were providing me with to adjust instruction in a targeted way. Formative assessment seemed like a big waste of time for me, as I discovered that my students were all over the place in terms of their understanding, but I didn’t know how to differentiate to meet their needs. 

It was when I began my Master’s work (recently) that I realized that formative assessment is not a tool, it’s a process. In a sense, if you are doing formative assessment right it becomes what your class does, it involves you and your students, and it never ends. I will explain more about how I set up my classroom, and my students, to make formative assessment transformative in upcoming posts, but suffice it to say that, if you want to discover the true benefits of formative assessment, you are going to have to change as a teacher. Also, your students are going to have to get used to routines that they’ve never seen before. It certainly doesn’t happen overnight, but once you have the process in place, you will be amazed at what you and your students can accomplish. 

In my experience, the real key to powerful formative assessment is small group instruction and differentiation. Many teachers find this difficult. I did too, until I learned how to prepare my students, establish routines, and develop simple ways of recording data so that I could actually use it. 

Also important is to not skip over the assessment as learning portion of formative assessment. I am a teacher at a PYP school, where we engage in inquiry based learning. For us, the student is the driver of learning. Harlen and Johnson claim that both inquiry-based learning and formative assessment “share the aim of students becoming increasingly able to take part in decisions about their work and how to judge its quality” (2014, p. 39). Assessment as learning is “when students personally monitor what they are learning and use the feedback from this monitoring to make adjustments, adaptations, and even major changes in what they understand. Assessment as Learning is the ultimate goal, where students are their own best assessors” (Earl, Lorna (2003) Assessment as Learning: Using Classroom Assessment to Maximise Student Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA, Corwin Press).

What is great about formative assessment, is that it can take virtually any form you, or the students, wish. It could be a traditional written test (these don’t just have to be used summatively), a quick white board response, a Seesaw post, a short exit slip, or a traffic light protocol. Formative assessment can also be simple teacher observation (although I would like to caution teachers that they need to have a simple yet effective way of checking in with students and recording their observations. Just simply observing students does not count as formative assessment). Formative assessment allows for variety, and can even be fun! 

But the real point here is that formative assessment helps students learn better. Black and Wiliam did a review of over 250 research studies related to formative assessment, which revealed that “attention to the use of assessment to inform instruction, particularly at the classroom level, in many cases effectively doubled the speed of student learning” (Wiliam, loc. 835 of 4459). Personally, when I engage my class in ongoing, targeted formative assessment measures, I know my students better, I know exactly what my next steps will be, and I see greater growth across the board. I am also able to avoid nagging questions such as “how are you going to challenge my child this year?” since my process already accounts for this. When formative assessment is done well, every single student is served. 

The UK Assessment Reform Group identified five elements that need to be in place in order for formative assessment to be effective:

  • Effective feedback to students
  • Active involvement of students in their own learning
  • The adjustment of teaching to take into account the results of assessment
  • The recognition of the profound influence assessment has on the motivation and self-esteem of students, both of which are crucial influences on learning
  • The need for students to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve

As I mentioned before, effective formative assessment is more like a lifestyle. Most of your students, will not have lived this lifestyle before. They are going to come up to you to ask you questions while you’re working with a small group, and you are going to have to redirect them, time after time, and keep sending the message that they are capable of working independently time after time, until they finally believe it themselves. But who can blame them?! Kids are, after all, creatures of habit. This will work in your favor in the long run, because once they buy into your new world order, they will do it better than you ever imagined.

You know who else are creatures of habit? Teachers. It is hard to adopt a new lifestyle. It is a lot of work to turn everything you’ve been doing for x amount of years on it’s head, and to effectively start over again. This is why professional development in formative assessment practices is so key. Some people believe good teachers are born; I believe good teachers are made. I believe this because I used to be a crap teacher, and now I feel pretty good about what I am doing, so I know growth is possible. However, PD needs to be deep, ongoing, and reflective. As James Popham says ““Human Behavior is tough to change, and one-shot workshops, even extremely illuminating and motivating ones, rarely bring about permanent changes in teachers’ conduct” (p.111). My opinion is that if there is one thing schools should invest in, it is formative assessment PD, but I will admit that as a teacher, not an administrator, I don’t really understand the logistics or costs involved. One possible option is to develop a teacher learning community (TLC) around this topic, which would be a small group of interested educators who would engage in long term action research around formative assessment, and share their findings with their colleagues. 

I want to make one final point about formative assessment, and that is that it should be done at the classroom level. I have the benefit of working at an international private school, where externally developed standardized testing is not the norm. As a teacher, I am given the power to develop my own formative assessment measures, based on what I am seeing in class, and what works best for me and my students. However, I am writing for a larger audience, including public school teachers, for whom standardized testing is a reality. Although I have not experienced it myself, I have heard that there exists externally imposed versions of formative assessments. Right now, I’m not going to go into the many drawbacks of this approach, but I will say that in order for formative assessment to be truly transformative, teachers need to be involved. Not only for the reasons I already mentioned, but also because, how can we ever really understand something unless we do it ourselves? For teachers to be able to really understand assessment, they need to be involved in its development. We are always talking about the need for good teachers, but we never give teachers the autonomy they need in order to develop the skills and competencies of excellent educators.

I am not a master of formative assessment. I am still learning everyday, but I am excited by the ways in which it has transformed my teaching practice, and I want to spread the word. I know there are others out there who know more than I do about formative assessment, and whose ideas NEED to be shared. I want to hear from all of you! What has been your experience with assessment? How have your practices changed? What is preventing you from engaging in meaning assessment practices? What are you doing in your classroom that we could all benefit from?

Learning Trajectories for Formative Assessment

Learning Trajectories for Formative Assessment

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One thing I have learned about effective formative assessment is that it is not done on the fly. Sure, I may be in the middle of a lesson one day, and realize that a good number of students have a misconception, or there is some key, prior knowledge that may be missing, and decide that I want to stop and give a quick formative assessment before I move on with instruction. This is what observant, knowledgeable teachers do. However, for formative assessment to have the greatest impact, it needs to be planned BEFORE the unit begins. If I am very clear about what my students are likely to already know (on a spectrum), what the next level of understanding looks like, and which activities will help students reach that next level of understanding, half the battle is won. 

Many of us believe that we know these things intuitively, since we have been teaching for so long, and therefore, we don’t need to spend too much time planning. However, let’s take mathematics as an example. If we are being honest with ourselves, how many of us are true mathematicians? I will be the first to admit that I am NOT. I always did pretty well in math throughout my education. I learned the algorithm, than I applied it–no big deal, right? Well, math isn’t taught that way anymore, and besides, being able to DO math, and UNDERSTANDING how mathematical concepts develop are two different things. My school has hired a math tutor for this specific purpose–to help teachers gain a better understanding of how students learn mathematics. Our tutor has been an invaluable resource. Unfortunately, not all schools have access to this type of expertise. So, how can schools empower teachers to become more knowledgeable about mathematics learning?

I have done a good deal of research on the topic of learning trajectories, and I am convinced that they are an integral part to the planning of any unit, whether it be math, reading, writing, social studies or science. A learning trajectory has been defined as  “a sequence of successively more complex ways of thinking about an idea that might reasonably follow one another in a student’s learning”(Smith et al., 2004, cited in Graf & Ariele-Attali, 2015, p. 196). Basically, I would describe it as a plan for learning which takes into account all possible levels of student understanding. 

To develop a learning trajectory you need to start with your standards or scope and sequence documents. First, choose an outcome that is small enough to work with. My example is: “represent and solve problems involving multiplication using efficient mental and written strategies”. Next, you may need to do some research to figure out how student understanding of this outcome grows. Research could include reading, but it could also simply be consulting with a math tutor, or other expert, doing an internet search, or engaging in a brainstorming session with your team members. The goal is to map out, from beginning to end, how students’ understanding develops. Once you have accomplished this, you will want to determine which learning engagements will help students move from one level of understanding to the next. This is going to pay off big time, as your planning will basically be taken care of for the remainder of the unit. 

Once you have the trajectory complete, you will need to preassess students, and place them on the trajectory based on what you see. Then, plan for small group instruction. This is the most important part of the entire process. I cannot stress enough how essential differentiation is. You need to find a fun, easy activity that the whole class can engage in without teacher assistance, so you can work with small groups. I usually choose a game that can easily be made more challenging by choosing bigger numbers, or doing an extension. In the meantime, I work with the small groups, including my advanced groups, on developing the skills and understandings they need to move them to the next level. A side note here. It may seem like a lot of time is being wasted as students play a game, while the teacher is working only with a group of 4-5 students. In reality, a lot more time is wasted when you teach the entire class the same concept, and the concept is really only appropriate for, at the most, 30% of the students. I would rather have my class playing a fun and engaging game, which gives them practice, while I work with a small group on exactly the concepts they need and are ready for. 

Finally, as the unit progresses, you will need to periodically revisit the trajectory, and make adjustments as needed. This is why learning trajectories are often called ‘hypothetical’. They are, and should be, a work in progress, which is constantly being refined. Your first draft is merely a hypothesis, and your work with students will inform the changes you make. 

So, what does this have to do with formative assessment? The real purpose of formative assessment is, or should be, to guide and differentiate instruction. This is precisely what the trajectory accomplishes. It is basically a way of breaking down the curriculum into bite sized chunks so that you have a better understanding of what students need to know, and how you can help them acheive that knowledge. To put it bluntly, formative assessment is ineffective if you, as a teacher, don’t understand what you are teaching. 

Now, I know that this all sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but I promise you, it is work that has big returns, and the more you do now, the less you will do later. This school year, I have very little planning to do when it comes to my multiplication unit. I have my trajectory, which includes student understandings, as well as instructional approaches, and I simply need to administer a preassessment and make my groups. Of course, I will continue to tweak the trajectory, and my small groups, but now I can put more of my energy into my students, and less into planning. Also, I recently presented on this topic at the Collaborative for innovative Education (CIE) conference (my school is one of six schools which belong to this collaborative), and a couple of teachers sitting at my table told me that they have created learning trajectories for other mathematics outcomes and they would be happy to exchange (unfortunately, I never heard from them, and I didn’t get their contact info.–call me!). The point is, if we share the work, we will save so much time!

So, this is where I share the work I have done on the multiplication trajectory with you 🙂 If you have done any work on trajectories, please share it with me as well. Also, if you would like to know more about the research on learning trajectories, please read the essay I wrote as part of my Master’s work for the University of Bath, entitled Using Learning Trajectories to Support Formative Assessment in Mathematics: An Example From a Grade Three Unit on Multiplication.

I am curious about what you have to say about learning trajectories. Have you used them? What do you see as the benefits or drawbacks? Do you have any advice for those trying to develop a trajectory?