“Formative Assessment is a deliberate process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides actionable feedback used to adjust ongoing teaching and learning strategies to improve students’ attainment of curricular learning targets/goals”
Source: Smarter Balanced
You Don't Know What You Don't Know
We believe that formative assessment is one of the most powerful tools we can use to enhance learning and engage students in the learning process. The best educators use a variety of formative assessment techniques and tools to help everyone in the classroom gauge essential understandings. The best formative assessments also help drive the learning experience for both teachers and students.
Favorite Formative Resources and Strategies
I am excited this week to be co-authoring this post with my friend and partner in all things teaching and learning, Melissa Wilson. Melissa is an English teacher and Instructional Technology Coordinator at Neuqua Valley High School. We will be cross-posting this story on her blog “#Whatsup Wildcats”. If you’ve never had a chance to explore Melissa’s blog, I highly recommend that you change that today. Melissa provides some incredible insights into the teaching and learning experience at Neuqua.
We are in our second year of 1 to 1 with Chromebooks, and we have been amazed by the incredible formative assessments we’ve witnessed as teachers have enhanced and transformed their instructional practices. Teachers are facilitating and our students are collaborating, communicating, creating, and thinking critically as part of the learning process on a daily basis. Formative assessment has become an essential component of our students' learning experiences.
We believe that one of the most rewarding professional development activities is when teachers find time to talk to each other. Powerful things can happen when educators from different departments have time to sit and talk to each other about teaching and learning. With this in mind, our second CAFE Connect was born with a focus on formative assessment.
Melissa and I enjoyed two days of questions, classroom stories, and educators exploring resources to support formative assessment. We even created some fun Neuqua Trivia Challenges using six different digital formative tools to help staff experience the student side of some of our favorite tools. Other than the trivia, there were no formal presentations, just educators talking to educators. It was a great learning experience.
Here are some of our reflections on this collaborative experience:
- Teachers are using the tools and techniques at all points in the learning process. We talked about formative assessment as a pre-learning tool, as a checkpoint during learning experiences, and as "reviews" near the end of an activity or unit.
- Teachers all have favorite tools, but they also realize that using a single tool all the time can have a negative impact on student engagement.
- Teachers are becoming more comfortable taking risks in the classroom and trying new resources to help engage, motivate, assess, and challenge our students.
- Teachers appreciate assessment tools that offer a way to provide answer feedback to students. Google Forms, Socrative, and Quizalise are a few examples of resources that offer this option.
- While we know our students enjoy competitive assessments, our teachers report that at times, they can be more of a distraction. As stated earlier, the key to success with utilizing assessment tools is variety, and this is no different when it comes to game-based learning; they can't be used all the time and still be as effective.
- The ability to record student voices has been a huge benefit for many of our teachers and students. Resources like Flipgrid, Adobe Spark Video, and Screencastify have made a huge difference in our World Language classes. They have also become a great tool for student reflection in quite a few of our classrooms. There is something about a student needing to verbally reflect that is pretty powerful.
Let us know if you have any questions and learn on!
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