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The Art of Listening in Writing Conferences with English Language Learners

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The Art of Listening in Writing Conferences with English Language Learners

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Andie CunninghamandRuth Shagoury

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Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article

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Listening to individual children in active writers' workshops is especially challenging, and understanding the words of students who speak a different first language than yours can be downright daunting. Here are some tips for mastering the art of listening in conferences with English language learners:

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The Difference Between Conferring and Touching Base

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The Difference Between Conferring and Touching Base

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Debbie Miller

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Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article

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Touching base is a good thing. That "little something in between" might be encouraging a child to keep at it, reminding a child to get back on track or asking a child if she's remembered what she learned in our conference yesterday to help her with her work today.

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Conferring: Interview with Partick Allen (text & podcast)

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Conferring: Interview with Partick Allen (text & podcast)

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Choice Literacy

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Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article

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The time that I put into developing a structure that my conferences follow -- which I call the RIP format in the book -- I think that just having a structure to conferences really helped me realize that it was more than just sitting down and having a conversation.

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Assessment for Learning: Peer-assessment in Science

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Assessment for Learning: Peer-assessment in Science

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Assessment for Learning: Peer-assessment and Science

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Observing Formative Assessment in Mathematics (notice 4 additional  video links)

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Observing Formative Assessment in Mathematics (notice 4 additional  video links)

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Mathematics Assessment Project

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The Characteristics of Formative Assessment in Science Education

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The Characteristics of Formative Assessment in Science Education

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Formative Assessment Strategies in Mathematics

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Formative Assessment Strategies in Mathematics

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NCTM

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Reading & Writing Project - Lucy Callkins

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A Writing Conference: Teaching a Student to Write for Audience (3-5)

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This is "A Writing Conference: Teaching a Student to Write for Audience (3-5)" by tcrwp on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love...

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Reading & Writing Project - Lucy Calkins

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Peer Conferring: Students Teach Each Other to Revise in Order to Orient their Readers (3-5)

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This is "Peer Conferring: Students Teach Each Other to Revise in Order to Orient their Readers (3-5)" by tcrwp on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos...

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7 Characteristics of Better Learning Feedback

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7 Characteristics of Better Learning Feedback

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Grant Wiggins

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by Grant Wiggins, Authentic Education
On May 26, 2015, Grant Wiggins passed away. Grant was tremendously influential on TeachThought's approach to education, and we were lucky enough for him to contribute his content to our site. Occasionally, we are going to go back and re-share his most memorable posts.
Whether or not the feedback is just "there" to be grasped or offered by another person, all the examples highlight seven key characteristics of helpful feedback.

Helpful feedback is -

Though some of these traits have been noted by various researchers [for example, Marzano, Pickering & Pollock (2001) identify some of #3, #5, #1 and #4 in describing feedback as corrective, timely, specific to a criterion], it is only when we clearly distinguish the two meanings of "corrective" (i.e. feedback vs. advice) and use all seven that we get the most robust improvements and sort out Hattie's puzzle as to why some "feedback" works and other "feedback" doesn't. Let's look at each criterion in turn.

1. Goal-referenced. There is only feedback if a person has a goal, takes actions to achieve the goal, and gets goal-related information fed back. To talk of feedback, in other words, is to refer to some notable consequence of one's actions, in light of an intent. I told a joke - why? To make people laugh; I wrote the story - why? To paint vivid pictures and capture revealing feelings and dialogue for the reader to feel and see; I went up to bat - why? To get a hit. Any and all feedback refers to a purpose I am presumed to have. (Alas, too often, I am not clear on or attentive to my own goals - and I accordingly often get feedback on that disconnect.)

Given a desired outcome, feedback is what tells me if I should continue on or change course. If some joke or aspect of the writing isn't working - a revealing, non-judgmental phrase - I need to know. To that end, a former colleague of mine when I was a young teacher asked students every Friday to fill out a big index card with "what worked for you and didn't work for you this week." I once heard an exasperated NFL coach say in a post-game interview on the radio: "What do you think we do out here, wind a playbook up and pray all season? Coaching is about quick and effective adjustment in light of results!"

Note that goals (and the criteria for them) are often implicit in everyday situations. I don't typically announce when telling the joke that my aim is to make you laugh or that I wrote that short story as an exercise in irony. In adult professional and personal life, alas, goals and criteria for which we are accountable are sometimes unstated or unclear as well - leading to needlessly sub-par performance and confusing feedback. It can be extra challenging for students: many teachers do not routinely make the long-term goals of lessons and activities sufficiently clear. Better student achievement may thus depend not on more "teaching" or feedback only but constant reminders by teachers of the goal against which feedback is given: e.g. "Guys, the point here is to show, not tell in your writing: make the characters come alive in great detail! That's the key thing we'll be looking for in peer review and my feedback to you." (That's arguably the value of rubrics, but far too many rubrics are too vague to be of help.)

2. Transparent and tangible, value-neutral information about what happened. Therefore, any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but transparent and tangible results related to the goal. Feedback to students (and teachers!) needs to be as concrete and obvious as the laughter or its absence is to the comedian and the hit or miss is to the Little League batter. If your goal as a teacher is to "engage" learners as a teacher, then you must look for the most obvious signs of attention or inattention; if your goal as a student is to figure out the conditions under which plants best grow, then you must look closely at the results of a controlled experiment. We need to know the tangible consequences of our attempts, in the most concrete detail possible - goal-related facts from which we can learn. That's why samples or models of work are so useful to both students and teachers - more so than the (somewhat abstract) rubrics by themselves.

Even as little pre-school children, we learn from such results and models without adult intervention. That's how we learned to walk; that's how we finally learned to hold a spoon effectively; that's how we learned that certain words magically yield food, drink, or a change of clothes from big people. Thus, the best feedback is so tangible that anyone who has a goal can learn from it. Video games are the purest example of such tangible feedback systems: for every action we take there is a tangible effect. We use that information to either stay on the same course or adjust course. The more information "fed back" to us, the more we can self-regulate, and self-adjust as needed. No "teaching" and no "advice" - just feedback! That's what the best concrete feedback does: it permits optimal self-regulation in a system with clear goals.

Far too much educational feedback is opaque, alas, as revealed in a true story told to me years ago by a young teacher. A student came up to her at year's end and said, "Miss Jones, you kept writing this same word on my English papers all year, and I still don't know what it means." "What's the word?" she asked. "Vag-oo," he said. (The word was "vague"!). Sad to say, too much teacher feedback is 'vagoo' - think of the English teacher code written in margins (AWK, Sent. Frag, etc.) Rarely does the student get information as tangible about how they are currently doing in light of a future goal as they get in video games. The notable exceptions: art, music, athletics, mock trial - in short, areas outside of core academics!

This transparency of feedback becomes notably paradoxical under a key circumstance: when the information is available to be obtained, but the performers do not obtain it - either because they don't look for it or because they are too busy performing to see it. We have all seen how new teachers are sometimes so busy concentrating on "teaching" that they fail to notice that few students are attending or learning. Similarly in sports: the tennis player or batter is taking their "eye off the ball" (i.e. pulling their head out instead of keeping your head still as you swing), yet few novice players "see" that they are not really "seeing the ball." They often protest, in fact, when the feedback is given. The same thing happens with some domineering students in class discussion: they are so busy "discussing" that they fail to see their unhelpful effects on the discussion and on others who give up trying to participate.

That's why it is vital, at even the highest levels of performance, to get feedback from coaches (or other able observers) and/or video to help us perceive what we may not perceive as we perform; and by extension, to learn to look for what is difficult but vital to perceive. That's why I would recommend that all teachers video their own classes at least once per month and do some walk-throughs and learning walks, to more fully appreciate how we sometimes have blind spots about what is and isn't happening as we teach.

It was a transformative experience for me when I did it 40 years ago (using a big Sony reel-to-reel deck before there were VHS cassettes!). What was clear to me as the teacher of the lesson in real time seemed downright confusing on tape - visible also in some quizzical looks of my students that I had missed in the moment. And, in terms of improving discussion or Socratic Seminar, video can be transformative: when students see snippets of tape of their prior discussions they are fascinated to study it and surprised by how much gets missed in the fast flow of conversation. (Coaches of all sports have done this for decades; why is it still so rare in classrooms?)

3. Actionable information. Thus, feedback is actionable information - data or facts that you can use to improve on your own since you likely missed something in the heat of the moment. No praise, no blame, no value judgment - helpful facts. I hear when they laugh and when they don't; I adjust my jokes accordingly. I see now that 8 students are off task as I teach, and take action immediately. I see my classmates roll their eyes as I speak - clearly signaling that they are unhappy with something I said or the way I said it. Feedback is that concrete, specific, useful. That is not to say that I know what the feedback means, i.e. why the effect happened or what I should do next (as in the eye rolling), merely that the feedback is clear and concrete. (That's why great performers aggressively look for and go after the meaning of feedback.)

Thus, "good job!" and "You did that wrong" and "B+" on a paper are not feedback at all. In no case do I know what you saw or what exactly I did or didn't do to warrant the comments. The responses are without any actionable information. Here is a question we can easily imagine learners asking themselves in response, to see this: Huh? What specifically should I do more of and less of next time, based on this information? No idea. The students don't know what was "good" or "wrong" about what they did.

Some readers may object that feedback is not so black and white, i.e. that we may disagree about what is there to be seen and/or that feedback carries with it a value judgment about good and bad performance. But the language in question is usually not about feedback (what happened) but about an (arguable) inference about what happened. Arguments are rarely about the results, in other words; they are typically about what the results mean.

For example, a supervisor of a teacher may make an unfortunate but common mistake of stating that "many students were bored" in class. No, that's a judgment, not a goal-based specific fact. It would have been far more useful and less debated had the supervisor said something like: "I counted inattentive behaviors lasting more than 5-10 seconds in 12 of the 25 students once the lecture was well underway. The behaviors included 2 students texting under desks, 2 passing notes, and 7-8 students at any one time making eye contact with other students, etc.

However, when you moved to the small-group exercise using the 'mystery text', I saw such off-task behavior in only 1 student." These are goal-related factual statements, not judgments. Again, it doesn't mean that the supervisor is correct in the facts and it certainly doesn't mean they are anti-lecture; it only means that the supervisor tries to stick to facts and not jump to glib inferences - what is working and what isn't.

Such care in offering neutral goal-related facts is the whole point of the clinical supervision of teaching and of good coaching more generally. Effective supervisors and coaches work hard to carefully observe and comment on what was perceived, in reference to shared goals. That's why I always ask when visiting a class: Given your goals for the class, what would you like me to look for and perhaps count or code?

In my years of experience as a teacher of teachers, as an athletic coach, and as a teacher of adolescents I have always found such "pure" feedback to be accepted, not debated; and be welcomed (or at least not resisted). Performers are on the whole grateful for a 2 nd pair of eyes and ears, given our blind spots as we perform. But the legacy of so much heavy-handed inferencing and gratuitous advice by past coaches/teachers/supervisors has made many performers - including teachers - naturally wary or defensive.

What effective coaches also know is that actionable feedback about what went right is as important as feedback about what didn't work in complex performance situations. (That's why the phrase "corrective information" is not strictly-speaking accurate in describing all feedback.) Performers need feedback about what they did correctly because they don't always know what they did, particularly as novices. It is not uncommon in coaching, when the coach describes what a performer successfully did (e.g. "THAT time you kept your head still and followed all the way through!"), to hear the performer respond quizzically, "I did??"

Similarly the writer or teacher is sometimes surprised to learn that what she thought was unimportant in her presentation was key to audience understanding. Comedians, teachers, and artists don't often accurately predict which aspects of their work will achieve the best results, but they learn from the ones that do. That's why feedback can be called a reinforcement system: I learn by learning to do more of (and understand) what works and less of what doesn't.

4. User friendly. Feedback is thus not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it, even if it is accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders. Highly-technical feedback to a novice will seem odd, confusing, hard to decipher: describing the swing in baseball in terms of torque and other physics concepts to a 6-year-old will not likely yield a better hitter. On the other hand, generic 'vagoo' feedback is a contradiction in terms: I need to perceive the actionable, tangible details of what I did.

When I have watched expert coaches, they uniformly avoid either error of too much overly-technical information or of unspecific observations: they tell the performers one or two important things they noticed that, if they can be changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement ("I noticed you were moving this way..."), and they don't offer advice until they are convinced the performer sees what they saw (or at least grasps the importance of what they saw).

5. Timely. The sooner I get feedback, then, the better (in most cases). I don't want to wait hours or days to find out which jokes they laughed at or didn't, whether my students were attentive, or which part of my paper works and doesn't. My caveat - "in most cases" - is meant to cover situations such as playing a piano piece in recital: I don't want either my teacher or the audience to be barking out feedback as I perform. That's why it is more precise to say that good feedback is "timely" rather than "immediate."

A great problem in education, however, is the opposite. Vital feedback on key performances often comes days, weeks, or even months after the performance - think of writing and handing in papers and getting back results on standardized tests. If we truly realize how vital feedback is, we should be working overtime as educators to figure out ways to ensure that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it in class while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds. (Keep in mind: as we have said, feedback does not need to come from the students' teachers only or even people at all, before you say that this is impossible. This is a high-priority and solvable problem to address locally.)

6. Ongoing. It follows that the more I can get such timely feedback, in real time, before it is too late, the better my ultimate performance will be - especially on complex performance that can never be mastered in a short amount of time and on a few attempts. That's why we talk about powerful feedback "loops" in a sound learning system.

All adjustment en route depends upon feedback and multiple opportunities to use it. This is really what makes any assessment truly "formative" in education. The feedback is "formative" not merely because it precedes "summative" assessments but because the performer has many opportunities - if results are less than optimal - to adjust the performance to better achieve the goal. Many so-called formative assessments do not build in such feedback use.

If we truly understood how feedback works, we would make the student's use of feedback part of the assessment! It is telling that in the adult world I am often judged as a performer on my ability to adjust in light of feedback since no one can be perfect.

This is how all highly-successful computer games work, of course. If you play Angry Birds, Halo, Guitar Hero, or Tetris you know that the key to the substantial improvement possible is that the feedback is not only timely but ongoing. When you fail, you can immediately start over - even, just where you left off - to give you another opportunity to get, receive and learn from the feedback before all is lost to forgetfulness. (Note, then, this additional aspect of user-friendly feedback: it suits our need, pace and ability to process information; games are built to reflect and adapt to our changing ability to assimilate information.

Do you see a vital but counter-intuitive implication from the power of many 'loops' of feedback? We can teach less, provide more feedback, and cause greater learning than if we just teach. Educational research supports this view even if as "teachers" we flinch instinctively at this idea.. That is why the typical lecture-driven course is so ineffective: the more we keep talking, the less we know what is being grasped and attended to. That is why the work of Eric Mazur at Harvard - in which he hardly lectures at all to his 200 students but instead gives them problems to solve and discuss, and then shows their results on screen before and after discussion using LRS 'clickers' - is so noteworthy. His students get "less" lecturing" but outperform their peers not only on typical tests of physics but especially on tests of misconceptions in physics. [Mazur (1998)]

7. Consistent. For feedback to be useful it has to be consistent. Clearly, I can only monitor and adjust successfully if the information fed back to me is stable, unvarying in its accuracy, and trustworthy. In education this has a clear consequence: teachers have to be on the same page about what is quality work and what to say when the work is and is not up to standard. That can only come from teachers constantly looking at student work together, becoming more consistent (i.e. achieving inter-rater reliability) over time, and formalizing their judgments in highly-descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained the same way we train teachers to be consistent, using the same exemplars and rubrics.
References
Bransford et al (2001) How People Learn. National Academy Press.

Clarke, Shirley (2001) Unlocking Formative Assessment: Practical Strategies for Enhancing Pupils' Learning in the Primary Classroom. Hodder Murray.

Dweck, Carol (2007) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Ballantine.

Gilbert, Thomas (1978) Human Competence. McGraw Hill.

Harvard Business School Press, Giving Feedback (2006)

Hattie, John (2008) Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, Routledge.

James, William (1899/1958) Talks to Teachers. W W Norton.

Marzano, R ; Pickering, D & Pollock J (2001) Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement, ASCD.

Mazur, Eric (1996) Peer Instruction: A User's Manual. Benjamin Cummings.

Nater, Sven & Gallimore R (2005) You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices. Fitness Info Tech.

Pollock, Jane (2012) Feedback: the hinge that joins teaching and learning, Corwin Press.

Wiggins, Grant (2010) "Time to Stop Bashing the Tests," Educational Leadership March 2010 | Volume 67 | Number 6

Wiggins, Grant (1998) Educative Assessment, Jossey-Bass.

[4] James, William (1899/1958), p. 41.

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7 Key Characteristics Of Better Learning Feedback

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by Grant Wiggins, Authentic Education On May 26, 2015, Grant Wiggins passed away. Grant was tremendously influential on TeachThought's approach to education, and we were lucky enough for him to contribute his content to our site. Occasionally, we are going to go back and re-share his most memorable posts.

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Grant Wiggins

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I received a nice query by email the other day and I thought readers might find my reply helpful.
Within my district there is quite a debate going on about the difference between formative and summative assessments. Specifically, the administration in my school district has developed a common syllabus for our teachers this year which states that 30% of a student's grade should be made up of formative assessments (homework, journals, etc.) and the remaining 70% should be made up of summative assessments (quizzes, tests, exams). I am on the side that is arguing that a formative assessment should never be graded - it is supposed to be used as a tool to evaluate teaching so that adjustments can be made to instruction. I write you in hopes of getting a clear and concise definition of a formative assessment. Can they be graded? If so, how are graded and ungraded formative assessments different from one another?
I'll need to qualify my answers by distinguishing between 'theory' and 'practice' and in terms of the meanings of the key terms.

In theory, I would define 'formative' assessment as "useful feedback with an opportunity to use that feedback" to perform optimally on later summative assessments. A simple example: a pre-season of 4 games in soccer (as well as ongoing "scrimmages") in which the games don't 'count' is formative assessment to get teams ready for the games that do count in the regular season. So, your comment about "use the information to evaluate teaching" introduces a slightly different purpose for me. Formative assessments provide feedback - for students first, then teachers; that's their purpose.

A 2nd simple example, more complicated: Suppose as an English teacher I do a pre-test writing on day 1 of my course, the same test is given twice during the year, and a post-test is given on the last day of the course - and it is the SAME prompt each time (say, a writing prompt on the course Essential Question "How well do we know ourselves?"). I will most likely NOT grade the pre-test, but I might grade it while not 'counting' the grade, i.e. tell students where they stand (e.g. what teachers do when they use a practice AP test or use the state rubric). But I also might grade and thus 'count' the 'formative' writing prompts DURING the year as well as the post-test at year's end IF I felt that students should be 'ready' to be tested on their understanding and writing ability thus far.

Another not so simple example: I give you feedback on your college essay before you submit the final 'real' essay to your college. I might "grade" your college essay draft with a B- as well as giving you feedback and advice on how to improve it for the final "summative" version you hand in to the colleges of your choice since we have been working on essays all year. And I might even put that B- in my gradebook as one grade of many for you in English 12 this year. (But, then, I might also raise your grade once I see the 'final' version you sent to the colleges and count only the final' grade on that personal essay in my gradebook.

In short, no matter the pure definition, I don't think it is accurate to say that formative assessments can't ever be graded. What matters - what makes a formative assessment formative - is whether I have a chance to get and use feedback in a later version of the 'same' performance. It's only formative if it is ongoing; it's only summative if it is the final chance, the 'summing up' of student performance.

What's really more irksome for me in these kinds of matters is when people utterly abuse the idea of formative by describing any non-end-of-course assessment as formative. It is completely bogus to declare that 'homework' and quizzes are 'formative' simply because they are different from quizzes and because they occur throughout the year. If the specific demand only occurs once and you can't use the feedback from them to do better next time, i.e. if the homework and journals are unique one-time events, then that individual homework assignment is summative. Just because it is not at the end of the year or semester doesn't make it formative. It's only formative if it recurs as a task in which I can learn from feedback to improve at the 'same' task.

Now, a critic may say - c'mon, Grant: they learn from doing homework how to do homework - so it's formative and not 1-shot. And we grade it because we want them to be accountable for homework. Fair enough, I suppose (if that is really true). Calling homework assignments formative seems like a stretch to me. The content is unique and we grade the content not just the doing of it in most cases. If the grade is just for turning it in then I might acquiesce. On the other hand, calling a journal 'formative' and grading it for development over time seems reasonable.

However, we can say for sure that any truly one-shot assessment - homework, journal, quiz, paper - is summative, no matter when it occurs.

Call me a cynic, but my hunch here is that the makers of this rule are doing it unthinkingly in terms of the pure ideas. They seem to be just throwing trendy language around (at least from what you sent me; that's all I can refer to). It sounds like they care less about the true meaning of 'formative' assessment than they care about making sure that kids do their work and are held accountable for it. FINE! But don't call homework and journals 'formative' then.

Suppose I am wrong; suppose that the point of the plan is to make sure kids do their work AND to provide more truly formative assessment opportunities for kids, AND to expand the different types of assessments to give kids more options for showing what they know and can do. Fine! But then the policy would probably be different than the one proposed, I think.

A policy sensitive to these issues and designed to give kids more opportunities to get good feedback and use it would make that more clear in the policy statement. It would make clear when you should and when you should not include a grade in a kid's average, what kinds of 'fair chances' to learn they need, and that journals and homework are only 'formative' if kids can improve at those tasks over time and have the later grades count more than the earlier grades (or some other reasonable rule).

What is really wanted here is a full discussion of the assumption that lurks below consciousness: the longstanding thoughtlessness of averaging grades to compute interim and final grades. This is just a dumb habit that penalizes growth and over-rewards wild swings of performance - though steady growth is what we presumably value in learners.

Another day I'll tackle that beast!
This article first appeared on Grant's personal blog; follow Grant on twitter; image attribution flickr user anthonypbruce; Using Homework As Formative Assessment

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I received a nice query by email the other day and I thought readers might find my reply helpful. Within my district there is quite a debate going on about the difference between formative and summative assessments.

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Bowling with Your Eyes Closed: Students Need True Formative Assessmen (Be sure to read part two as well)

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Bowling with Your Eyes Closed: Students Need True Formative Assessmen (Be sure to read part two as well)

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Ben Johnson

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I've been bowling recently, as perhaps have some of you. There are some unusual things about bowling you can directly apply to improving classroom learning, so let's go bowling for a minute.

Imagine you are at a bowling alley. You have brought your own beautiful bowling ball, and you are wearing your stylishly patterned bowling shoes. As soon as you step up to the lane, however, someone ties a blindfold over your eyes so you can't see a thing. Undaunted, you launch your ball down the lane, and you hear the solid crash of a ball against pins. But there is so much noise in the building that you can't tell whether it was your ball or someone else's. You wonder, "Did I get a strike, or was it a gutter ball?"

How long do you think you would continue to bowl if you could not see what you were aiming at, and you never knew if you even hit a pin? I know I wouldn't last very long. It would be pointless.

The most enjoyable thing about bowling is seeing how you did after each throw. You are in charge of your own performance, and you get to see the results as a natural consequence. As with any endeavor, if you do it enough, you can often get pretty good at it, which is even more fun. Bowling is one of many learning systems that give participants intrinsic feedback to improve, and feedback is the most important element of formative assessment.

Education, just as bowling, is most fun and effective when the learner is in charge of his own improvement. He sees the goal, gives his best shot at meeting it, gets feedback to make corrections, and then can try it again. If the bowler does not knock down all ten pins on the first roll, he gets another chance to knock them down.

The bowler is dependent on being able to see what happens when the ball he has just released strikes the pins. The next time he rolls the ball, he applies what he learned from the first roll to do it better. If it works, great. He's achieved success. If it doesn't, then it is not failure. He simply tries again. Everyone is a lousy bowler the first go-around. It's the repetition that makes us better. So, why do we expect our students to knock down all ten content pins the first time they pick up the ball?

Please share your thoughts, and click here for the second part of this entry.

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Bowling with Your Eyes Closed: Students Need True Formative Assessment | Edutopia

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I've been bowling recently, as perhaps have some of you. There are some unusual things about bowling you can directly apply to improving classroom learning, so let's go bowling for a minute. Imagine you are at a bowling alley. You have brought your own beautiful bowling ball, and you are wearing your stylishly patterned bowling shoes.

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A Favorite Formative Assessment: The Exit Slip

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A Favorite Formative Assessment: The Exit Slip

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Rebecca Alber

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When we think about all the different ways we check for understanding in the classroom, a go-to strategy for many teachers has always been the exit slip or exit ticket. For this strategy, students write at the conclusion of learning, sometimes on a half-sheet of paper with sentence starters provided. It's then collected by the teacher. Why a favorite? Being that they come at the end of a lesson, unit, or segment of study, exit slips give teachers a snapshot of the overall student learning.

Robert Marzano, classroom researcher and education author, recently wrote in depth about this formative assessment. In the article, he shares four uses for exit slips. Students:

1. Rate their current understanding of new learning.

2. Analyze and reflect on their efforts around the learning.

3. Provide feedback to teachers on an instructional strategy.

4. Provide feedback about the materials and teaching.

An exit slip can also be be a great way to set up the next day's learning. With that in mind, here's a few uses to consider:

Discover Shared Interests

Before introducing a group project that includes student choice, students can respond to a strategic question via an exit slip, sharing their primary topics of interest and their reasons.

Activate Prior Knowledge

Instead of taking time during class to create a concept/topic map, you can provide students with the concept or topic word at the end of class, activating their prior knowledge, and have them write words and phrases related to it on their half sheet of paper. When they come into the classroom the next day, they will see all their ideas displayed around the main word or phrase. This brainstorm also serves as a diagnostic check for the teacher.

The Start of an Essay

The low-stakes nature and end-of-class urgency of the exit slips creates a space for students to write quickly, jotting down all that they know about something. You could ask, for example, "Tell me all that you believe to be (a character's) motivation for ______ in the book________." Students write and write for several minutes. You can hand it back to them the next day, telling them they have a start to their first draft of a character analysis essay.

Surveying Students

Use the exit slip to survey students on a current issue or hot button topic related to them (i.e. curfew, cellphone use at school). The data can be used to launch a lesson on the art of debate, or start a unit on argumentative writing ("75% of the class agrees that...").

The beauty of the exit slip is that it puts the learning in the students' hands. It's also empowering for them when they see what they have shared influence what and how they are taught the next day.

We'd love to hear your ideas. How do you use exit slips in your classroom?

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A Favorite Formative Assessment: The Exit Slip | Edutopia

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When we think about all the different ways we check for understanding in the classroom, a go-to strategy for many teachers has always been the exit slip or exit ticket. For this strategy, students write at the conclusion of learning, sometimes on a half-sheet of paper with sentence starters provided.

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Andrew Miller

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With all the education action around Standards-Based Instruction, Understanding By Design, Assessment for Learning, Grading for Learning, Project-Based Learning, Competency-Based Instruction and more, we need to have a frank conversation about formative assessment and grading. This may be a difficult conversation to have.

Educators may end up mourning the loss of past practices and frameworks. It is a paradigm shift, and consequently, we need to have empathy for all stakeholders as transitions occur.

Grades for Everything?

Let me start off by making a clear distinction between two ideas, assessment and grading. They are not the same; they are related. We grade assessments, and assessments reflect learning that has occurred. However, the concept of grading and assessment is complicated, and has further been complicated by the many ways that education reform has manifested itself in the classroom.

Secondly, I want to be honest with all of you about my journey with this concept. When I first started teaching, I utilized both what I learned from my experience in the classroom as a student and from my student teaching. Everything was graded -- and I mean everything. Why did I do this? Well for one, that was my leverage to make students do the work I know they needed to do in order to be successful. The intention was good. In addition, this practice was normal for students, and they understood the routine. We know that routines provide stability, so I thought I was doing them a service by continuing to grade everything. I developed an elaborate system of weights to create what I thought was a clear system for parents, students and other stakeholders. Parents understood it, because it was the same system most them had experienced.

So what was the problem? Where do I start? I had no time. I was grading everything. I had so much paperwork because I was trying to give great feedback on everything in addition to grading and inputting the grades. Perhaps even worse, I wasn't focused on the larger problem. My students cared more about the points than they did about the class. They weren't engaged, and whose fault was that? It was mine. I was "cattle-prodding" them into doing work. It was punitive. "Don't do the work and your grade will suffer." I should have been focusing on my instruction and creating engagement lessons and projects for students to do.

Instead, I was clouding the issue of instruction with grading. I was putting the blame on students rather than on myself. That is a key reflective moment that every teacher should engage in when students are doing the work: What did I instructionally do, or not do, to engage all learners? Not, how can I make them do the work?

Changing the Conversation

What has changed? I don't grade formative assessments. Yes, you read that correctly. What do I do with them? I document them in the grade book, because I need evidence of progress for students, parents and myself. I give specific, focused feedback on the assignments I collect. I have students reflect on their formative assessments and set goals. I have conversations with students after completing a summative assessment; we reflect on the grade of the summative and how the formative relates to the grade they received on the summative. I facilitate moments where students and I connect a seemingly irrelevant assignment, like a comma worksheet, to a more authentic, relevant and engaging summative assessment. These are all things you need to be doing instead of grading.

Why don't I grade formative assessment? For one, a grade is supposed to answer the question: "Did the student learn and achieve the learning targets or standards?" If this is the case, then the summative assessment primarily represents achievement. Formative assessment is practice. It is part of the journey. I would feel evil if I punished a kid during practice and then, literally and figuratively, brought that punishment to his or her "A-Game" in the final match (summative assessment). We've all seen that happen. A student achieves on the summative assessment, but because of a mediocre performance on the formative assessments, they get a lower grade. Ethically, that is just plain wrong. If a student ended up achieving in the end, he or she should be rewarded for that achievement, not penalized for a failure during practice.

The Payoff

A couple of important notes: I do use formative assessment in two ways. If students don't do well or complete the summative, I use the formative to create a "progress" grade to input. It is good evidence, and can be used this way. In addition, if I am assessing the 21st century skill of Work Ethic, formative assessment can be utilized as part of that grade. If one of the quality indicators, for example, is "turning in work on time," then I can leverage formative assessment as part of that grade. You will notice, however, that the intent is different. The learning target is different.

I'm not saying this is an easy transition; it is a paradigm shift for everyone. Parents need to be educated, stakeholders need to be educated, students need to be educated, and teachers need to be educated -- and provided the space to wrestle with these ideas. I took a while to get to this place. However, the payoff feels better, both from an instructional and ethics standpoint, and also from a student achievement standpoint. My students often asked, "Wait, so you are only going to reward us at our best, not necessarily when we tried and failed?!?" Then they'd say, "Hmmm, I guess that makes sense" as the idea sunk in.

Is it time your grading practices made a little more sense? Formative assessment is about ensuring equity for all students. Thank you readers for being open to this conversation. Cognitive dissonance is healthy. As I like to joke in my workshops, "If I have made you a little uncomfortable, I've done my job."

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Courageous Conversation: Formative Assessment and Grading | Edutopia

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With all the education action around Standards-Based Instruction, Understanding By Design, Assessment for Learning, Grading for Learning, Project-Based Learning, Competency-Based Instruction and more, we need to have a frank conversation about formative assessment and grading. This may be a difficult conversation to have. Educators may end up mourning the loss of past practices and frameworks.

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Formative Assessment Efficiency, Summative Assessment Proficiency 

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Formative Assessment Efficiency, Summative Assessment Proficiency 

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David Ginsburg

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Education Week - Coach G's Teaching Tips

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I'm often surprised when teachers are surprised when their students perform poorly on tests. Sure there are kids whose scores belie their skills, such as those who have test anxiety or had a bad day or took the test on an empty stomach. For the most part, though, students' performance on tests is predictable based on their day to day performance in class. And that's the problem: teachers who are surprised by students' performance on tests often aren't assessing students' understanding in class as routinely or effectively as they need to be.

Routine, effective assessment means knowing what students know or don't know now. No waiting for the chapter test, much less a year-end standardized test. In fact, no waiting until you grade students' papers after class, since the time for timely formative assessment is during class when you can identify ASAP what students don't get and why they don't get it, and clear up their confusion right away.

One key to such in-the-moment assessment is circulating to see how students are doing as they're working on something in class--whether it's a five-minute "Do Now" or a 45-minute discovery activity. Just be sure when you do this to assess all students before you assist any students.

Another key to immediate, reliable assessment is effective questioning techniques. I've written before about one such technique, cold calling, and here are a few more:

Ask, Don't Tell. Ask questions through which you can pull information from students rather than provide it to them. Examples: give students diagrams of insects and arachnids (or, better yet, have them create their own), and ask them to identify similarities and differences rather than doing so for them; draw a few figures with lines of symmetry inserted and ask students what they think a line of symmetry is rather than define it for them up front. Same goes for discussing readings or interpreting graphs, where you'll get a better sense for students' understanding if you solicit their opinions and analysis before sharing yours.

Avoid Yes-No Questions. Ask questions that require students to say or show what they do or don't understand rather than if they understand. In other words, lots of what, why, and how questions rather than knee-jerk yes-no questions like "Does everyone understand?" or "Is everyone ready to move on?" or "Does this make sense?" I've noticed even when facilitating workshops that participants are more responsive when I ask, "What questions do you have?" than when I ask, "Any questions?" Similarly, it's better to ask, "What do you remember about...? " rather than "Do you remember...?"

Target Conceptual Understanding. Ask questions that assess and facilitate conceptual understanding before asking those aimed at procedural understanding. (Example: "What is perimeter?" rather than "What is the formula for perimeter?")

In my experience, teachers who assess students' understanding using these practices are rarely if ever surprised by their students' performance on tests. And more important, they're pleased with their students' performance on tests, since formative assessment efficiency on the part of teachers is a key to summative assessment proficiency on the part of students.

What questions do you have?

Image provided by Phillip Martin with permission
Join my mailing list for announcements about webinars and the work I do to improve teaching and learning.

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I'm often surprised when teachers are surprised when their students perform poorly on tests. Sure there are kids whose scores belie their skills, such as those who have test anxiety or had a bad day or took the test on an empty stomach.

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Different Examples of Formative Assessment (56!)

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Different Examples of Formative Assessment (56!)

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David Wees

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56 Examples of Formative Assessment | Edutopia

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Note the definition I'm using at the beginning of the presentation: A formative assessment or assignment is a tool teachers use to give feedback to students and/or guide their instruction. It is not included in a student grade, nor should it be used to judge a teacher's performance.

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Using Thinking Routines as Formative Assessment

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Using Thinking Routines as Formative Assessment

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A math teacher uses technology to facilitate the Headlines routine

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Step by step instructions on how to run the activity while highlighting the collaboration, discussion and formative assessment associated with the routine.

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1st Grade

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Teaching Gradual Release of Responsibility

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The Joy of Conferring lets us focus in with Debbie Miller to see what happens at the individual level as she conducts reading conferences with her students.

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High School

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Reading Strategies for Struggling Middle School

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4th Grade

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Powerful Method for Teaching Reading to Classroom of Students

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Conference with Bella (from Patrick Allen: What Are You Thinking? Conferring in Reader's Workshop)

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www.stenhouse.com/0880.asp Have you ever wanted to sit down beside a master teacher and see how he or she confers? In this DVD, join Patrick Allen, author of Conferring: The Keystone to Reader's Workshop, as he confers with nine different students over the course of two days.

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Are Our Kids Ready for Computerized Testing?

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Are Our Kids Ready for Computerized Testing?

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Kristine Gullen

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March 2014 | Volume 71 | Number 6
Using Assessments Thoughtfully Pages 68-71

Kristine Gullen

Recently, my 21-year-old son faced a real-life task that made me think about the assessments connected to the Common Core standards that U.S. students will soon complete in elementary, middle, and high school. I had accompanied Nickolas to the airport to catch his flight for a semester abroad. At the ticket counter, the attendant told Nick, "Your flight to London has been cancelled. After getting through security, you can try to bump yourself onto a flight to get over to Europe, and then connect to a boat, train, or bus to get the rest of the way."

"What!" The mom in me exclaimed. Nick, however, had a huge grin on his face at the excitement of this unforeseen journey. He hugged me and said, "Mom, I'll call you when I get to the university." I stood there stunned, struggling to think of the steps to take in creating a new plan. But Nick was already walking toward the gate. He was up to the challenge of finding his destination. When Nick turned to wave, I had to smile: His shirt said, "Not all who wander are lost."

Needed: Knowledge, Synthesis, and Tech Skills

To get himself to London, Nick needed basic knowledge about airports, air and train travel, and the locations of European cities. He also needed to interpret and synthesize disparate bits of information and choose the best of several options-quickly. Students facing the performance tasks and questions being created by the consortia connected to the Common Core standards, Smarter Balanced and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC), will also need to retrieve knowledge and synthesize it under pressure. Imagine how much harder Nick's task would have been if he had scant experience using the technology involved in modern travel, such as flight monitors, electronic check-in kiosks, or even escalators.

Inexperience with technology might frustrate many students taking the computerized Common Core assessments. As I recently realized after debriefing with hundreds of students who had participated in pilots of computerized assessment items, even many digital natives aren't versed in the skills needed to take online tests, such as moving a cursor, dragging text, or even keyboarding.

As teachers face the reality that students will need to demonstrate mastery of Common Core-aligned content and skills through computerized tests as early as fall 2014, we may feel stunned-just as I did when Nick's flight was cancelled. Although we've lived through many changes in curriculum and the tools used to facilitate learning, and we've often repeated, "This too will pass," this time feels different. Something is really changing.

So let's consider what that change means and how to get kids ready for the technical skills involved with these new assessments, using insights from those who've actually tried them.

In spring 2013, Michigan piloted some of the online assessment items from Smarter Balanced. As an education consultant, I support teachers and students in preparing for this new testing genre. I reasoned that the firsthand perspectives of students and educators who participated in the pilot would help me see what each group needs, so I arranged debriefing sessions in schools. I talked with more than 500 students who had just taken the pilot items-and with teachers who'd just administered them. Responding to a set of prepared questions, participants in grades 3, 6, 7, and 11 shared their take on the technology skills students will need to successfully demonstrate learning in this new format.

3rd Graders: "The Bubble in the Straw"

These post-pilot debriefing sessions revealed many technology skills that younger students, especially, will need to build before they can demonstrate proficiency through computerized tests. One debrief began with the question, "Suppose a student has never taken an online test: What computer skills would be important for that student to have before taking this test?"

Hands quickly shot up. Nine-year-old Ethan said, "The bubble in the straw was really important to learn about; my fingers wouldn't work." Looking around the room, I saw his classmates nodding their heads in agreement.

Puzzled, I asked, "What exactly did this bubble do?"

With much animation, Ethan pointed up, down, and side-to-side, "There are straws with a bubble on the side, on the bottom, and sometimes in the middle. You can move them this way and that. I had to use the arrow to move the bubble."

It became clear that these 3rd graders, many of whom were well versed in touchscreen devices, had just realized that putting a finger on the computer screen couldn't get the words to move. "Oh," I exclaimed, awareness dawning, "that's called a scroll bar, and, yes it's very important."

Brittney chimed in with an additional suggestion for needed learning: "The blinky line has to be in the box where you want your words to go. ... You can press the letters all you want, but nothing happens if the blinky line isn't in the box!" A show of hands revealed that more than half of these 3rd graders had struggled with how to use the cursor.

This exchange was a reminder that, even for tech-savvy students, a high level of competency on one device doesn't always transfer to another device or task. Using technology for demonstrating content knowledge is different from using it for entertainment.

Computerized and online assessments, educators are discovering, will require kids to have certain digital skills: using a mouse, highlighting text, dropping and dragging text, drawing lines and creating graphs on a screen, operating an online calculator, using scroll bars (the "bubble in the straw"), and keyboarding, to name a few. If we want an online assessment to capture a student's level of learning, rather than that student's ability to navigate technology, teachers must integrate these skills into their instruction, giving students practice before administering high-stakes exams on a computer.

Secondary Students: "Mighty Confusing"

I began my conversations with secondary students by asking, "When it comes to using technology, is there anything your teachers should know that would help other students be successful on this test?"

There was a consensus that negotiating the large amount of text and questions on the screen was a challenge, especially on small screens. Janal shared that several multistep problems

went on and on and combined stuff from all sorts of classes. ... it was mighty confusing at first. ... We had this split screen. I was scrolling on the left to look at information, then over to the screen on the right, scrolling to answer the questions ... back and forth, back and forth.

Students who had increased the font size (an accommodation option) found that this intensified the amount of scroll bar usage. Some realized-after the fact, unfortunately-that they needed to use the scroll bar on each question to check whether there was information beyond that shown on the initial screen.

Previewing the test format and directions regarding answer selection for each section would help test takers. Some students, relying on past experiences with standardized assessments in which each question had only one correct response, missed directions that changed this expectation. Ben, who hadn't read the directions carefully, shared, "It was confusing that the computer let you click on more than one answer. You had to be careful to unclick when you changed your mind or you could put in two or three answers to one question." "You have to pay attention," Kyle warned. "Many questions had more than one right answer. It was different from other tests where you search for the right answer and move on to the next question."

Students at all grade levels disclosed frustration with responses that required extended keyboarding skills. "There was more I could have said," Jacob noted. "There was plenty of time, and the box wasn't full. I just didn't want to type anymore." Many students reported choosing to shorten responses on constructed-response items because they lacked fluency with the keyboard.

Overall, however, students commented positively on computerized assessment, saying things like, "So much better than a paper test" and "I liked all the different questions; it wasn't the same boring thing over and over again."

Insights from Educators

Debriefing with teachers brought forth different perspectives. The self-sufficiency these items required was a main theme. One teacher reflected,

When it comes to the performance tasks, my apprehension isn't the rigor of the content; it's the independence and perseverance students need. I teach in chunks, with lots of feedback and support. These assessments expect kids to be very self-directed with large pieces of content and many complex tasks. ... I'm not sure they're ready.

Teachers also expressed concern about the length of items and kids' lack of keyboarding skills. They imagined the awkwardness test takers might feel using a new or different computer. Keys and spacing often feel different from one device to the next, and upgrading to a new device or operating system can be frustrating.

When I talked with educators at the district level, I found that logistics were a challenge for some. A few pilot sites reported difficulty obtaining enough devices to give the assessments or having to take over computer labs (and interrupt their use for instruction). Others had problems with the amount of bandwidth needed. Many thought they had sufficient Internet capacity-until 120 students logged on to take the assessment at once.

How to Get Students There

The new online assessments will challenge educators to ensure that students not only have learned certain things, but also can demonstrate their knowledge using technology and apply their learning to a variety of tasks-all without the direction of the teacher.

So, how do we get there? Here are five suggestions:

1. Enhance digital skills. Integrate technology into instruction to help strengthen students' computer skills and transfer those skills to academic tasks. For instance, you might teach students to summarize something they're reading by creating a word cloud (using www.wordle.net or www.tagul.com); or as they discuss common texts, have students share their comments and links to further content in a protected online space (like www.voicethread.com); or assign your kids to create a class website.

2. Assign cross-curriculum tasks. Create projects that connect multiple subjects so students get accustomed to using their knowledge flexibly across disciplines.

3. Promote self-sufficiency. Assign multidimensional tasks that scaffold a student's ability to persevere over an extended period while demonstrating learning independently. Teachers often require students to research a topic, write a report, and then present their findings. When I taught, I would break such a report into many steps and check students' work as many as 10 times along the way: several checks during the research process, a few more as learners create an outline, and a check after each of three drafts. All this support was great, but an educator giving a similar assignment now should have students complete bigger chunks of work before checking in and giving support-doing only five or so check-ins for the project and decreasing this to two or three for subsequent projects, working toward as much independent work as possible.

4. Provide practice and try out your technology. Give students opportunities to build a level of comfort with the actual keyboards, screens, external mouse or touch pads, and so on that they'll use during the assessment. Seek out opportunities to pilot upcoming web-based assessments from the Common Core consortia, or have all students take a different online test simultaneously to determine, firsthand, your system's capacity, strengths, and challenges.

5. Debrief. After piloting assessment items, hold dialogues like those described here to capture test takers' thoughts and recommendations for the skills and support students will need.

As the Common Core assessments approach, let's challenge ourselves to provide opportunities for students to independently apply the knowledge they'll need to meet the new standards-and indeed, to succeed in life. If students can't demonstrate mastery of content independently, what have they really learned?

Endnote

The schools connected to a secure browser for students to take the online items. The Bureau of Assessment and Accountability within the Michigan Department of Education supported this student-voice, post-pilot debriefing project.

Kristine Gullen is an education consultant in the School Quality and Learning Services Department at Oakland Schools in Waterford, Michigan.

KEYWORDS

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Are Our Kids Ready for Computerized Tests?

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March 2014 | Volume 71 | Number 6 Using Assessments Thoughtfully Pages 68-71 Kristine Gullen Recently, my 21-year-old son faced a real-life task that made me think about the assessments connected to the Common Core standards that U.S. students will soon complete in elementary, middle, and high school.

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Art and Science of Teaching / Using Polling Technologies to Close Feedback Gaps

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Art and Science of Teaching / Using Polling Technologies to Close Feedback Gaps

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Sonny Magaña and Robert J. Marzano

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March 2014 | Volume 71 | Number 6
Using Assessments Thoughtfully Pages 82-83

Sonny Magaña and Robert J. Marzano

Despite the research on the positive effects of efficient and timely feedback, a significant time gap often exists between student responses to questions on an assessment and teacher feedback on those responses. Because teachers often take the assessments home to score by hand, the "feedback gap" can be at least a day and, in some cases, several days, a week, or more.

This lag time greatly diminishes the opportunity for students to think about their thinking, reflect on their errors, and revise their knowledge. The more time that elapses between a student response and teacher feedback, the less metacognitive reflection that takes place. In some situations, students never even get the opportunity to review their incorrectly answered questions so they can revise their knowledge.

The Benefits of Polling Technologies

The recent emergence of polling technologies-such as clickers, student response systems, and free online resources like Poll Everywhere or Socrative -can potentially diminish or even eradicate the feedback gap. Armed with almost instantaneous feedback on their responses, students are more able to reflect on their thinking and, often with teacher guidance, revise their knowledge on the spot.

Polling technologies are helpful to teachers, too. Teachers can administer more frequent assessments because these technologies are easy to use, and when teachers predetermine the correct answers, the assessments literally grade themselves. Instead of grading tests by hand, teachers can spend more time studying student progress, making informed inferences about student learning needs, and providing timely interventions.

Polling technologies also enable all students in a class to respond to teacher-posed questions simultaneously, increasing student response rates to 100 percent. In addition, teachers can pose questions and get instant student responses throughout a class period, making assessment a seamless part of the flow of instruction.

Of course, polling technology is not required for real-time formative assessment. Teachers often ask students to use hand signals to respond to a question. However, if a teacher asks students to raise their hands if they don't understand, typically few students will raise their hands. Alternatively, if the teacher asks students to publicly vote on a question using thumbs up or thumbs down, some students might first look around the room to determine how others have voted.

In contrast, when students respond in the relatively anonymous mode afforded by polling technologies-only the student and teacher know how that student responded-the students' answers will more accurately reflect their thinking. This will obviously increase the accuracy of their responses.

Learning from the Data

Let's say a teacher has used polling devices to collect student responses to six multiple-choice questions he or she asked in the course of a class period. Each device has its own number and is assigned to a particular student; student responses are listed for each voting device and student name. As soon as a student enters a response, it's automatically scored, with a checkmark indicating a correct answer. Of course, this immediate scoring requires that the teacher use selected-response items, such as multiple choice, matching, true or false, and the like.

The display of student responses shows how all students in the class answered these six problems. It clarifies for teachers which students struggle with which information as well as which students seem to have mastered the material. It also shows how the class did globally: Only one-half of the class might have answered Question 4 correctly; Question 6 might have stumped almost everyone.

Teachers can display these data to the class with the column listing student names hidden. As long as students know the number of their polling device, they can see how their answers compared with those of other students, while still maintaining their anonymity. Teachers can easily initiate discussions about why several students might have answered a question or questions incorrectly.

Polling technologies need not require new hardware. In classrooms in which all students own or have access to a smartphone, students can take assessments using free polling software services, such as those noted above, or services that charge a nominal fee.

Testing at Three Levels

Polling technologies also offer an opportunity for teachers to use proficiency scoring when creating tests. Proficiency scoring begins by writing items (or selecting them from an item bank) that reflect three levels of proficiency. These three levels are communicated to students as learning goals.

For example, consider the following three levels of learning goals for the topic of democracies:

Basic: Students will be able to recognize correct definitions of basic terms and phrases that relate to democracies.

Proficient: Students will be able to recognize accurate statements about the defining characteristics of democracies.

Advanced: Students will be able to differentiate democracies from other forms of governance.

To return to the six-question, multiple-choice assessment, the first three questions might focus on content at the basic level, the next two questions on content at the proficient level, and the last question on content at the advanced level. A display of student responses would give the teacher an immediate picture of each student's performance at each of the three levels, as well as how the class did as a whole.

It's important to note that patterns of student responses to short classroom assessments will not necessarily provide accurate profiles. A student might guess at an answer or miss an item because he or she didn't read it correctly. However, if students answer items at all three levels of difficulty several times during a week, accurate patterns should surface for each student.

Make the Leap

Polling technologies offer a new type of assessment that benefits both students and teachers as it closes the feedback gap. It's time to try them.

Endnotes

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.

Marzano, R. J. (2012). An easier way to score tests. Educational Leadership, 69(6), 82-83.

Sonny Magaña is associate vice president of Marzano Research Laboratory and director of the Educational Technology Division. Robert J. Marzano is cofounder and CEO of Marzano Research Laboratory in Denver, Colorado, and executive director of the Learning Sciences Marzano Center in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. He is coauthor, with Michael Toth, of Teacher Evaluation That Makes a Difference: A New Model for Teacher Growth and Student Achievement (ASCD, 2013).

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Using Polling Technologies to Close Feedback Gaps - Educational Leadership

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March 2014 | Volume 71 | Number 6 Using Assessments Thoughtfully Pages 82-83 Sonny Magaña and Robert J. Marzano Despite the research on the positive effects of efficient and timely feedback, a significant time gap often exists between student responses to questions on an assessment and teacher feedback on those responses.

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The Bride Between Today's Lesson and Tomorrow's 

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The Bride Between Today's Lesson and Tomorrow's 

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Carol Ann Tomlinson

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March 2014 | Volume 71 | Number 6
Using Assessments Thoughtfully Pages 10-14

Carol Ann Tomlinson

There's talk aplenty in schools these days about formative assessment. That's encouraging, because formative assessment has great potential to improve both teaching and learning. Listening to the conversations sometimes, however, reminds me that it's easier to subscribe to a word than to live out its fundamental tenets.

I see formative assessment as an ongoing exchange between a teacher and his or her students designed to help students grow as vigorously as possible and to help teachers contribute to that growth as fully as possible. When I hear formative assessment reduced to a mechanism for raising end-of-year-test scores, it makes me fear that we might reduce teaching and learning to that same level.

Formative assessment is-or should be-the bridge or causeway between today's lesson and tomorrow's. Both its alignment with current content goals and its immediacy in providing insight about student understanding are crucial to helping teacher and student see how to make near-term adjustments so the progression of learning can proceed as it should. I worry when I hear educators say they have purchased formative assessments to give once a quarter or once a month to keep tabs on student achievement. These assessments are not likely to be well aligned with tomorrow's lesson, nor are they able to provide feedback rapidly enough to influence daily instruction.

The best teachers work persistently to benefit the learners in their charge. Because teaching is too complex to invite perfection, even the best teachers will miss the mark on some days, but in general, teachers who use sound formative assessment aspire to the following 10 principles.

1. Help students understand the role of formative assessment.

Students often feel that assessment equals test equals grade equals judgment. That association leads many discouraged students to give up rather than to risk another failure. It causes many high-achieving students to focus on grades rather than learning, and on safe answers rather than thoughtful ones.

It's important, then, for teachers to help students understand that assessments help them learn and that immediate perfection should not be their goal. Teachers can communicate this message by telling students,

When we're mastering new things, it's important to feel safe making mistakes. Mistakes are how we figure out how to get better at what we are doing. They help us understand our thinking. Therefore, many assessments in this class will not be graded. We'll analyze the assessments so we can make improvements in our work, but they won't go into the grade book. When you've had time to practice, then we'll talk about tests and grades.

It's essential for teachers to help learners both understand and experience the reality that sustained effort and mindful attention to progress feed success. That belief needs to be a cornerstone ethic in the classroom.

2. Begin with clear KUDs.

The first step in creating a worthy formative assessment occurs well before the teacher develops the assessment. It happens when the teacher begins to map out curriculum. At that point, the teacher asks the pivotal question, "What is most important for students to Know, Understand, and be able to Do as a result of this segment of learning?" Absent clarity on the essential knowledge, understanding, and skills for a unit or lesson, the curriculum wanders. But with clarity about KUDs, the teacher is able to focus curricular decisions squarely on what matters most for student success.

KUDs also lay the groundwork for pre-assessment and ongoing assessment. A pre-assessment provides a "dipstick check" of student status as a unit begins. It need not be wholly comprehensive, but rather should sample student standing in relation to the material so the teacher has a reasonable approximation of who may experience difficulty, who may show early mastery, and who may bring misunderstandings to the unit of study. Other formative assessments will follow regularly and often, and together they will form an image of a student's emergent development.

Alignment between KUDs and formative assessments-and later, between formative assessment results and instructional plans-is imperative if formative assessment is to fulfill its promise.

3. Make room for student differences.

The most useful formative assessments make it possible for students to show what they know, understand, and can do; therefore, it's useful for teachers to build some flexibility into formative assessments. For example, a student who is learning English may be able to draw and label a diagram of the relationship between density and buoyancy but not write a paragraph explaining it. The prompt, "Use an example from your experience to illustrate the idea that a person's culture shapes his or her perspective," is more likely to draw a meaningful response from a broader range of students than the prompt, "Explain the relationship between culture and perspective." Likewise, asking students to illustrate how fractions are used in sports, music, cooking, shopping, building something, or another area they are interested in is more likely to be revealing than asking them simply to explain uses of fractions.

In formative assessments (as in summative ones), it's acceptable-and often wise-to allow students some latitude in how they express what they know, understand, and can do. Assessment formats and conditions can vary as long as all forms of the assessment measure the same KUDs.

4. Provide instructive feedback.

Although formative assessments should rarely be graded, students do need useful feedback. Comments like, "Nice job," "I enjoyed this," or "Not quite" don't help learners understand what they did well or how they missed the mark. Feedback needs to help the student know what to do to improve the next time around. For example, it's helpful for a teacher to say, "The flow of your logic in this section is clear, but you need additional detail to support your thinking." It offers a student little guidance if the teacher simply says, "Not quite there yet," or "Weak effort."

When feedback serves its instructional purpose, students are clear about the learning targets at which they are aiming, and they understand that assessments show how they are doing in reaching those targets. They trust that teachers will use the assessments to help them achieve, and they know that there will soon be follow-up opportunities for them to use the feedback in improving their performance.

5. Make feedback user-friendly.

Feedback should be clear, focused, and appropriately challenging for the learner. As teachers, we sometimes feel our job is to mark every error on a paper. Not only is that practice time-consuming, robbing us of time we could more potently use for instructional planning, but a sea of "edits" without clarity about which comments matter most, how they connect, or what to do next is likely to evoke a negative response from a student.

To realize its power, feedback must result in a student thinking about how to improve-the ideal is to elicit a cognitive response from the learner, not an emotional one (Wiliam, 2011). It's seldom useful to send students a message that their work is stellar or that their work is dreadful. Praise and shame shut down learning far more often than they catalyze it. It's more fruitful to straightforwardly share with students their particular next steps in the learning process, based on goals that are clear to teacher and student alike. The teacher sees where a student is in a learning progression and points the way ahead for that student. In other words, feedback is differentiated, pointing each learner toward actions that are challenging but achievable for that learner.

For example, a teacher who is working with students on using sources to support an opinion provides criteria for the effective use of resources for this purpose. In writing an opinion piece, some students may have difficulty synthesizing ideas from multiple resources. A second group of students may synthesize proficiently but rely solely on obvious interpretations of text. To move ahead, the first group of students needs specific guidance on how to synthesize ideas from resources. The second group needs direction in plumbing ideas more deeply. Both groups will receive feedback in the area of using resources to support an opinion, but their feedback will focus on aspects of the skill set that move them to their next step in development.

6. Assess persistently.

Formative assessment should permeate a class period. A great teacher is a habitual student of his or her students. A keen observer, the teacher is constantly watching what students do, looking for clues about their learning progress, and asking for input from students about their status.

These teachers walk among their students as they work, listening for clues about their understanding, asking questions that probe their thinking, taking notes on what they see and hear. They ask students to signal their level of confidence with the task they are doing with thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or thumbs-sideways, for example, to gain a sense of how the class as a whole is faring. They ask students to write answers to questions on whiteboards or to respond with clickers so they can get an in-process sense of how individual students are coming along.

They use start-up prompts to see what students learned from last night's homework. They use exit cards to assess student understanding as a class ends. They spot-check student work with an eye to seeing how students are progressing with a particular skill. They talk with students as they enter and leave the classroom, at lunch, or while waiting for the school buses to leave. They solicit and are alert to parent input about their students' strengths, attitudes, work habits, and goals.

It isn't really so much that these teachers use formative assessments often. It's that they do so continually -formally and informally, with individuals and with the group, to understand academic progress and to understand the human beings that they teach. For these teachers, formative assessment is not ancillary to effective teaching. It is the core of their professional work.

7. Engage students with formative assessment.

Time was when doctors examined patients, made diagnoses, and provided treatment plans with limited conversation about their observations or alternative courses of treatment. More recently, physicians have learned that outcomes improve when patients and doctors exchange information and examine treatment options together.

It's easy for teachers to stick with the traditional classroom paradigm that casts them in the role of giver and grader of tests, diagnoser of student needs, and prescriber of regimens. Things go much better, however, when students are fully engaged in the assessment process.

Students benefit from examining their own work in light of rubrics that align tightly with content goals and point toward quality of content, process, and product-or in comparison to models of high-quality work that are just a bit above the student's current level of performance. They benefit from providing feedback on peers' work, as long as the feedback is guided by clear criteria and a process that enables them to provide useful suggestions.

Students also need to be involved in thoughtfully examining teacher feedback, asking questions when the feedback is not clear, and developing plans that specify how they will use that feedback to benefit their own academic growth. Students who are consistent participants in the formative assessment process should be able to say something like this:

Here are four goals I'm working on right now. In this piece of work, here's evidence that I'm competent with the first and third goals. If we look at my work from a month ago and then at this most recent piece, I can show you evidence of my progress with the second goal. I can also tell you two things I'm going to work on this week to make sure I become more confident and more skilled in working with the fourth goal.

8. Look for patterns.

The goal of reviewing formative assessment is not to be able to say, "Six students made As, seven made Bs, ten made C s, and so on." Neither is the goal to create 32 lesson plans for 32 students. Rather, it is to find patterns in the students' work that point the way to planning classroom instruction that both moves students along a learning continuum and is manageable.

Patterns will vary widely with the focus of the assessment. In one instance, a teacher may see some students who have already mastered the content, others who are fine with computations but not word problems, still others who know how to tackle the word problems but are making careless errors, and another group that is struggling with prerequisite knowledge or skills.

In another instance, a teacher may find that one group of students can provide causes of an event but no evidence for their reasoning, while other students are able to provide both causes and evidence. In still another case, a teacher may see students who understand the general idea being assessed but lack academic vocabulary to write with precision, while other students are using appropriate academic vocabulary. The possibilities are many, but the goal is to look for clusters of student need and plan ways to help each group of students move ahead.

9. Plan instruction around content requirements and student needs.

There is little point in spending time on formative assessment unless it leads to modification of teaching and learning plans. In other words, formative assessment is a means to design instruction that's a better fit for student needs, not an end in itself.

On rare occasions, formative assessment will indicate that everyone in the class needs more practice with a certain skill or more engagement with a particular understanding. Much more frequently, however, formative assessment points to a need for differentiated instruction during at least some of an upcoming class period, in homework, or in both. John Hattie (2012) says that

teachers must know where students are and aim to move them "+1" beyond that point; thus the idea of teaching the class as a whole is unlikely to pitch the lesson correctly for all students. This is where the skill of teachers in knowing the similarities across students and allowing for the differences becomes so important. (p. 97)

An assessment is really only a formative assessment when teachers glean evidence about student performance, interpret that evidence, and use it to provide teaching that is more likely to benefit student learning than the instruction those teachers would have delivered if they had continued forward without using what they learned through the assessment (Wiliam, 2011).

10. Repeat the process.

Formative assessment is more habitual than occasional in classrooms where maximizing each student's growth is a central goal. In such classes, it simply makes no sense to teach without a clear understanding of each student's development along a learning trajectory. It is wasteful of time, resources, and learner potential not to make instructional plans based on that understanding. Assessment of each learning experience informs plans for the next learning experience. Such an assessment process never ends.

A classroom is a system with interdependent parts-each affecting the other for better or worse. The learning environment, quality of curriculum, use of formative assessment, instructional planning, and implementation of classroom routines work together to enhance student learning-or, if any of the elements does not function effectively, to impede it. Fruitful use of formative assessment is an essential component in the mix.

References

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. New York: Routledge.

Wiliam, D., (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

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The Bridge Between Today's Lesson and Tomorrow's

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March 2014 | Volume 71 | Number 6 Using Assessments Thoughtfully Pages 10-14 Carol Ann Tomlinson There's talk aplenty in schools these days about formative assessment. That's encouraging, because formative assessment has great potential to improve both teaching and learning.