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Explicit SEL Instruction - Casel Schoolguide

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Explicit SEL instruction refers to consistent opportunities for students to cultivate, practice, and reflect on social and emotional competencies in ways that are developmentally appropriate and culturally responsive.

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This article is an overview of assessments. It talks about a lot of different assessments including tests and different projects the students could do.

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Chris Hull | Otus Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer

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The Ultimate Guide to Summative Assessments

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Summative Assessments are—in simple words—the way educators determine what a student has learned. Examples include curriculum tests, rubrics, and multiple choice tests. See how each can work for you i

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Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation 

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Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation 

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This article talks about the different types of assessment- formal vs informal, etc., and talks about the purposes of each one. Also has some great alternative methods such as portfolios.

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This updated second edition of Dylan Wiliam’s best-selling book explores how integrating formative assessment into daily classroom practice boosts student engagement and learning. It includes new research, over 50 practical strategies, and updated examples and templates to help teachers gather evidence of learning, give effective feedback, and support student ownership of learning.

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A teacher’s role is to guide student learning in a purposeful direction, which requires connecting classroom instruction with how students process information—something only achievable through effective assessment.

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In Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom, Carol Ann Tomlinson and Tonya R. Moon explore how differentiation can enhance assessment across all subjects and grade levels. They examine its role in pre-assessment, formative and summative assessment, grading, and report cards.

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Having different readily available is very important. Sometimes, I get brain fog and forget different assessment strategies I can use quickly.

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22 Simple Assessment Strategies You Can Use Every Day

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Here are 22 simple assessment strategies and tips to help you become more frequent in your teaching, planning, and curriculum design.

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This will be beneficial to reference to understand the differences between summative and formative assessments.

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I talked about this in my assessment strategies, using discussion or a rant, is a great way to understand your students learning. Both Val and Lorelei used a discussion as a way to see our learning. It felt more casual and less daunting than an actual test or project. They taught us the information, and now it was our turn to show them what we knew. This could only be done a couple of times or like I said before as an option for a summative which only a few students might do!

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Verbal participation in discussions is a tried-and-true formative assessment, but it can also be rubric-based and summative.

Anna Godeassi / The iSpot

Throughout my two decades in education, I have experimented with a variety of approaches to assessment, including projects, models, debates, and traditional assessments. In the past two years I've been teaching high school online, and I've abandoned traditional tests in favor of more compassionate forms of assessment. My new favorite is the discussion assessment, and I hope I can inspire you to add it to your assessment toolbox whether you're teaching online like me or in a classroom.

My first foray into discussion assessment involved the cellular energy unit in my biology course. Many students struggle to see the relevance of photosynthesis and cellular respiration and thus find the concepts overly challenging. I decided to experiment with discussion as a way to help students engage with the concepts on a deep level but also feel encouraged to explore, share understandings, and learn during the assessment process.

At a recent professional development session, I heard the phrase "compassionate assessment." It was loosely defined as supportive, rather than punitive, assessment practices. My discussion assessment is compassionate, as it supports critical thinking, allows students to teach each other, and provides students an opportunity to master content. In the best discussions, students ask probing questions that take the class into new territory, and we all learn together. At the end, students have expressed how interesting and fun the class felt-something that never happens after traditional tests.

Getting Started

To get started with discussion assessments, outline a few meaty questions before you begin your unit. For a class of 20-25 students, I find that six questions in a 90-minute period is the maximum. Start with those essential unit questions you want students to understand, and then branch out to some of your favorite extension topics that you will touch on, or hope students will want to explore. Students' questions and work during the unit often inspire great discussion questions, so it's OK to not be thoroughly backward-planned.

I like to tease these questions throughout the unit. Since I'm a science teacher, my units are driven by phenomena, so I am always coming back to the driving phenomenon we are working to explain. My students answer a lesson question each day (which I use instead of a traditional objective or learning target), so the idea of having layers of questions makes sense to them. When we finally arrive at the end of the unit, students are ready to synthesize their learning about the questions we've been working to answer.

Implementation

To have a successful and productive discussion, I give students a full class period to choose their questions and to start writing response outlines. We typically use a claim, evidence, and reasoning framework (you'll want to teach this structure before the discussion prep, if necessary). I encourage students to find visuals to support their responses.

Allowing students choice over which question to answer is important; if we want students to show what they know, they must be able to choose the questions they understand the best. It's also impossible for every student to share their thinking in response to all six questions, so limiting preparation to three or four questions helps. If possible, assign discussion preparation through your learning management system so you can track students' preparation.

On the day of the discussion, students run the show, and you moderate. I begin by calling on a student and asking them to share their claim. I provide discussion starters to support productive talk and record student contributions in a spreadsheet.

Every student is called on for the questions they prepared, but students may participate in all questions. Students agree and disagree with each other, build on each other's ideas, and ask clarifying and probing questions. When students express ideas that are incorrect, they help each other understand-and most important, no points are deducted. Students can only earn points during the discussion, which results in a wonderfully supportive experience for all members of the classroom community. The rubric I provide to students delineates how I score the quantity and quality of their participation and makes sure that each student is contributing to the discussion for all questions prepared.

Documentation and Adaptation

Students must take notes during the discussion. This not only holds them accountable for learning, it also results in notes that support the formal writing assessment I assign afterward, in which students choose one discussion question to respond to in a paragraph.

This written assessment makes the process more rigorous-adding a writing task allows students to synthesize what they learned in the discussion. I've found that this student writing is of much higher quality compared with short-answer responses on previous traditional assessments, which makes them more rewarding for me to evaluate.

But what about students who don't prepare, don't participate, or are absent? I simply turn the discussion questions into an alternative assessment and require that students choose two or three of them to respond to in paragraph form. This way, all students have the opportunity to demonstrate deep content knowledge and critical thinking. I always suggest that teachers try a new approach in their least favorite unit or the unit where previous projects or assessments have not worked out. Some additional teacher resources to inspire you include these discussion sentence stems and a discussion rubric, which you can adapt or modify for your class.

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Using Discussion as a Summative Assessment

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Verbal participation in discussions is a tried-and-true formative assessment, but it can also be rubric-based and summative.

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This was such an interesting bell ringer! I see students in centers doing a sorting game but a quick version is so interesting!

I will definitely be trying this!

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On many days, in Jess Quiggle's social studies class at Fairview High School, in Fairview, Pennsylvania, high school students walk in to find envelopes on their tables. After settling in, Quiggle gives them the go signal, and they dump the contents out. Quickly they begin to sort little pieces of paper, often onto a graphic organizer that Quiggle has provided each table. Each card has a concept or vocabulary term related to the previous night's homework topic. Table groups are tasked with categorizing all their cards as fast as possible-and they hardly notice that the game is actually helping their teacher with formative assessment.

For example, after having learned about the demographic transition model, students were tasked with sorting terms like "high birth rate" or "negative population growth" into stages 1-5 (shown as columns on their graphic organizers).

Quiggle circulates the room while students work, and when a group thinks they have it right, she is called over to check. Once a table has everything correct, everyone stops, and they review as a class.

"What I love about Quick Sorts is that anyone can do it in any class or (with) any content. As long as you have vocabulary terms or examples or things that can fit together, it's really just like putting together a big puzzle and having the kids figure it out for you."

While Quiggle uses it as a quick formative assessment, the benefits of the game don't stop there. It encourages both collaboration and competition. "I think it motivates them to work a little bit harder, and try to correct each other's thinking as they go, because they don't want to get it wrong. They want to see if their team can beat the other teams in the class."

Responses are generated by artificial intelligence. AI can make mistakes.

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In this formative assessment game, table groups compete against each other to categorize key terms and concepts from the previous night's assignment.

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This is a very cool assessment strategy. You create questions specific to outcomes of that lesson and what was taught and give each student a different question. This shows you what they know and what they are ready to move on to the next lesson. This is a great way to show if your students are understanding.

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Using Mastery Checks to Assess Student Learning

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Unlike simultaneous, class-wide tests or exit tickets, Mastery Checks allow students to demonstrate learning at their own pace.

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This is a great article that has tons of different ways to quickly check for understanding. Some of these include, "Just One Word" where students share one word from a lesson, "Help Me Plan" (!!!!!) this is great, you ask the students to help plan the next lesson to see if they need to do any more clarifying. Amazing. They have unique ones I have not heard of before.

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Quick learning "pulse checks" during and after lessons can be a powerful way to "improve and enhance student learning," says veteran teacher and author Jay McTighe. Designed to assess students' understanding of concepts or their ability to apply new skills, formative assessments can also inform next instructional steps.

Importantly, they're generally not graded, since the point of these in-process checks is to "obtain feedback to use in improving teaching and learning, not to evaluate learning," McTighe clarifies. "It's important that students understand the purpose of these techniques, that mistakes are OK-and even expected-and that they will not be graded on their responses."

Drawing from our archives and hundreds of comments on the topic from educators across our social media channels, we compiled a list of quick, low-stakes-and fun!-formative assessments designed to offer a variety of low-lift, flexible options in your classroom.

Write a Headline: Following a lesson, ask students to write a headline about it. Teacher Sarah Cook caps her students' headlines at six words: "They really have to think about what is most crucial to say," she writes on our Facebook feed.

Sit Down/Stand Up: Midway through a lesson, or at the end, ask the class several true/false questions related to what you just covered and have them stand up if they agree, stay seated if they don't, or squat if they're uncertain, suggests educator Celeste Kirsh. To make kids comfortable, educator Jess Mark asks students to keep their eyes shut during this quick check for understanding.

Draw a Comic: After a lesson, "ask students to draw the lesson in a comic strip-max five frames," proposes educator Kim Allsup, then have them explain the comic to classmates. It's a helpful review strategy, and kids gain insights into what their peers found important about the lesson, says Allsup.

Color Cards: Periodically, stop the lesson and have students hold up color cards. Green means "Keep going, I understand"; yellow means "I'm a little confused"; red means "Stop, I need help." We heard several variations: Bobin Manchanda has students write their names on post-it notes and stick them in green, yellow, or red zones on the board. Sarah Marlatt Petrie's students place a green or red dot on their desk to show their understanding, an approach that helps "other students identify an 'expert' when working in groups or pairs," Petrie writes.

Mini Debate: In class, select a few student "experts" to debate or discuss a topic you've just covered while the rest of the class listens, suggests Todd Finley, a professor of English education at East Carolina University. If you record it, you can even have students turn the discussion into a mini podcast using free audio editing software like Audacity.

Connect to Your Life: EducatorSarah Nawras Sandouk uses a strategy that she calls Connect to Life Objective. "Whether it's a poem, a text, a history fact or even a grammar rule," she asks students to explain how they'll use something they've learned in their day-to-day lives.

Create a Quiz: Students can write a set of test questions related to the lesson they've just had, then pick two of them to answer in a paragraph, Finley suggests. For a twist, consider having students trade papers to answer each others' questions.

Quick Check-In: At the end of class, ask students to "take a selfie, or use an emoji, that represents how you felt about today's lesson," proposes teacher Tarita Reeves. "Include a caption that tells what you learned that made you feel this way."

Compose an Acrostic: Have students pick a vocabulary word or key term from the day's lesson and write an acrostic poem-a short poem where each line begins with the next letter in the chosen word-suggests Kristin Shapiro.

Knowledge Walk: On the whiteboard or on sticky notes hung around the class, students can write a single sentence summarizing something new they learned, says educator Greg Evans on our thread on X. Then the class strolls around the classroom reading what their peers have written.

Have a Chat: If you have the time, quick one-on-one conversations with students-scheduled or off the cuff-can reveal what they understand and what they're struggling with. "Five minutes per student would take quite a bit of time," says educator and education researcher Laura Thomas, "but you don't have to talk to every student about every project or lesson."

Tweet It: Have students write a 280-character tweet summarizing a central takeaway from the lesson, suggests Finley. And if there's time, have students write responses to each other's tweets, says educator Jackie Ferguson. Consider having students generate related keywords or hashtags, too.

Use Your Hands: McTighe recommends hand signals to quickly gauge kids' understanding:

Thumbs up: I understand _____ and can explain it in my own words.

Wave hand: I'm not completely sure about _____ and doubt I could explain it.

Thumbs down: I don't yet understand _____ and cannot explain it.

Holding up fingers also works, says Sherri Rockstad Simpson, who asks students to hold up fingers from one to five to quickly show their level of understanding.

Note It: Ask students to write one takeaway from the lesson on a sticky note, then affix the notes to a poster or whiteboard so classmates can browse and learn from their peers, suggests educator Kim Roberts.

Misconception Check: Give students a common misconception about the topic they're studying. Their first challenge is to identify the flaw or error in the statement, says McTighe. The bigger challenge: correct the error with an accurate explanation.

Assess Yourself: The ability to assess their own learning is an important metacognitive skill for students. "You can give your rubric to your students and have them spot their strengths and weaknesses," says Thomas. For a lighter lift, write three or four topics on the board that you think the whole class should work on, then have students write their names under the topic they need the most help with.

Just One Word: Have students provide a singleword to describe a person, event, or concept they learned about. "I'm always amazed at the creative, thought provoking words the kids come up with," writes Meredith Adelman.

Summary Poem: Ask students to list 10 useful vocabulary words from an assigned text, then write a free verse poem using those words, says Finley. Or have them write a quick summary of the reading that incorporates their 10 chosen vocab words.

Concept Maps: Many teachers use graphic organizers and concept maps to support learning-but they can also work as formative assessments, writes McTighe. For example, students might draw a visual web of factors affecting plant growth, or develop a concept map to illustrate how a bill becomes a law.

Help Me Plan: At the end of a lesson, educator Mark Hansen breaks his class into small groups at separate tables to discuss how their learning went. Groups report back to Hansen to share "what we should review or clarify tomorrow, and where we should go deeper."

3-2-1: Many teachers in our audience check for understanding via 3-2-1 prompts-with some interesting variations. Meghan Mannarino asks for three things students learned, two things they found interesting, and one question they have. Jessica Case-Martinez, meanwhile, starts her 3-2-1 by asking for three words to describe the day; Lorraine says on Instagram that she ends with one connection they can make about the class material.

A $2 Summary: Tell students that they have a $2.00 budget to summarize the day's lesson or a recent reading, and each word costs 10 cents. Besides quickly showing students' grasp of the lesson's key idea, this activity gets elementary age students engaging in mathematical thinking, says educator Sunaina Sharma.

What Are Others Wondering?: To avoid the sea of blank stares after he prompts his class to ask questions, educator Paul Holimon suggests a different approach: Ask students to "think of a question you think someone else in the class might have about today's lesson. This solves the problem of a student thinking, 'I don't have any questions.'"

Vote With Your Feet: Hang four signs in the corners of your classroom: "Agree," "Mostly Agree," "Mostly Disagree," and "Disagree." Then read statements related to the day's lesson-for example, "Orwell was trying to call attention to animal rights with Old Major's speech"-and ask students to agree or disagree by migrating to the appropriate corner of the room, writes an educator from Rhode Island on Instagram.

One Minute Jot: Teacher Angie Huels gives students 60 seconds to write a reflection on the day's lesson, answering the following prompts: Name the most important thing you learned in class today; what questions do you still have; and offer a suggestion about our class.

Help a Classmate: At the end of a lesson, students with questions can write them on the whiteboard and classmates who think they know the answer can write a response below the question-or volunteer to discuss the topic one-on-one, writes educator Heather Brown.

Get Creative: "Whether students draw, create a collage, or sculpt," a creative formative assessment can help students "synthesize their learning," writes Thomas. "They can create a dance to model cell mitosis or act out stories like Ernest Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants' to explore the subtext," she adds.

Teach Someone: To expose gaps in students' understanding, ask them to "teach a new concept or skill to someone else-a new student, a student who has just returned from absence, or a younger child," writes McTighe. Or have students write a letter explaining a new concept to a friend, Finley suggests.

HELP OTHER TEACHERS OUT!

What are your favorite ways to check for understanding? Please share your strategies and ideas in the comments so other teachers can try them out in their classrooms.

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28 Ways to Quickly Check for Understanding

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From sketching comics to drafting tweets, these fun-and fast-ways to check for understanding are creative and flexible.

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This is a great check-in for students after the lesson. It shows you if students are ready to move on or not. This also shows that maybe the Mentor students can help the ones who not yet ready to move on.

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At Amana Academy in Alpharetta, Georgia, teachers use a tool called the NAEM Tracker to help kids self-assess where they are in their learning. The process also helps teachers decide whether to move on with the unit or reteach a lesson or concept. NAEM is an acronym: N is for Novice ("I don't know much about this topic; it's new to me"), A is for Apprentice ("I am aware of this topic and currently learning about it"), E is for Expert ("I understand the topic well and apply it"), and M is for Mentor ("I understand the topic well, can teach it to others, and support them in applying it").

Students choose which description fits them best at the moment the teacher checks in. There are lots of different ways to have students do this, from raising their hands for each choice, to placing sticky notes on a NAEM Tracker poster board on their way out the door, to giving verbal answers. Typically teachers ask students to self-assess three times during the lesson-once at the start of class, once in the middle, and once at the end. Not only do students take more ownership of their learning, but teachers can more efficiently plan their next lesson, knowing who's got it down and who needs more support.

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With a series of quick check-ins, students can assess their own learning-which lets teachers plan their next lesson with ease.

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With effective assessment comes effective feedback. Feedback is something I believe gets the best possible outcome for our students. In order for them to succeed, they need to be given detailed feedback. Whole class feedback is a good way to give simple feedback which can also be beneficial.

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Ensuring that students know what they did well and where they need to improve doesn't have to be an interminable task.

Consider this. It's Sunday evening and you're once again sitting at your desk. Back stiff and fingers sore. You've been here for the past three hours, taking an exercise book from an ever-so-slowly dwindling pile and then grading it. One after the other. For hours. And there are still seven left.

For many teachers, this is a familiar scenario, even a rite of passage. Staying up late on the weekend, desperately trying to fight your way through a stack of work before Monday morning.

But it doesn't need to be like this. As an approach to grading student work, the promise of whole-class feedback is potentially transformative. Instead of giving each student a personalized written comment, focus on identifying and addressing common patterns across the whole class. Grade better by grading quicker. Since first reading about it in a 2015 blog post by Joe Kirby, I've experimented with various whole-class feedback routines, refining and improving my own approach.

I'll share my latest version with you-outlining a step-by-step guide that can be implemented immediately. In my experience, it works best when grading and providing feedback for already completed work, but it could easily be adapted to guide students at a draft phase.

Step 1: Read and Highlight Student Work

As with all grading, whole-class feedback begins by collecting student work and reading it. Yet, this is also where the differences start.

Rather than scribbling detailed individual comments in the margins, read with a highlighter in your hand. If you read something you like, highlight it. It could be an idea, the way a student has phrased something, or where they've met an agreed success criterion.

We do this for two reasons. First, it's a far quicker way of showing students that we have read and paid attention to their work. Second, it provides an opportunity for metacognitive reflection, as students reflect on exactly why something may have been highlighted.

Step 2: Identify Individual Next Steps

Once you've read a piece of work, provide the student with a targeted next step, ideally drawn from a premade template. This is a specific goal that they need to work on for their next piece of similar work. Like highlighting, this serves a motivational function. It shows students that you've attended to their work and are offering them something specific and personal to act on.

Step 3: Identify Examples of Excellence

While reading student work, seek out examples of excellence. This is going to form a core part of the feedback lesson.

Aim for at least two examples of excellence drawn from student work. As you read, make a note of any such examples on a piece of paper. During the feedback lesson, share these with the whole class, live-modeling them and explaining why they're excellent. Students see what excellence looks like, and this step discloses the nature of success in a concrete and actionable manner.

It's crucial that these examples come from student work. In my experience, this provides a significant boost to student motivation. To those students whose examples you use, there is public recognition for their work, although you may wish not to disclose names (I keep the examples anonymous). To everyone else, there is a specific model that they can adopt and adapt, as well as accruing all the benefits that come with any live modeling. By using student work, we communicate a clear message: If one person can do it, then so can everyone.

Step 4: Create the Template

By the time you reach the final piece of student work, you should have completed the following:

1. Highlighted student work, focusing on what you like.

2. Given each student an individual target, ideally drawn from a prewritten template.

3. A couple of examples of excellence, jotted down on paper and drawn from student work.

For a full set of class grading, getting to this point usually takes me just under an hour.

With the student work in hand, now it's time to give it back. This is the premade template I use, printed out beforehand and attached to each assignment with a target highlighted.

Step 5: The Feedback Lesson

Hand assignments back, asking students to reread their work and to pay particular attention to what has been highlighted. Encourage students to pause over these highlights, considering why they might be highlighted.

Next, share the chosen examples of excellence. I do this by placing a blank template under a visualizer, live-modeling the example and verbalizing what precisely makes it excellent. If you don't have a visualizer, you could just as easily type your comments onto a screen or write on the board. Use the notes you jotted down while reading student work as a point of reference. Here's an example of live-modeled feedback.

As you live-model, students should follow along with you so that they have their own version. In many ways, this is the most important part of the entire process, so move slowly and carefully. Pause to ask questions, invite comments from students, and discuss together what makes "excellence" excellent.

Now, move on to next steps. Ask students to look at their individual targets, perhaps returning to their work to try to identify specific moments where they could change something to make it better. It's likely that you would have used the same target for multiple students or maybe even just a handful across the class. Take a few moments to address these high-leverage areas for development, explaining what might've been done differently. It's even better if you can link certain targets back to the examples of excellence already modeled.

Step 6: Complete a Task Together

As the lesson comes to a close, I like to finish with a final task that everyone completes. This "together task" might take many forms, but try to link it to the examples of excellence or an especially frequent next step. The goal is for students to practice deploying the skills you've addressed during the feedback lesson in a different but similar context to the original task.

And with this, the lesson ends. Consider how far we've come. We read and marked the work of an entire class in an hour. In the lesson itself, students engaged more fully with the feedback, reflecting on their work and coming to understand what defines excellence. No more scattered glances before pushing their graded work to one side, unread. And the teacher got their time back.

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6 Steps to Effective Whole-Class Feedback

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Giving students effective whole class feedback is a way for teachers to show students what they did well and where they can improve.

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This can be a great way to integrate technology into a lesson! As a teacher, there are a lot of apps and websites that help with formative assessment. This is also great because you are able to look at that check point later on a laptop instead of keeping track of papers.

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Adding simple tech options to boost formative assessment activities can help ensure that every student is getting the most from the lesson.

Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock

When you think of assessment, what's the first thing that comes to mind? I started teaching before iPads came on the scene, and the introduction of technology had a profound effect on the way I think about formative assessment. Digital tools are more than a quick way to review quiz responses amid instruction, although that's indeed a plus. Digital tools can help more students reach you and also enable you to gather higher-quality information.

Below are some tips to help you check for understanding in the middle of a lesson. You'll notice how these strategies build upon traditional best practices. For example, while a turn-and-talk strategy doesn't need to include technology, the benefit or value that tech adds to this interaction is that students can share more widely and let you hear from every partnership.

Check for Comprehension During a Lesson

In the middle of a lesson, pausing to check for student understanding can be a strategic and purposeful part of your goal to make sure instruction is meeting students' needs. What might this look like in a tech-friendly classroom? Here are four options:

Turn-and-talk: Students chat with a classmate and then submit their responses to a shared space. This could include a discussion board like Schoology where students post their thoughts to a discussion thread. You might also try a collaborative board like Padlet that offers a few choices like adding a voice note, link, or several sentences to their post.

Stop-and-jot: With this strategy, students pause to capture their thinking in various ways-drawing a picture in a space like Seesaw or adding a virtual sticky note to a collaborative space such as Jamboard. During a stop-and-jot you can choose a space that gives students choice on how they'd like to capture their thinking. Options could include a text, sketch, or even audio recording.

Quick question: Students reply to an open-ended, short-response question, which can give you a sense of their current level of understanding. An interactive tool like Lumio, Nearpod, or Pear Deck lets teachers insert a question into a teacher-led or self-paced lesson to check for understanding with a quick response.

Pulse check: With a pulse check, students share their confidence level, how they're feeling, or an indication of what more they might need to succeed with the lesson. You can use options such as a word cloud, a scale, or ranking with a free tool like Mentimeter). To set up students for a pulse check, you can ask a question of the entire class, with students responding anonymously. This can give you a read of the room. Alternatively, you can ask students to share a response tagged to their name so that you can follow up with them one-on-one.

Making a Formative Assessment Plan

When planning mid-lesson moments to check for understanding, first determine the direction and intended outcomes of the lesson. Know where you're headed and what you'd like to see students accomplish by the end of the lesson or activity. Identifying success criteria is helpful during all phases of formative assessment, including in the middle of a lesson.

For example, if you poll the class and find that student confidence is low, or you ask students to post a response to a question in a collaborative space and their answers raise concerns, you might decide to pivot your instruction based on their responses. Mid-lesson checks offer an opportunity to bring the class together for a reset. The information you gather may lead you to take immediate action, such as asking a small group of students who have shown they need more support to review a concept or making you aware of what to look out for during the remainder of the lesson.

Putting Ideas Into Action

What's the best way to put these strategies into action? Choose one of the tactics listed above to plug into your weekly routine. You might decide to use a tool that students are already familiar with to start. This way, you can easily shift how you use it during other parts of the day to gather actionable formative assessment data in the midst of a lesson. For example, if you already use a tool like Mentimeter to create word clouds when kicking off a new unit of study, try the scale feature in the middle of an upcoming lesson for a pulse check.

As you review the ways you currently check for understanding, choose just one idea from the list. Try it out and see if it sticks. If it doesn't provide value or match your goals for formative assessment, switch it up, try another idea, and pick one to build into your routine.

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Using Popular Apps for Formative Assessment

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Adding simple tech options to boost formative assessment activities can help ensure that every student is getting the most from the lesson. Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock When you think of assessment, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

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This guide has a lot of valuable information from a school district right here in Alberta. And provides other links specifically for assessment!