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Strategy: Transformative Feedback - Formative Action

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Strategy: Transformative Feedback - Formative Action

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Why My Feedback Didn’t Work — and How Formative Action Changed My Practice

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Podcast Innerdrive with Bradley Bush about coaching and implementation

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Podcast Innerdrive with Bradley Bush about coaching and implementation

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Formative Action Loops - Jamie Clark, Tom Sherrington & Valentina Devid

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Formative Action Loops - Jamie Clark, Tom Sherrington & Valentina Devid

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Formative Action Loops: Ensuring Assessment Actually Changes Learning [FREE ONE-PAGE GUIDE]

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Discover how formative action loops turn classroom assessment into immediate learning decisions. Get our free one-page guide to making assessment truly shape student progress.

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Blog 3 Tom Sherrington - Formative Action Loops

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Blog 3 Tom Sherrington - Formative Action Loops

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Formative Action Loops – and why teaching effectively involves creating them constantly.

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Having spent some time talking to the brilliant people at Toets Revolutie – Valentina Devid and René Kneyber – I’m convinced that the concept of formative action loops has a huge …

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Blog 2 Tom Sherrinton  - Formative Action

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Blog 2 Tom Sherrinton  - Formative Action

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Recently I spent time with the Dutch team led by René Kneyber, Toets Revolutie where they shared their work on their concept formative action and the training programmes they run for schools. I first encountered this at the London ResearchEd in 2022 and it immediately made sense to me. The concept has been described extensively in Dutch and, with help from René, I posted a translation of their own blog so you can read it for yourself here:

Here I'm going to explore my take on the process. In general terms, it's a reworking of the idea of formative assessment as described by Dylan Wiliam.:

In a responsive teaching situation, teachers need to set and clarify learning goals, get students to engage and then elicit evidence of the learning so that teachers can and then adapt their teaching accordingly. The problem René had with this was that in Holland 'formative assessment' didn't translate. They couldn't get beyond the deeply held idea that Assessment = Testing. It wasn't compatible with that sense of a process that is truly formative, dynamic, real-time, leading to actions by students to improve their learning. So 'Formative Action' is an attempt to reframe it so that these elements are more explicit.
1. Orient and Predict.

Step 1 aligns with Wiliam's Clarify Learning Intentions. It's arguably the most important step because all the others hinge on the clarity with which teachers can establish and express the focus of the learning: what the specific goals are for the lesson, where they sit in the wider map of the learning journey towards the end goals of the curriculum and how this lesson leads to those wide goals. A big part of the work that Toets Revolutie does with schools is essentially curriculum mapping, starting with the end goals and working back to the specific steps that students should take along the way.

Related to this is the idea of 'sense of quality' - and for the teachers we spoke to this concept really cut through. Essentially, until you know very clearly what the standards are that you are aiming for in the long term and short term, you don't have the benchmarks to assess against to then inform the best course of action. The predict element is informed by this road map... you pre-empt areas of struggle or misconceptions in the instructional delivery but also then check to see how students have done in relation to your predictions.
2. Thinking and Generating

This step aligns with many people's ideas and observations about the need to involve all student in thinking, revealed through a generative process that yields some kind of product: some evidence of learning. It's Wiliam's elicit evidence step. Without those products, you have no source of information to inform your decision-making. Mini-whiteboards, structured pair talk, demonstrating skills in writing or via a physical artefact or performance are needed - and must involve all students. The questios for teachers are then:

how do I engage all students in thinking and generating a response?

how will I check and sample those responses?

3. Interpret, Communicate & Decide

The third step is shown as rising up above the 1-5 pathway. This signifies that process of taking stock.. rising up, hovering above the action to see the lay of the land. This is the assessment moment where students and teachers, evaluate the quality of their answers, their work, their products, their understanding. It's the artist, standing back from the easel to evaluate their composition. This can weave in Wiliam's 'students as resources for each other' idea - by including peer assessment.

Importantly in this step it's vital to decide the big 'so what?'. What happens now? What do the student needs to do in order to move forward.? That has to be the outcome of this step - communicating the next steps to students, or them deciding for themselves. This is Wiliam's 'feedback that moves forward' concept.
4. Informed Follow-Up Action

Now we reach the core of things: The Action. Formative assessment only helps if it leads to actions. In Formative Action, this is entirely explicit. The students must now respond to the feedback; they must take the actions identified in the previous step. The feedback has to land back on the ground of students' tangible activities. Hence the arrow shown aiming towards a landing spot. Teachers spoke of 'the landing spot' - meaning the exact actions students must take in light of the review (step 3) of the work done so far (step 2).

Conceptually and practically this is powerful - the feedback must land. There must be action.
5. Verify, Reflect & Predict

Finally, there is a need to check - to verify - that those actions have been successful. Has the student now understood and produced a correct or more complete answer? Has the knowledge now been secured? Has the quality of work improved?

To complete this step - reflect and predict - teacher and students are encouraged to consider their next steps. Depending on the degree of success so far, the teacher and students can move on to the next part of the learning journey, or embark on more improvement loops. Here, students develop self-regulation and agency -Wiliam's owners of their own learning .
Conclusion
The teachers we met had found this formulation incredibly powerful. The emphasis on actions and follow up to actions, on feedback loops, on sense of quality - all made a lot of sense . The five steps also provide a superb framework for instructional coaching and professional development. And, of course, it locates assessmen t firmly in the realm of classroom dynamics, not the examination room.

Toets Revolutie are publishing a detailed book next year - it's going to be a must-read.

Thanks to all those responsible for this work especially Dominique Sluijsmans, René Kneyber and Valentina Devid.

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Formative Action: A brilliant, refreshing take on formative assessment and responsive teaching.

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Recently I spent time with the Dutch team led by René Kneyber, Toets Revolutie where they shared their work on their concept formative action and the training programmes they run for schools. I first encountered this at the London ResearchEd in 2022 and it immediately made sense to me.

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Podcast with Shane Leaning - From Formative Assessment to Formative Action

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Podcast with Shane Leaning - From Formative Assessment to Formative Action

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From Formative Assessment to Formative Action — ShaneLeaning.com

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This conversation dives into what formative action is, why Valentina Devid and colleagues reframed formative assessment as an action-oriented practice, and why that reframing matters for school leaders trying to get useful classroom evidence turned into immediate, high-impact teaching moves. Valen

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Formative Action Loops - Jamie Clark, Tom Sherrington & Valentina Devid

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Formative Action Loops - Jamie Clark, Tom Sherrington & Valentina Devid

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Formative Action Loops: Ensuring Assessment Actually Changes Learning [FREE ONE-PAGE GUIDE]

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Discover how formative action loops turn classroom assessment into immediate learning decisions. Get our free one-page guide to making assessment truly shape student progress.

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Podcast - Thought Stretchers Podcast with Drew Perkins & Valentina Devid 

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Podcast - Thought Stretchers Podcast with Drew Perkins & Valentina Devid 

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Moving From Formative Assessment To Action

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Practice Assignment - Short loop Formative Action 

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Practice Assignment - Short loop Formative Action 

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Podcast - Formative Action with René Kneyber and Valentina Devid, Mind the Gap, Ep.75 (S4, E12)

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Podcast - Formative Action with René Kneyber and Valentina Devid, Mind the Gap, Ep.75 (S4, E12)

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Formative Action with René Kneyber and Valentina Devid, Mind the Gap, Ep.75 (S4, E12) - The formative action school

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Authors Rene Kneyber René Kneyber is a former teacher of mathematics, and currently a trainer, advisor and board member of The Formative Action School He has written and translated more than fifteen books, including Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up. From 2015 to 2022, he was a crown member of the Dutch [...]

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What is the short Formative Action loop? - Formative Action process?

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What is the short Formative Action loop? - Formative Action process?

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Formative action is to collecting information from the learning process of students, to make (better) follow-up actions based on that information.

Formative action can be used for...

Retrieving prior knowledge

Retrieving misconceptions/problems

Finding out whether your instruction/explanation has landed

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REPOD - René Kneyber and Valentina Devid on the power of formative action - The formative action school

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Authors Rene Kneyber René Kneyber is a former teacher of mathematics, and currently a trainer, advisor and board member of The Formative Action School He has written and translated more than fifteen books, including Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up. From 2015 to 2022, he was a crown member of the Dutch [...]

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Book 'Formative Action: from Instrument to Design'

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Book 'Formative Action: from Instrument to Design'

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Formative Action: from Instrument to Design - The formative action school

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Authors Rene Kneyber René Kneyber is a former teacher of mathematics, and currently a trainer, advisor and board member of The Formative Action School He has written and translated more than fifteen books, including Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up. From 2015 to 2022, he was a crown member of the Dutch [...]

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De didactische routekaart als kompas voor formatief handelen

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What is constructive alignment and backward design?

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What is constructive alignment and backward design?

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With a strong curriculum, you want to ensure alignment between:

Goals

Assessment

Padagogy

To tailor this as effectively as possible, it is helpful to design backwards. You start with your end goal, then your assessment, and finally your pedagogy. Creating a pedagogical roadmap (PedRo) can be useful in this process.

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De didactische routekaart als kompas voor formatief handelen - Toetsrevolutie

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De woorden formatief handelen hebben, vijf jaar na de introductie ervan door René Kneyber, een vaste plek veroverd in het onderwijswoordenboek van veel scholen en opleidingen. Dat is natuurlijk fantastisch! Het risico van een dergelijk populair concept is echter dat er vele misvattingen kunnen ont…

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Organising feedback is a strategy you use to make students more independent in the learning process.

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Teaching a sense for quality is a strategy you employ to help students understand the learning objectives.

A way you can accomplish this is by...

Comparing examples

Demonstrating a think a loud

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Formative action is goal-oriented action, but how can students assess if they have achieved a particular goal?

When you pass a ball, and it reaches the receiver, then you can tell from the result whether you did well or not. The feedback is implicit, and also easy to grasp.

But with many academic assignments, the answer to the question "Did I make it?" is a lot more complicated. If you have to write a letter, or a reflection report, or answer an exam question, you can't automatically tell whether you did well or not by looking at what you wrote down.

In order to more effectively self-regulate towards goals, and process or give feedback along the way, it is beneficial for students to develop a 'sense for quality'. In this blog I will discuss what a sense for quality is, and what strategy is effective for developing a sense for quality.

A sense for quality in teachers

You might not be aware of it, but as a teacher you will have developed a lot of sense for quality. Not only through expertise in the subject, but also by gaining assessment expertise.

The latter you develop naturally as a teacher in your working life, as you have to perform hundreds, if not thousands, of assessments per year. Assessment expertise not only gives you insight into what range of quality you may find (what is best, what is worst, and what you can broadly expect from students); but you also gain a skill whereby you can still grade different executions of an assignment along a similar bar, i.e. two assignments may have been executed quite differently and still have the same degree of quality, e.g., a 7 out of 10.

It is this expertise, in addition to your subject knowledge, that you rely on when formulating feedback as a teacher. Although there are different terms for this type of expertise, at The Formative Action School we refer to it as a sense for quality.

Why develop a sense for quality in students?

A disadvantage of expertise is that you can also develop the "curse of knowledge": it can be difficult to put yourself in the shoes of novices. You look at the same thing, but you see different things. The curse of knowledge means that the lack of a sense for quality among students can be an underestimated problem, which can leave teachers wondering why you should spend time and effort developing it at all.

The answer to that question is two-fold. The first point is that a lack of sense for quality can get in the way of the independence. Students will be unable to assess for themselves where and how their efforts on an assignment could be improved. Of course, as a teacher you can take on that role, and be a circulating "sense for quality". But apart from whether that is realistically feasible, there is also the question of desirability: Do you want a better product, or do you want the person in front of you to become more capable of making a better product on their own? By giving expert feedback too often, you undermine students' independence and learning. [ see our free chapter on transformative feedback]

The second point is that in the absence of a sense for quality, the feedback you give might not be effectively processed. Feedback may be very clear to us as experts, but may be too difficult to understand for our students.

A sense for quality with more complex tasks

These two points hold up especially when the tasks require more "higher order" skills such as analysis, synthesis, creativity, evaluation and critical thinking and have a more holistic quality, a sense for quality of students becomes even more important. If a student has to write a narrative essay, there are a lot of quality aspects to this: from sentence structure to spelling to grammar, but story construction and creativity are also important. The quality of an essay is not the sum of all these factors, but lies in the whole configuration of those factors. You then have to consider everything, and judging whether something is "quality" involves a lot of implicit knowledge.

If a student has to make a success of such a complex task on their own, it is important that they have a good sense of what they are working toward, and what they need to pay attention to along the way.

Criteria and rubrics do not replace a sense for quality

A common way to clarify what quality looks like is through the use of criteria and rubrics.

Quality criteria (or success criteria) describe which criteria a task must meet. While criteria obviously provide more guidance for the learner, many will still struggle with the question of when it is exactly right or good enough, even though these criteria can be very clear to an expert.

An attempt is often made to get around this problem by using rubrics. In these you describe what a student has to do to meet each criterion, and classify this description by level (e.g.: insufficient/satisfactory/good).

A rubric is, of course, clearer than a list of criteria. But a possible disadvantage of rubrics also immediately becomes apparent. Given their descriptive nature, rubrics contain an excess of text, and that will scare many students off. But even those who read it all may still question what exactly is meant in some of the boxes.

Rubrics are well-intentioned, and you obviously want to give students guidance in how they are assessed. I wouldn't want to propose that we do away with them outright. But if we want students to develop a sense for quality, more is needed.

Developing a sense for quality with exemplars and dialogue

To instill a good sense for quality in students, the use of exemplars is necessary. Here you show how others (for example, last year's students) completed a particular assignment, and you use these exemplars to have a structured conversation with the class about it. Both activities are necessary: Using exemplars communicates things that can't be communicated well in other ways; looking at and comparing exemplars provides insights that sometimes can't easily be put into words. And dialogue is necessary because other students may have insights you wouldn't have come up with yourself: their perspective provides a kind of second-opinion to your own assessment.

Several benefits emerge from research on this

1. Students start to more profoundly understand exactly what is expected of them in an assignment.

2. Students better understand what the teacher's expectations are. In research by Hawe and colleagues, they found that first-year students had a better understanding of what constitutes good writing style and content, how deep the content should be, what quality looks like, in what detail answers should be given, and at what level they should write themselves. Students will begin to better understand what also counts, but what cannot be captured in criteria or rubrics.

3. By using exemplars, students become more aware of their own work and thinking. They "translate" the insights from the exemplars into their own work and become more aware of what they are doing. In other words: they develop improved self-regulation through the use of exemplars.

In addition, there are two more interesting side effects:

4. Reflecting on exemplars motivates students and gives them more self-confidence. You can see that others have been successful before you: so what others have achieved, you could achieve yourself.

5. Possibly, it also improves students' understanding of the lesson material, at least as long as the exemplars also relate to the lesson material covered.

Using exemplars

Using exemplars and talking about them is best done as early in the process as possible, e.g. before students start a task, but not so early that they can't make sense of it yet.

There are several ways to employ the combination of exemplars, dialogue, and criteria/rubrics, and I will outline some ideas below starting with the nature of exemplars:

1. Use constructed anchor exemplars. You want to show students "typically" good work, and typical mistakes and problems to talk about them. These exemplars are already "in your mind" as a teacher: because of your expertise, you have an image of what is a good example, a bad example, and where things can go wrong. It may be worthwhile to construct these yourself and use them as a topic of conversation.

2. Use exemplars from former students (anonymized). Of course, option 1 can be a lot of work, and often many exemplars are already at hand. Probably students have submitted work before. You could use this (anonymously, of course) as a topic of discussion. Should any "interesting" anchor exemplars be missing, you can still add them.

3. Use current exemplars (if there is enough social safety in the group).

If there are enough good exemplars and interesting mistakes, current work of students can be used. Then, of course, there must be sufficient social safety in the classroom and the work must be anonymized. If these conditions are met, they often enjoy looking at what others have done and learning from it. Moreover, if you apply this strategy in a series of assignments, the class can also see for themselves which progress they are making.

A possible drawback

Of course, one possible drawback is that students will focus on a particular exemplar without too much thought. For example, in graphic arts, you can imagine that students will end up submitting products that are quite similar to the "good" exemplars. Should that be a problem for your specific subject (in graphics arts, creativity and originality is obviously important), you can choose to grab exemplars from a different assignment (with enough similarities), or modify the assignment slightly from what you have as exemplars.

Using rubrics and criteria

Rubrics and criteria can play a positive, structuring role in this type of conversation in a number of ways.
1. Use dialogue about exemplars to build criteria or rubrics together.
Consider starting a conversation without criteria or with an empty rubric. By watching and talking about the exemplars, students can create criteria for themselves, and fill a rubric. This can culminate in a plenary session with one list or criteria or a rubric, but with the advantage that students will understand what it is about.
2. Use dialogue about exemplars to understand criteria.
It is a quite the art form to have such a conversation result in a list of criteria that also makes sense and is correct. And sometimes the requirements are just fixed, too. Suppose that, for some reason, you cannot deviate from an imposed rubric: you can use exemplars to make clear to students what the rubric means.
3. Have students/students apply criteria to sample work.
Another strategy can be to have students apply the criteria to (carefully selected) sample work. By assessing someone else's work, they develop a certain degree of expertise.

In conclusion

Regardless of the benefits, you're obviously not going to show exemplars and have a dialogue about them for every purpose. But for more complex tasks and assignments, it can be worthwhile. A sense for quality is helpful for the self-regulation of students; allows them to make better use of feedback; and makes them able to give each other better feedback.

Therefore, "developing a sense for quality" as a strategy should not be seen as time-consuming: it can literally buy you time. Moreover, it is also often an indispensable part of the educational process.

Read more?

You can read more on developing a sense for quality in our book.

If want to know more on how formative action can contribute to self-regulated learning, read our blog here.

Someone who has done amazing work on a sense for quality is Ron Berger. See this podcast for example.

Teaching Walkthrus contains a lot of interesting takes on developing a sense for quality.

René Kneyber is a former teacher of mathematics, and currently a trainer, advisor and board member of The Formative Action School He has written and translated more than fifteen books, including Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up. From 2015 to 2022, he was a crown member of the Dutch Education Council.

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Developing a sense for quality - The formative action school

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In order to self-regulate and give or process feedback during lessons they require a sense for quality. In this blog we discuss...

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Elevating teaching and assessment Welcome to The Formative Action School Empowering educators with innovative teaching and learning strategies. Join us for practical courses and workshops to transform your teaching approach. To Free e-Courses Learn more Blogs & Books Enrich your knowledge and skills More books e-Course Learn at your own pace Learn from experts Learn [...]

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Turning Formative Assessment into Action

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The perfect introduction to our model for formative action. We'll explain how it works and help you design processes for your lessons.

Your instructors

As consultants ánd teachers, we have plenty of experience with formative action. We've assisted thousands of teachers in implementing formative action in their lessons, and we're happy to share all our insights with you!

Manager Online Learning Environment

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In this online course you will learn about our new five step model.

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Blog 1 Tom Sherrinton - Formative Action

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Blog 1 Tom Sherrinton - Formative Action

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In 2022, I had the pleasure of hearing René Kneyber and Valentina Devid from Dutch organisation toetsrevolutie.nl at the London ResearchEd event. They explained how the concept of 'formative assessment' or 'AfL' had never really taken off in the Netherlands, partly because of specific associations with 'assessment' as an end-point and not part of a learning process. Keen to introduce the underlying ideas more strongly into Dutch education, they conceived the idea of Formatief handelen or Formative Action. This places the emphasis firmly on what teachers and students do with the information gathered from assessment processes during a learning sequence - the actions they take.

There are clearly strong overlaps with Wiliam and Leahy's five formative assessment strategies but the formulation isn't identical. It has many important and interesting features and, overall, I'd argue that formative action deserves to be widely disseminated as a concept.

Having spent some time recently in Utrecht (alongside Oliver Caviglioli) with René and Valentina and their colleague Hilly Drok, I started planning a blog post about Formative Action. However, this is taking a while so, for now, here is a translation of their own blog written for the Toets Revolutie site: https://toetsrevolutie.nl/ons-model-voor-formatief-handelen/

( The translation originates from a web-translator with some additional amendments by René Kneyber)

Formative action is a complex pedagogical skill that requires knowledge from a teacher on learning, curriculum design, pedagogical strategies and appropriate techniques and tools , and how to use them. To clarify what is practically involved in formative action we have worked on a model. Step 1: Orient & predict
Those who followed us for a bit might have a number of iterations since 2018.

This is not without reason. We think it is important to try out new designs in our lectures, workshops and trajectories, to test which ones best fit into practice. Our requirement is that a model should be of help - in combination with our assignments and exercises - for teachers to put formative action in practice in an effective and satisfying way. To do so it is important that they understand the underlying principles.

In 2021 we had already been working with a semi-final model that we were very satisfied with. This model is described in the first edition of our book Formative action: from instrument to design , Which released in 2022.In this book a double-coded version of the model is presented - courtesy of illustrator Oliver Caviglioli (known from the Walkthrus series) -.

However, in our trajectories in schools, we noticed that step 1 and step 5 in the model - in particular - still led to a number of misconceptions. This has led us to tighten the name and explanation of these two steps in particular. In this blog, we present the most recent version of the model and identify the questions that need to be asked in each step.

The foundation of our model is five steps that can be found in any effective execution of formative action, whether it is the teacher or the student or student who performs steps, or that these steps are taken together.

Formative action is a goal-oriented process. Before doing anything a teacher should do a thorough mental orientation by asking questions such as:
Step 2: thinking and generating
* What do I want to achieve with my students?

* What knowledge and skills do students need to get there?
Step 3: interpret, communicate & decide
* What information do I need to assess whether the prerequisite knowledge is available to take the next instructional step?

As a teacher you should also attempt to make a prediction about what kind of problems and misconceptions you expect to find.

The more thorough this first step is undertaken the more focused the following steps in the process of formative action will be.

After a successful step of orientation & prediction a teacher should have a clear picture of when and why a process of formative action is necessary.
Step 4: informed follow-up action
The student is encouraged (or encourages themself) to think about something and to make this thinking - or the result of it - observable by generating something. Generating something could mean the classic example of mini whiteboards or a modern variant such as Padlet. But fairly, everything that can be observed can be functional for formative action: ranging from a written letter to a dance to pronouncing or writing down a sentence, from raising hands to vote to communicating using coloured cups.
Step 5: verify, reflect and predict
Having said that however, this does not mean that everything that is observable is equallyfunctional. For it to be functional, thorough and strategic preparation is required on behalf of the teacher. What typical misconceptions and common logical errors that impede the instructional process are you looking for? Which question or activity enables you to identify these easily? What is the easiest and fastest way to gain an overview of everything that the students generate? And if that is less important, how do you support students to gain a view of their own progress by themselves?

Following this, the outcomes of the students' actions during the previous phase, the 'productions', need to be interpreted by someone. What do their productions mean? Can we move on, or are there any issues that get in the way of taking the next step of the educational process? And if so, which? Do the students show adequate understanding, or does it need improvement?
Finally
When a teacher sees a class full of mini-whiteboards, he needs to interpret all those varying answers. When he receives an Excel-sheet with results from an online app, he will need to interpret what all those numbers, colours and/or diagrams mean.

Students too need to interpret when they look at each other's - or their own - work. A classmate will have, for example, to interpret the quality of another classmate's letter. What is going well? What could be improved?

The interpretation of different productions can therefore lead to follow-up questions and - research. How did you get to that answer? What was your approach? Which answer option did you choose and why? The teacher can dig deeper in the Excel-sheet: which errors are most common? Which misconceptions are most common? What do you learn from this as a teacher? And what does this tell me as a student? This information leads to a decision about the most logical follow-up step. When a teacher takes that step, he can explain his choices.

After you have decided which action to take, it is important that you actually do so! It doesn't matter whether the conclusion was that the required prior knowledge was already present and you should therefore continue as fast as possible, or whether you will have to explain more or that more exercises need to be done, or whether the letters need to be revised, or that students need to train their stamina. It is of the utmost importance that the information retrieved in step 3 is indeed used, or else all reflection in the last step has been for naught.

Surely, we can never know whether a chosen follow-up action will truly lead to an improvement. That is why we will often have to ask a similar question or give a similar assignment. Did their understanding improve? Are things going better? Or is it getting worse? Based on this information the choice can be made to repeat a process of formative action until the desired level of understanding or control has been reached.

This is once again an important step. This can lead to the teacher experiencing success, because he sees the group perform better, but, more importantly, this can lead to experiences of success for the students. When they start to realise that going through a process of formative action leads to an improvement (together with those corresponding feelings of success), they are encouraged to engage again more wilfully in the future.

In this blog, we have set out our most recent model of formative action. Of course there is much more to say about formative action and this model. We will be releasing our book with John Catt in the beginning of 2024 ( www.formative-action).

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Formative Action: a brilliant teaching concept from @toetsrevolutie

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In 2022, I had the pleasure of hearing René Kneyber and Valentina Devid from Dutch organisation toetsrevolutie.nl at the London ResearchEd event. They explained how the concept of 'formative assessment' or 'AfL' had never really taken off in the Netherlands, partly because of specific associations with 'assessment' as an end-point and not part of a...

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5 FIVE CORE PRINCIPLES TO TRANSFORM STUDENT LEARNING

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5 FIVE CORE PRINCIPLES TO TRANSFORM STUDENT LEARNING

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Blog: Five core principles for formative action

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Blog: Five core principles for formative action

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In the last twenty-five years, formative action - or formative assessment - has become a common part of education . Yet there still appear to be many misconceptions and ambiguities about what formative action is, exactly, and how it can be used effectively by teachers. In this blog, we want to share five core principles of formative action. These principles clarify what formative action is, but more importantly, also indicate what it is not.

Below we will discuss the following five principles of formative action:

1. Not a method of assessment | but a method of pedagogy

2. Not going gradeless | but constructive alignment

3. No time-consuming data collecting | but time-saving in practice

4. No transmission feedback | but transformative feedback

5. Not a packed and incoherent curriculum | but a clear and coherent curriculum

1. Not a method of assessment, but a method of pedagogy
Not a method of assessment
In the Netherlands we stopped using the term formative assessment, a term that is widely used and by which this particular teaching approach has become known. The term however creates the misconception that it is about testing or grading rather than pedagogy. Teachers would say things like: "your grade for this subject is the average of three formative tests" or "he missed the formative test, so he has to make it up on Friday afternoon at four o'clock". And these are not statements that fit the pedagogy that we advocate when we speak of formative action.
Method of pedagogy
We started using the term formative action because it is a pedagogical method that ensures that teacher and students can get a better handle on the student's learning process, in which both teacher and student have a role to play. Formative action makes it quicker, easier and more precise to check if what has been explained by teachers has actually been mastered, so that it becomes clear what the next step in the learning process should be.

In doing so, formative action is goal-oriented action: you are always thinking about the question, 'what information do we need now in order to decide on the next step in the instructional process?' And what do I want students to think about right now? That way, it's about the student's learning outcome and here the learning process is the focus, not the teacher's schedule, the handbook's approach, or the grade the student receives.

Moreover, "formative" is not a characteristic of a test or assessment moment, but the characteristic of a decision you make based on information gathered from students. Formative action involves looking at where the student is at the beginning of the learning process and using that information to determine what a good next step might be. The teacher or student can use the information gathered to make a more informed decision about the next step in the learning process than would have happened without it[1[i]].

Summative assessment, by contrast, is related to whether learning has actually occurred (mastery) and is preferably planned at the end of a learning process, so that a student also has time and practice to achieve mastery.
Practical tips

Before class, think carefully about at what point you need information to determine whether students have mastered the material sufficiently to proceed.

You can use all sorts of ways to retrieve that information (a whiteboard, raising fingers or an online tool such as Padlet or Mentimeter), but in all cases: think about the goal first, and only then follow up with the tool with which you want to retrieve the required information.

It is advisable to apply the maxim that you can proceed on to the next topic when about 80% of the students have mastered the material.

Use diagnostic tasks and questions in your lessons to check if students have mastered the material.

Check for specific misconceptions that you know are common to the topic covered. Discuss with colleagues which misconceptions are common in the topics you cover.

2. Not going gradeless, but constructive alignment
Not going gradeless
Sometimes teachers or school leaders say, "We no longer grade student work at school, because we work formatively," or conversely, "We don't want to start with formative action, because we don't want to get rid of grades." While it certainly not helpful to grade students in a process of formative action, because this will usually stop the learning, you can still grade students work at the end of a learning process. Even when you have employed formative action during that learning process.

Schools sometimes take up formative action because they believe their students are being given to many tests and exams. When there is too much focus on assessment, it quickly leads to - what we in The Netherlands call - "sweating, achieving, forgetting," where a student will study hard, the knowledge is stored in their memory long enough to pass a test, but disappears from memory immediately afterwards. Indeed, putting less focus on grades can be a very healthy development for a school, because this can have a positive impact on their long-term learning.

Still, a reduction in the quantity of grades does not immediately mean working entirely without grades. At the end of a lesson series, it is useful for both teachers and students (and their parents) to know whether the learning objectives have been met. So while it can be a very good idea to put less emphasis on grades and assessment, and using and designing tests and exams in a more focused way, summative assessment, and thus grades, can certainly exist alongside formative action.
Constructive alignment
Even when teaching according to the principles of formative action, the learning process can be concluded by an assignment or test whose results are used for a summative decision, for example in the form of a grade. Formative action is, in part, about better aligning the learning goals that the teacher has set with the activities that help the student achieve those learning goals, and the assessment that measures whether the goals have been achieved. This process is better known as "constructive alignment".

If you want to reduce assessment pressure at school, you can use fewer summative assessment moments. In some cases, the time spent on summative tests can be replaced by time for pedagogy, e.g. by working towards better mastery through repeated recall. This is the case, for example, when there is a so-called sub-goal, e.g. when students need to expand their vocabulary in order to maintain a conversation in French, or when students need to be able to apply certain concepts in order to analyze a social problem.

But formative action is not a substitute for summative assessment. Formative action and summative assessment are two different processes with very different goals, ways of gathering information and "game rules", and therefore cannot replace each other. When there is too much assessment pressure or there are too many summative assessments in the curriculum, there is a "testing problem" to be solved, and that cannot be done by pedagogical processes. Also it is not beneficial to just replace the graded summative assessment with a gradeless 'formative assessment'. The risk when that does happen is that the processes of formative action are secretly deployed as summative tests after all; that is explicitly not the function of formative action and can lead to an unsafe learning climate due to the clouding of the processes.

So it is important to design moments of summative assessment well and think carefully about what you want to assess. Summative exams or assignments can be very valuable at the end of the learning process. A grade can be good evidence to a student to which extent the learning objectives have been met. It is then seen not as a moment of reckoning, but as a moment when the student can also celebrate that the learning objective has been achieved and is capable of independently solving a particular task or question.
Practical Tips
- Start by formulating your main and subgoals: what should students master (independently) for your subject? Pay attention to the use of observable and active verbs. These can be found, for example, in Bloom's taxonomy. Consider what you want your students to memorize. Based on this you can determine what information you need to assess whether goals have been met: the assessment. Only then you can figure out which interim checkpoints you want to build in to make sure that you and the students can see whether they have mastered the material and/or are on the right track.

Consult colleagues about the most appropriate moments to collect information from students. This will give you a better view of the moments in a lesson series when this is needed. Even better, construct what we call a PedRo: a pedagogical roadmap.

Make use of the test effect: when students try to retrieve information from long-term memory, they are already learning; even when students cannot remember the information.

Let the learning material reappear to students as often as possible. The more repetition, the better the learning is remembered. For tips on how to apply this, you can read theory on a spiral curriculum (e.g., The hidden lives of learners by Graham Nuthall from 2007).

3. No time-consuming data collection, but time-saving in practice
No time-consuming data collection
Many teachers are fearful that formative action mainly means a lot of extra work. Based on the idea that it is important to monitor student progress, teachers sometimes tend to collect data on where individual students stand in their learning process all the time. This is a very time-consuming activity, which, moreover, is not always effective.

First of all this takes responsibility away from the student, and this is counterproductive considering formative action is meant to help students progress on the road toward autonomy. In addition to this, collecting data can get in the way of actually acting on the data. Information from the processes of formative action provides teachers or students insight into what the next step in the learning process should be at that exact moment.
Time-saving action in practice
By integrating processes of formative action into your lessons, it will become clear to you whether students have sufficiently mastered the material you have taught. That way you know whether you can continue or whether the students will for example need extra practice. This way, as a teacher, you constantly fine tune your lessons to students' levels of mastery.

Of course, not every student moves at the same speed and not every student needs the same amount of practice or explanation. Nevertheless, it is not necessary as a teacher to keep precise track of each student's development. The group as a whole often gives an overall impression of the mastery of the learning objectives.

Again, you can use the maxim that when 80% of the students give the right answer, you can move on. Obviously, you should not leave the remaining 20% to their own devices, but the rest of the class need not wait for them. In other cases, half the class will need additional instruction while the other half can already move on. By letting students keep track of what their follow-up action should be, this ultimately ensures that they are more independent in shaping their own learning.
Practical tips

Provide diagnostic questions that give you information at a glance. Whiteboards can be very helpful in this regard, but various online tools can also help.

Give the answer options colors or other codes, which students keep themselves. Each code corresponds to a different follow-up action, e.g.: extra practice with topic 1, extra practice with topic 2, move on to topic 3.

Take a pictures of student answers. You can discuss these (anonymized!) answers with the whole class. All students then write down the feedback that they can use for their own work.

The more often you work this way, the more students will get used to monitoring their own learning and thus the more you can leave it up to the student.

4. No transmission feedback, but transformative feedback
No transmission feedback
The general idea about feedback has long been that feedback should follow a task as quickly as possible and be very detailed. However, recent research shows that this is not (necessarily) optimal. For example, it appears that feedback that is too detailed produces little learning. One reason for this is that the learner is left with little to think about.

The ideal timing of feedback is also up for debate. In some cases it is pleasant for the student to receive feedback as soon as possible, so that the student immediately knows what he is doing well and what he can work on further. However, feedback that comes too quickly can make students dependent, because then they do not have to struggle and think about the next step themselves. Thus, as a teacher, you actually take learning opportunities out of students' hands, which is also referred to as learned helplessness[3[ii]].
Transformative feedback
In many cases, feedback is given at the end of the learning process, as a kind of final judgment on the final product. Many teachers have an endless collection of essays, posters, exams and papers in storage, filled with well-meant feedback, which was never looked at by students: a sad waste of the teacher's investment and the student's learning opportunities. Research[4[iii]] shows that when feedback is given in addition to a grade (i.e., at the end of the learning process), students do not look at the feedback at all. The impact of that feedback is very small, while the teacher's investment in it was very large.

However, when feedback is given during the learning process, it becomes the starting point of the learning process: the student can still apply the feedback in a new phase of the learning process. When students are given time to incorporate the feedback into the next version, the feedback has a landing spot and finds ground. Interestingly and paradoxically, feedback has more impact when it is incomplete, because the student has to think about the next step to take.

At The Formative Action School we like to say: Feedback is information makes you think, before you act upon it.
Practical Tips

When designing your lesson, think about when you give feedback and how you you're your students to process it. Consciously thinking about this ensures that you are more focused in offering a process in which the student is structurally encouraged to learn from feedback.

Make sure the adjustments students make in response to the feedback they receive are immediately visible by, for example, sharing the improved version in class or writing it in an online tool.

Make use of exit tickets, e.g.: a question at the end of your lesson about the material taught. To limit the amount of work for yourself, you may choose not to review all exit tickets, but to look or scan randomly to see what the most common errors are. You discuss those errors the next lesson in class (without naming students' names, of course).

Make sure students develop a sense for quality (read our blog, new link) so that feedback has a good "landing spot".

Make use of peer feedback. Be sure to work with students on quality awareness here so that students are capable enough to give good feedback.

5. Not a packed and incoherent curriculum, but a clear and coherent curriculum
Not a packed and incoherent curriculum...
The school year has begun, the learning paths have been determined, the scheme of work created. In our experience, many schemes are full of excercises that must be completed because they are used in the subject books, which leaves very little room for delay. As a result, teachers sometimes feel they have too little time for formative action. If one exercise has taken too long, all the other exercises can no longer be carried out. Thus, exercises are reviewed and then the teacher quickly moves on to the next, regardless of the outcome of the previous one. If the teachers don't do this the run the risk of not completing the program. But in doing so this creates the risk that students are constantly doing separate assignments and the connection between assignments and the main goals is lost - in a so called cycle of non-learning.
... But a clear and coherent curriculum
When exercises are completed but nothing is done with the outcome (e.g., extra explanation or practice to increase student understanding), precious learning opportunities are lost. If a student does not master the basics, the foundation on which to build further becomes very shaky, and eventually that will break the student down: the further a subject goes into depth, the less students will understand it.

This is why it is essential to strive for a thorough understanding and mastery of the subject matter. It is better to cover less content and make sure it is well understood by students, than to cover a lot that is not adequately understood. This requires choices to be made that will sometimes hurt, and it is essential that the conversation in a subject department, like English or biology, should therefore be about what the core objectives are for their field as a whole. When there is consensus on the "what" of the subject, it becomes possible to look at what components really need to be mastered by the student. In many cases there might still be quite a few subjects that are, upon close inspection, not so essential for mastering the final objectives. Therefore, always determine the end goal first, and from there on reason and design your way back to what is necessary for the mastery of these goals to be covered. In doing so, make sure that students take their time to achieve that mastery.
Practical tips

Engage with colleagues from your department about the "what" of your subject.

Think about the goals you want to achieve with your lessons. Are all assignments from the method necessary to achieve these goals?

Dare to make choices! Always choose quality over of quantity.

Get in touch with colleagues from other schools via social media and education platforms and discuss how they approach their curriculum design. This can often be quite enlightening!

Conclusion

The impact of education on the learning process of a student is greater when the learning process of the student focuses on the visible output of the thinking process of students, rather than on what is offered by the teacher. In other words, student mastery rather than teacher activity. When you as a teacher dare to take control over your time and make choices about what material you do and do not cover and give students the opportunity to think for themselves about his next step, student will become more independent. Eventually being able to shape their own learning processes. Formative action thus focuses on shaping students toward autonomy with self-efficacy, isn't that what education is about.
Want to know more?
Read our book - Formative Action: From Instrument to Design

Read the blog - Our model for formative practice (new link)

Hilly Drok is a trainer, educational consultant and director at The Formative Action School. She also coordinates the Formative Action course for School Experts. She has been a Dutch teacher for 14 years and pioneered the implementation process of formative action at her high school. She is currently working on the topic of self-regulation.

Flemming van de Graaf is a social studies and social sciences teacher. He aims to use his practical experience to inspire colleagues within his own school and at other schools to teach more effectively using formative action. Flemming is also a trainer for The Formative Action School.

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Five core principles for formative action - The formative action school

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In the last twenty-five years, formative action - or formative assessment - has become a common part of education . Yet there still appear to be many misconceptions and ambiguities about what formative action is, exactly, and how it can be used effectively by teachers.

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https://buildbettereducation.com

Valentina@formative-action.com

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Build Better Education: adaptive & responsive teaching, evidence-informed

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Education consultancy for adaptive and responsive teaching. We help schools put formative action, evidence-informed pedagogy and durable implementation to work, from the classroom to the system level.

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