Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Formative assessment—discovering what students know while they’re still in the process of learning it—can be tricky. Designing just the right assessment can feel high stakes—for teachers, not students—because we’re using it to figure out what comes next. Are we ready to move on? Do our students need a different path into the concepts? Or, more likely, which students are ready to move on and which need a different path?

When it comes to figuring out what our students really know, we have to look at more than one kind of information. A single data point—no matter how well designed the quiz, presentation, or problem behind it—isn’t enough information to help us plan the next step in our instruction.

Add to that the fact that different learning tasks are best measured in different ways, and we can see why we need a variety of formative assessment tools we can deploy quickly, seamlessly, and in a low-stakes way—all while not creating an unmanageable workload. That’s why it’s important to keep it simple: Formative assessments generally just need to be checked, not graded, as the point is to get a basic read on the progress of individuals, or the class as a whole.

As you can tell from our video, there are many ways to describe formative assessment. Simply put, Formative Assessment is taking a pause in learning to ensure students are where they need to be for a particular lesson. The best formative assessments are subtle, giving teachers an overall picture of how students are learning and adapting to their immediate needs. Think of it as a GPS for the teacher—knowing where students are in their learning and where you should head in your teaching.

"A group of teachers set out on an adventure (aka field trip!) to conduct classroom observations and to seek out answers to some of their key questions about formative assessment. What better way to learn than a field trip? Here were some of their guiding questions:

       * What does formative assessment practice look like in action?

       * What are ways that teachers learn formative assessment?
       * Where do they get stuck?
       * What does day-by-day, minute-by-minute assessment look like in action?
     * How do teachers begin their learning in formative assessment?
      * What systems or structures best support teachers to learn formative assessment?

Teachers and leaders from the Austin ISD (all of whom are participating in the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation How I Know initiative) team visited Summit View Elementary School in Sunnyside, Tucson to explore these questions – both to deepen their understanding of formative assessment generally, and also to inform their own learning goals as they enter their second year of the How I Know formative assessment pilot."