Formative Assessments - Part Two

Back in March, we wrote a blog post titled Formative Assessments. The purpose of the post was threefold:

1. Give teachers a set of tools tools to use right away
2. Show how to get help with formative assessments
3. Learn how to give quick feedback without sacrificing more time

In this post, we want to give readers some specific examples of how teachers at Stilwell and Indian Hills formatively assess their students.

Stilwell:

Celeste Richardson uses google forms, kahoot!, and ALEKS to gauge her students’ growth. In math resource, the continual progress of a student is monitored. Celeste has tirelessly experimented with best practice to gather this data. ALEKS is a software that allows her to access diagrams, statistics, and other information. In addition, she uses kahoot to “spot-check” her kids’ knowledge of different areas of math. She can then instantly conduct mini-lessons for review. Finally, Celeste values reflective learning and is experimenting with google forms to gather data on her students’ understanding of math practices and processes. We are trying to determine if sorting and evaluating student data is quicker and easier in a spreadsheet.

While Bryan Bacehowski often uses tech-based immediate feedback tools such as kahoot, occasionally he kicks it old-school with individual whiteboards.  He feels the actual writing of responses can provide deeper internalization, and wells as enables him to easily differentiate the level of mastery through response time and thoroughness of each student’s answer. With minimal technology and maximum efficiency, he can see the complete class’ progress before moving on. Bryan then knows if he needs to review concepts from earlier lessons or if he can move on. This kind of formative assessment requires little prep, provides large-group feedback, and connects to the EEI question: How can I connect today’s lesson to past learning.

Rochelle Svestka recently re-designed her advertising unit in Consumer Education. As we all realize, being conscious consumers is an immediate learning need for our students. By creating checklists, Rochelle has better realized her students’ progress throughout the unit. Three separate lists (each created for the specific part of the process) incorporated a week’s worth of learning targets to better enable students to work in groups at their own pace. This type of differentiation led to student leaders and multiple roles. The checklists allowed students the autonomy to discover the process to learn the advertising about creating an advertising campaign.

In social studies, Scott LaPlante assesses his students’ progress on individual assignments with something he calls, “finish a section, bring me a section”. When students receive an assignment, such as an historical atlas activity or a worksheet, they are instructed to check in with Mr. LaPlante after a specific number of items. If a student’s answers are correct, he will initial the section. If there are mistakes, he will work with the student to make the necessary changes. This type of formative assessment gives students immediate feedback on their progress, allows Mr. LaPlante to check in individually with all of his students, and cuts down on time spent grading the assignment when it is turned in the next day. 

Recently, Katie co-taught Heather Hanser’s study skills class as they drafted a thesis and introduction for Mr. Stein’s DBQ on the Mexican War. By teaching the paragraph sentence by sentence, and individually workshopping with each student (made easier in a class of 8 with 4 adults), we were able to give personalized feedback and wait until each student reached success before moving on. The workshop technique allows each student to get formative feedback as he/she completed each step of the writing process, instead of waiting until they’re “finished” to find out if they are on the right track. Writing is a sensitive area of instruction for many students. They don’t think they are good writers, and their work often feels personal. Therefore, it is important that they get feedback throughout the writing process.

Indian Hills:

Given where we are at in the school year, we are taking a different approach to sharing out about formative assessments--we are celebrating what teachers have been working on throughout the school year.

Here is what we are emailing out to staff.  We will come back to this in a way of recruiting some “deeper coaching” opportunities involving formative assessment at the onset of the new school year.  This will include staff members sharing out during staff meetings as well as us sharing some ideas to consider.  This conversation will include the “now what” piece.  

Throughout the 2014-2015 school year, Indian Hills staff members met the challenge to purposefully use formative assessments to guide instructional decision-making.  Here are some of the amazing ways our leaders in education are formatively “assessing for learning”:

• ALEKS--software that differentiates math content for students and provides visual categorization for teachers regarding where students are at with concept proficiency
• Project Check-ins--receiving feedback on progress at various checkpoints throughout a project
• Reading Conferences--conferring with students on a variety of reading goals depending upon student skill level and interests
• White Boards--quick visual check for understanding
• “Comments” in Google Docs--provide feedback while work is “in progress”
• Google Forms--entrance/exit slips, check for understanding, gauging prior knowledge, etc.
• Nearpod--concept review, check for understanding
• Kahoot--concept review, check for understanding
• Writing Conferences--conferring with students to develop proficiency in writing standards as well as celebrate writing growth
• Checklists--quick visual on student progress towards task completion and/or learning target accomplishment
• Learning Target Reflections--students reflect on their learning
• Bell Work Activities--entrance/exit slips, check for understanding, gauging prior knowledge, etc.
• i-Ready--ongoing online personalized student instruction catered to students’ reading level in relationship with Common Core standards
• Discussion/Comment feature in Google Classroom--entrance/exit slips, check for understanding, gauging prior knowledge, etc.

These things are happening in classrooms throughout the building on a consistent basis.  Formative assessments are becoming second-nature as we make research-supported instructional decisions to meet the diverse needs of our students.  We pretty much rock. ☺

As the school year nears its end, let’s celebrate these and all of the other incredible things we do daily to make Indian Hills and Stilwell such great schools!