The past two weekends in a row were similar stories as I spent 5-6 hours both weekends putting exemplars together, writing remediation activities and designing new lessons to review challenging content.Īdd on top of this my need to work several different part time jobs simply to pay my bills-combined with the meetings I’m required to attend during 3 of my 5 weekly planning periods and the room cleaning that I’m required to do now that our district has cut back on janitorial services-and it becomes clear that I’m going to have to make a choice between formative assessment and living a life. Heck, just last night I spent 3 hours grading one set of graphs because I wanted to get them back to my students in a timely way-but that required working from 5:30-8:30 and missing dinner with my family and bedtime with my little girl. I haven’t seen my daughter or my wife much this month simply because responsible formative assessment is an incredibly time-consuming process. Second, I’m completely exhausted and doubtful that I can keep up this work all year long. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Heck, I’d bet that there aren’t many teachers who are taking these kinds of steps on a regular basis anywhere in America.įirst, I’m probably three-weeks behind in my curriculum-formatively assessing and then taking action on what I’m learning is a relatively time-consuming process, especially when kids aren’t mastering content at the rate that my district’s pacing guide suggests is possible. I’ve used our working lunch program-a 30 minute one-on-one review session with the classroom teacher-to help kids that continue to struggle after peer tutoring. I’ve used our peer tutoring program-a system of intervention that pairs struggling students with successful peers to rework tasks and to review content-to provide support before summative assessments. I’ve used student responders to quickly measure student mastery and to give my kids a chance to instantly see whether or not they have a firm grasp on the content we’re studying in class. I’m using my Livescribe pen to record quick mini-tutorials on the concepts that great numbers of my kids seem to be struggling with (see here). I’ve given two or three practice assignments-tasks that count for less than 10 percent of a child’s grade and are designed solely to give students feedback on their individual strengths and weaknesses and to give me a sense for the intellectual hiccups that my students are having around the concepts we are studying-for every essential skill that we’re required to study. I’ve developed exemplars demonstrating a full-range of performance for almost every subjective task that we’ve tackled (see here, here and here). I’ve got short lists of essential objectives (see here) called I Can Statements written in student friendly language that students refer to before every lesson and use to self-assess their own progress towards mastery. Here’s why: I’ve spent the first four weeks of this school year trying to make formative assessment a bigger part of my own instructional practices-and it’s damn near killed me.ĭon’t get me wrong: I’m proud of the work that I’m doing and am convinced that I’ve adopted some of the best practices suggested by assessment experts ranging from Marzano to Stiggins, Ainsworth, Chappius and Chappius. 37)īut I’m really starting to wonder whether or not effective formative assessment is even possible in the classroom. ![]() The simplest prescription for improving education must be 'dollops of feedback.'” (As quoted in Marzano, 2003, p. In fact, the conclusions he’s drawn in What Works in Schools suggest that providing students with timely and specific feedback on their levels of mastery can account for percentile gains of anywhere from 21 to 41 points-higher than gains caused by other school-based achievement factors including parent and community involvement, safe and orderly environments, and collegiality in the schoolhouse.Īs John Hattie-an educational researcher cited by Marzano in What Works-writes, “The most powerful single modification that enhances achievement is feedback. ![]() Let’s start with the fact that after conducting a meta-analysis of every significant research study on achievement in the past three decades, Bob Marzano believes in formative assessment. Let me start with a simple, researched-based truth:įormative assessment-timely feedback gathered and reviewed during the course of a learning experience that serves to ' inform' both teachers AND students and allows for the ' formation' of new learning plans-matters.
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