Formative Assessment - Part 3 - Secondary Effects

All educational practices, both effective ones and ineffective, have side effects.  

Some side effects are undesirable: 

• lost instructional time from over-adherence to inquiry
• lack of development of organizational skills because Google Drive is searchable and doesn't require organization
• lost focus from attempted "multi-tasking"
• anxiety from large amounts of high-stakes testing

Some side effects (even from the same practice) are great:

• increased relationship development during an inquiry experience
• students with ADHD not losing all of their work because Google Drive is searchable and doesn't require organization
• recognition of how important focus is after an attempt at "multi-tasking"
• recognition that you are stronger than you think you are when you persevere through a time of high-stakes testing.

I have noticed some side effects of implementing intentional formative assessment in my classroom.  I have yet to find an undesirable effect, but there are three strong upsides that I have particularly noticed.

1.  Keeping them on their toes

It is possible for apathetic students to go entire days without paying attention to the teacher.  If teachers are merely calling on those with their hands up, the uninterested student can simply not raise his hand. If she knows she has tutoring later, the uninterested student might check out and do some online shopping, knowing she can learn it later. 

Without checking for understanding, a student can get all the way to test day without a teacher ever knowing he is lost. 

I like it when educational principles show up in my life outside of school, and this is one of those times.  I mentioned a few weeks ago on this blog that I have been attending a liturgical church for about a year.  Liturgy often involves a fair amount of call-and-response style participation from the congregation.  A couple of weeks into my attendance at this church, I said to a friend, "There is no way to let your mind wander there." She asked what I meant, and I showed her the bulletin.  "Everything in bold print is something I'm supposed to say.  So, I can't let my mind wander because I've got a line coming soon."

Ongoing formative assessment that requires participation from all students is just like that.  They have a line coming soon.  It keeps them engaged because they know they will be asked a question about what they are doing now about three minutes from now. No one wants to hold up their mini-whiteboard to show a ridiculous answer, so after a few questions, when they realize you really are going to keep doing this, they usually pay better attention.

2. It is motivating to know what your progress is

Have you ever suffered from the illusion of competence?  You know what I mean, you studied for a test, and you were sure you were going to ace it until you actually had the test in front of you and realized you didn't know much.  

Students who are engaged in regular formative assessment have much less of that experience.  Not only do you have frequent check-ins with their understanding, so do they.  Is it a bummer to get a question wrong? Yes.  But that is not a reason to abandon a good practice.  When they get it right the next time, call out how far they have come. "Remember when y'all couldn't do that?  Look at you now, doing it well. Thanks for putting in the work." 

There is not much that encourages people to grow like actually seeing their growth. It's why people in weight loss programs weigh themselves. It's why coaches show their teams game footage.  I'll give you another example from my outside-of-school life.  A few months after I started taking cycle classes at the Y, I began setting goals about distance, tension level, and power on the bike.  At first, I only knew how to check these statistics at the end of a class. I was often surprised to get to the end of a workout and find that I hadn’t achieved as much distance as I had thought.  Because I wasn’t tracking that information at all during the class, I didn’t have the ability to make adjustments that would help me reach my goals.  I could do better on a different day, but I didn’t know how to do better at the moment.  Then, an instructor showed me how to use the bike’s computer to see real time information during class by changing the display screen.

Checking the number on that screen was motivating because I knew if I needed to speed up or turn up the tension. I could adjust my course of action based on what I was seeing.

But be careful, you can have too much of a good thing. I found it was tempting to stay on that screen.  After all, feedback is good, right?  We like having constant access to information, but I quickly learned that was unwise.  It made me so focused on the number that I couldn’t pay attention to instructions.  Worse, I was so focused on the number that I couldn’t enjoy doing the things that would improve the number, and I was in a state of panic if the average didn’t move as quickly as I thought it should.  Worst of all, I wasn’t building any internal sense of how to improve because I was relying too much on the bike itself rather than how my legs felt or my perceived level of exertion.  Eventually, I disciplined myself to only visit that screen once every four minutes.  That gave me enough information to figure out what I need to do to make progress for the next four minute check, but it didn’t do my thinking for me.

The same is true in formative assessment. Stop and check at the crucial moments and the hinge information, but don't make them sick of hearing "Take out you whiteboard."

3. The joy of more classroom interaction

I mentioned earlier that it is possible for a student to go through a day without paying attention. It is also possible a for an introverted student to go through a day without having anyone interact with them. One of the best ways to do formative assessment is to require everyone to give an answer. My favorite way of doing this in the past few years was to have each student answer questions on mini-whiteboards. In a quick glance, I can see 24 answers and know if there are several of them with the same misconception. I can see who is taking longer to write their answer and who is copying off of their neighbor. It's great. What I didn't expect was to get so much joy out of their idiosyncrasies.

My favorite example of this was a boy named Jonah. He put on a front of being a cynic and too cool for school. Yet, he was a gifted mathematician and wrote excellent explanations of complex topics. He also had a wry sense of humor, but he never wanted to appear engaged in class, so he didn't use it there. However, he was required to write answers on his whiteboard, leading to some fun moments.

I don't know if this story is going to translate into writing, but I want to give it a shot. One of the things I do early in the year with 8th graders is teach them the names and functions of lab equipment. I explain that on tv, every piece of glassware is called a beaker, but in actual labs, it is important to be precise with your language so you get what you need for the purpose. We then play a game I call, "Beaker - Not a Beaker." The kids spend the rest of the year giving me a hard time by calling beakers flasks and vice versa. So, the first time we used whiteboards for retrieval, Jonah wrote "Beaker" as his answer a couple of times. I finally said, "That's great. You can do that, but you also have to write a real answer." For the rest of the year, he wrote two answers for every question, Beaker and whatever the real answer was. Then, during an exam review, there came a magical moment. I asked a question where the answer actually was "Beaker." He held up his board with, you guessed it, two answers: Beaker and Beaker. I laughed, and he responded with the slightest of smiles. It was a sweet and joyful interaction that I couldn't have planned and that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't regularly engaging in formative assessment with all students.

I hope in these three posts that I have convinced you that there is value in implementing a structured program of formative assessment and given you some practical ways of doing it. If you have a favorite tool for formative assessment, please post them in the comments so everyone can add to their toolbox.

Formative Assessment - Part 2 - How to Know and What to Do When You Know

"How will I know?  Don't trust your feelings.  

How will I know?  They can be deceiving." - Whitney Houston

Two weeks ago, I told you the story of why we need formative assessment, but if I had included what it is and how to implement it, the post would have been far too long.  So, I made you wait a while for the practical part.

Let's start by defining formative assessment.  If you look online, you will only find about 48 definitions, and if you Google it, you will get a different answer from the Google AI every time (I've gotten six so far). So, let's look to some credible sources.  Kevin Washburn calls formative assessment “a teacher’s assessment activities while a student is learning.”  Dylan William describes it as “any activity that provides information about student learning and enables teachers to adapt teaching to meet student needs.” If you put these together, you have a pretty good definition, focused on timing and purpose.

There are many ways to collect data in the classroom, both informally and formally. 

Informal: 

I'll discuss the informal first as it what you will do with most of your day.  I mentioned last week that there are pitfalls to trusting the vibe in the room, but what I really mean is don't trust it alone.  While you need objective data to confirm or contradict it, the vibe is still valuable. As Douglas Fisher and Nacy Frey say In their book Checking for Understanding, “Talented educators know that the opportunities for fine-grained analysis of student learning are all around us.  Each time we host a discussion with students, examine a child’s writing, or listen closely to a question, there’s a chance to assess formatively.”And the more experience you have, the more accurate you will be at interpreting those hundreds of pieces of data.

So what are you looking for?

• Changes in Body Language - If the kid that is usually leaning in is suddenly fidgety, leaning back, or puts his head on the desk, chances are you've lost him.
• Changes in Facial Expression - The girl who is usually sparkling with interest goes a little glassy eyed or stares into the middle distance?  She's likely confused.
• Aimless Searching - If you ask a question and the student flips through his book or notes with no evident destination, it is likely because he doesn't know what he's looking for.
• Disconnected Answers - When you ask a question like, "What number would I change to balance this equation?" and the student answers with the name of an element. Or you ask, "Which character in the novel exhibits hubris?" and the student answers "Motif." These students are lost.
• Explicitly Telling You They Are Lost - Students DO NOT like to admit they are lost, and much of the time, they don't know they are.  If you have a student actually say it out loud, you have found golden treasure, my friend. Do not make the mistake of brushing it aside.  Take the time to figure out where they went wrong.
• Nodding: God bless the nodders and those that make sounds of recognition.  I had one that kept me going through the hybrid year of the pandemic. He may never know how crucial it was

Formal:

Most of your formative assessment should be planned, involve the entire class (or you will only hear from those who are confident), and you should have some idea of what their wrong answers could be, what misconception they reflect, and how you will respond.  This is what Dylan William calls "Working Plan B into Plan A."  

I know, it's a lot.  That's why you want to think it through while lesson planning rather than on the fly.

• Identify your crucial content - While all your content is gold, you know there are some points on which future understanding depends.  Ask yourself what the points are in your lesson that students MUST get before you move on? Plan some high quality questions about those.
• Ask questions in such a way that they can't get them right by accident. - The point of this is to reveal their thinking and identify their misconceptions, so if your question is vague, there is no point in doing it.
• Plan and communicate your means of participation - Do you want to use multiple choice questions and socrative (or Kahoot or clickers or the many other methods of answering multiple choice questions)?  Do you want free responses on mini-whiteboards? Do you want open ended written responses in GoFormative? Do you want students to answer out loud in unison? Do you want to cold call?  The answer to any of these questions can be yes or no, but you want to decide ahead of time and communicate it to the students. Otherwise, you will revert back to the easiest but least informative method - calling on a kid with his hand up.
• Think about likely wrong answers. - If you have been teaching for longer than one year, the chances are high that you have gotten the same wrong answers multiple times.  If you teaching middle and high school, you may have gotten the same wrong answers multiple times in the same day. Start anticipating those while planning. Why might a student answer that way? Is there a misconception they are likely expressing through that answer?
• Plan how to address those misconceptions - Is this a minor thing that can be quickly addressed by saying, "I can see why you might think that, but . . ." Or will it require some time to reteach and practice? If there is a likely misconception that will take time to deal with, make sure you have enough room in your plan to do that.

Teaching is exhausting, y'all.  And it is so easy to fall into the trap of saying, "Does everyone understand?" and moving on if no one says no.  And, unless you have me in your class, it is highly unlikely anyone is going to say no.  The same goes for "Any questions?" and my go easy go to "Does that make sense?"  Students don't know what they don't know, so we have to draw it out of them by asking them to summarize or explain their understanding.

I've found a few other delightful secondary effects of using formative assessment, so I'll talk about those next week.  

For now, go find out what your students know.  You might be surprised.

Formative Assessment - Part 1 - A Story on Why it Matters

Let me tell you a story from almost 22 years ago. I had been teaching science for a few years when I got hired in a small private school. A week before school started, I got my schedule (this was pre-checking on the internet when you got a printout during teacher week), and it said I was teaching Algebra IB. Since I am a science teacher and not a math teacher, I went to the principal to show her the mistake in my schedule. Her response surprised me.  "If you can teach physics, you can teach Algebra I.  To this day, I don't know if that is true, but it was a small school with a need, and I was game for most things. So I gave it ago.

I looked at the curriculum, and it was mostly things that had steps, graphing quadratic functions, factoring binomial expressions, exponential growth problems, FOIL, and the like.  I decided the best way to go about this was to teach them to follow the steps in the same way one might follow a recipe, and since there were only 9 students in the class, it seemed like a good way to keep them engaged was to do the problems together as a class. "Thanks for doing step 1, Liz. Now, who wants to tell me what to do next."

Math teachers out there, I can feel you cringing.  I know that you are thinking, "This is not how you teach math! They will never learn mathematical thinking that way!"  

Rest assured that I know that.

Now.

I didn't know it then, but remember you are on my side in this story. I didn't know how to teach math and was just doing the best I could.

Anyway, during class, things seemed like they were going well. 

Then, I gave them a test. 

Things were NOT going well. 

One student could do the first step of a problem before getting lost while others didn’t even know how to begin.  I was confused by the differences in their approaches because it seemed like they should be getting stuck in similar places. 

I had been relying on a classroom vibe as measure of how things were going and didn’t have enough math experience to recognize that the scaffolds I provided weren’t leading them to independence. I started analyzing my classroom practice and found the problem.  When we solved problems together in class, we were solving them together as a group.  What had seemed like the best way to engage every student was masking individual deficiencies in understanding. I had fallen into the pitfall of the using the classroom vibe.

Just because a group can solve a problem doesn't mean all of the individuals in the group can.

They could only solve problems together.  It was like an assembly line.  Liz knew how to do step one, which gave Eric just enough momentum to do step two.  Drew could do step three. 

So we all suffered from the Illusion of Competence until they had to do problems on their own without help.

This was my first real life lesson in the need for formative assessment. I realized that I needed to check in with them individually and frequently.  I started giving a problem every day as an exit ticket that they had to solve on their own. I didn't expect them all to do it perfectly, but it let me know where they were.  And we started having a 3 question, low stakes quiz every Friday over what we had done on Monday through Thursday.  

Once I started doing those things, I had a better sense of where each student was with competence in each skill.  Their test grades improved (to be fair they had nowhere to go but up), and we all learned more.

What I did then helped a lot, but I would handle it differently now to get more information during the teaching so I could adapt in real time.

For the next couple of weeks, I will write about how to collect good data in both formal and informal ways so you can be responsive to the students in front of you and avoid being surprised by upsetting tests scores.

Back to Normal and Moving Forward

About three weeks into the lockdowns of 2020, I saw it for the first time.  It was a tweet that said, "Before we reopen schools, we have to reimagine them."  I remember reading that tweet and thinking, "Oh, crud, here it comes.  A lot of agendas are about to get pushed."  A couple of weeks later, a video was made for teachers to watch, purporting itself to be about best practices for assessment in remote learning.  The first two minutes of this video mentioned remote learning, but after that, it was clear that this man had a decades-long beef with grades and had given this lecture a hundred times.  He took advantage of the fear of educators when it came to uncertainty about assessment during the pandemic to make money pushing an agenda he had clearly always had.  This is reprehensible.

A year later, most of what I saw online was a desire just to "go back to normal."  A spring of remote learning and a year of either remote or masked hybrid learning had exhausted people, and we were feeling nostalgic for "precedented times" again.  The next year was supposed to be better, but the Delta and Omicron variants ensured otherwise, resulting in tired educators being even more exhausted than before.  Few people have had the energy to reimagine anything.  We just wanted this to be over and to return to something familiar.

As with most things, the views on the extremes are not ideal.  They might even be damaging.  To turn education upside down, throwing out everything from the past in the name of change is a terrible idea.  It would be bad for both teachers and students, experimenting with kids on a large scale, not knowing what the results would be for a decade or more is reckless and wrong.  In the same way, pulling out our 2018 lesson plans and moving on as though we have not learned anything in the past three years is equally irresponsible.  Teachers have learned to use tools in ways we had not before, and we should continue to use them (even if we use them in different ways).

Prior to the pandemic, I had taught for 20 years.  I know which things were working.  I will continue to do those things.  One of the things remote and hybrid teaching confirmed for me is that paper tests are superior to digital tests.  I used digital platforms from March 2020 to May 2021 because it was necessary.  While it made grading easier, it was not good for kids.  Since they couldn't write on the tests, they couldn't do the things we have always advised them to do, like underlining keywords, crossing out answers they know to be wrong, and skipping questions to return to them later.  I was using GoFormative for tests.  It is a great tool, and I will use it in other ways, but I hope it is never my testing platform again.  Digital labs have some value, in that it is programmed to work correctly, but it is hardly the same as doing a lab.  Since it does work correctly every time, there is no troubleshooting involved, which is one of the soft skills taught by lab experiments.  Direct instruction by me as the expert in the room works.  I'm sorry for those of you that believe it isn't learning if the kids aren't discovering it for themselves, but the research doesn't support that.  I believe in labs and projects and group work and all of those things, but only after I have taught them a concept and before I follow up with reflective practices about what they have observed.  I knew that was true prior to the pandemic, and it is still true.  

As important as knowing what was working pre-pandemic, I also know what wasn't working.  I wasn't doing nearly enough formative assessment and had just begun engaging in regular retrieval practice.  Finding a tool like GoFormative during hybrid learning will now help me to solve that problem.  This year, my students will use it daily to retrieve something from the last lesson, the last week, and the last chapter (interleaved and spaced retrieval).  I used FlipGrid for open-ended questions during remote and hybrid learning.  My students used it creatively and well, and they showed me things in ways they could not have on paper because they could demonstrate things live.  I will use that for more homework assignments than I did before so students could make their learning visible.  These tools were used one way during the pandemic, but as I evaluate the ongoing practice of teaching, I will use them in a different way this year.

Are we going "back to normal"?  In most ways, thank God, yes we are.  We will be seeing each other's faces this year rather than masks or screen icons, and I am grateful for that.  I can return to well-established tried and true practices this year, and I am grateful for that.  But should I just return to those things and make no changes?  Of course not.  Any good teacher should be self-reflective all the time.  We should always be examining what worked and what didn't in the lesson we just taught, separating the wheat from the chaff, and finding new ways to improve on what we did.  This year provides the opportunity to evaluate it with more potential tools than we have had before.  So, as we get back to normal, we can keep moving forward.