Report in Teaching english .

Key Formative Assessment Practices

Effective use of the formative assessment process requires students
and teachers to integrate and embed the following practices in a
collaborative and respectful classroom environment:

What do we want students to learn

(to know and be able to do)?
1.Before instruction starts, clarify what students are learning and let
them know how to gauge if they’re successful. Research shows this
makes a difference in their learning; having clear targets provides the
direction students need in order to set a course. From there, knowing
what it looks like if they’ve learned allows them to become better
assessors; they can compare themselves to the target in order to
determine where they are in their learning.

Clarifying, sharing, and understanding goals for learning and criteria for success with
Learners There are a number of ways teachers can begin the process of clarifying and sharing learning
goals and success criteria. Many teachers specify the learning goals for the lesson at the beginning of
the lesson, but in doing so, many teachers fail to distinguish between the learning goals and the
activities that will lead to the required learning. When teachers start from what it is they want
students to know and design their instruction backward from that goal, then instruction is far more
likely to be effective.

Strategies and Tools

• Group Discuss Expectations: Small groups of students take a few
minutes to discuss the learning target and success criteria before
instruction begins. They clarify questions for each other and those
they cannot clarify are taken back to the whole class so the teacher
can respond.

• Animoto: This application gives students the ability to make a short,

30-second share video of what they learned in a given lesson.

• Lino: A virtual corkboard of sticky-notes makes it easy for students to

provide questions or comments on their learning. Use this to clarify learning targets or success
criteria, or use it for exit tickets.

2. Eliciting Evidence
How do we know where students are in
their learning?

Designing effective discussions and questions takes practice.

Additionally, planning where in the lesson these activities will occur
is important. This gathering of evidence on an ongoing basis allows
teachers to better meet student learning needs in-the-moment.
There are two main purposes for questioning:
• to promote student thinking
• to elicit evidence of student learning, surface errors, and
misconceptions
John Hattie talks about the fact that the effects of
questioning vary mainly due to the types of questions asked; yet
overall there is still an effect size of 0.46, almost half a standard
deviation. Effect size tells us how effective something was and half a
standard deviation equates to about 1.5 grade levels.

Strategies and Tools

• No Hands Up: This strategy takes a variety of forms. The use of
craft sticks personalized with individual student names works as
a randomizer. The teacher poses the question, waits (think time),
draws a stick, and calls the student name. All students need to be
prepared to engage.
• AnswerGarden: A tool for online brainstorming or polling, educators
can use this in real time to see student feedback on questions. It
creates word clouds with responses, allowing teachers to look for words
used most frequently.
• Kahoot!: A game-based classroom response system where teachers can create questions and
quizzes.

3. Providing Feedback
How do students know what to work on next?
When it comes to student performance, providing effective, learningfocused feedback and the time to
use that feedback matters.
It means
working with students to get them the information they need to better
understand problems and solutions, so they can offer feedback to
themselves and others. Teachers should share feedback that focuses on
the task, causes students to reflect on their performance, and includes
a recipe for future action. Then the teacher needs to structure time for
students to use that feedback. Hattie reports that doing this—providing
effective feedback and the opportunity to use it—has a 0.73 effect size.
This effect size could mean almost 5 points on the ACT or a difference
of 2–3 grade levels.

Strategies and Tools

• Comment-only Marking: Provide students with comments, but no
grades. This gets them to focus on the learning rather than their
rank in the class. Comments are specific to the qualities of the
work, designed to promote thinking, and provide clear guidance on
what to improve.
• ForAllRubrics: This software is free for all teachers and allows
you to import, create, and score rubrics on your iPad, tablet,
or smartphone. You can print or save the rubrics as a PDF or
spreadsheet.
• Formative Feedback for Learning: This iPad app is designed to foster and encourage communication
between students and teachers by using a conference setting as well as icons to prompt
discussions.

4. Activating students as learning resources for one another

activating students as learning resources for one another’ is critical for the inclusion of students with
disability within general education. Inclusion of students with disability is a human right, but the
practical application of inclusion is problematic.

Cooperative learning is an evidence-based, highly structured, constructivist approach to learning that

involves students working as a group to achieve a common educational or social goal that the
students find meaningful. In traditional classrooms, teachers direct interactions rather than students
working in groups to learn from each other. As well, questions and answers are with one student at a
time, resulting in lost learning time and frustration for the students who wait. However, in
cooperative learning, the students are involved in meaningful dialogues with each other. This
approach supports the process of working out ‘where the learner is’ and ‘how to get to where the
learner is going’. There is a high degree of student interactivity which is more effective than one-on-
one instruction from a teacher (William 2011). The delegation of authority to students does not mean
abdicating responsibility. Instead, it provides space and time for teachers to support learning and
inclusion in the classroom further.
5. Activating students as owners of their own learning

The implementation of the strategy behind this feel-good-phrase, often falls into the dust of ‘noble
intent’ rather than delivering something tangible. However, it is actually highly actionable and links
directly to many other ideas. ‘Owning your own learning’ is at the heart of strong self-regulation and
metacognition: setting learning goals, planning, monitoring and evaluating success in tasks links to
those goals; forming effective schemata that take account of big-picture questions and themes that
inform subsequent conscious rehearsal and elaboration. However, these ‘goals’ are not broad brush
life goals; they are learning goals – the next steps in improving writing fluency, science knowledge,
confidence with maths and languages, physical fitness etc.

The point is that these characteristics of effective learning can be fostered by setting up good routines
and expectations. Teachers can help students to know where they are going and where they are on
the curriculum journey. This can be supported by:

 Giving students access to long-term topic plans, the syllabus, the wide scope overview before
diving down into the details;
 Setting out milestones in the progress journey so that students can take their bearings and plan
their own next steps through appropriate forms of practice, becoming increasingly independent.
 Setting out clear relational models for conceptual schema building – as per Shimamura’s Relate
in MARGE.
 Providing exemplars of performance at various levels of success up to a high/exceptional level so
students can compare their own work against a scale and see for themselves where they are and
what short-run learning goals might be achievable to move forward.I

if a student knows for themself what they need to do in order to improve and gains the
experience of being able to achieve success through applying effort to these self-determined
goals, then they begin a positive upward spiral of confidence building, growth mindset-inducing,
self-regulation that fuels even more success.

SUMMARY OF THE LESSON

. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success. That means
getting students to really understand what their classroom experience will be and how their
success will be measured.
 2. Elicit evidence of learning. This refers to developing effective classroom instructional
strategies that allow for the measurement of success.
 3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward. To accomplish this, teachers must work with
students to provide them the information they need to better understand problems and
solutions.
 4. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another. Getting students involved with
each other in discussions and working groups can help improve student learning.
 5. Activating learners as owners of their own learning. Teaching students to monitor and
regulate their learning increases their rate of learning.

formative assessment’ has been too broad a term; too much of a catch-all, thereby allowing
various degrees of corruption and dilution to take root. I think that it’s when you get into
understanding and deploying the five separate strategies that it finds form. That’s the
understanding of formative assessment that teachers need. It’s powerful stuff, right there,
where it’s been for years.