Episode 26 Formative Assessment

Dan discusses the need for teachers to shift their paradigm when it comes to assessment. Key to this shift is the need to see assessment as a tool for teachers to guide future teaching for that student.Formative Assessment is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Produced and Transcribed by Brad Keyes at Podgee.io.Join the Facebook CommunityTranscriptHi and welcome to another episode of the effective teaching podcast. Today I want to talk about formative assessment and I thought I should start by talking about why formative assessment is so important when it comes to helping our students develop the skills of lifelong learning.Firstly, formative assessment requires a change in perspective on assessment. For too long assessment has been seen as summative. A tool to tell us how much the student has learnt from a unit or year of school and that was it. Formative assessment on the other hand requires that both the teacher and the student view assessment more like a check in to see how they are progressing.You see formative assessment has a very different goal than summative assessment. Formative assessment is looking to discover how much learning has happened, if there has been any misunderstandings, any areas that need to be re-addressed and what should happen next as the student moves towards the learning goals. So, rather than the assessment being about attaining a grade formative assessment is about checking progress with the purpose of adjusting teaching and learning activities. Formative assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning. In one direction it tells us whether the teaching has produced learning, how much learning, and how students are progressing. BUT, and I think MORE IMPORTANTLY, formative assessment also goes in the other direction. It tells us how we, as teachers, should adapt, adjust, and change our teaching based on student progress. It is what we should be basing our differentiation upon!If we can make this shift in mindframe and help our students do the same it will provide them with a great skill moving forward as lifelong learners, and that skill is to be able to use assessment to monitor performance, identify areas to work on, and then find the next steps required to develop their understanding and skills to become masters of not just the new content, but of learning.As teachers, we need to be leading by example in this area. We must see assessment of students more as an assessment on our teaching than on their learning. Of course, there are students who chose not to try and others who may never be able to “get” your content. BUT the reason why students don’t meet the learning goals is all too often because teachers either didn’t expect them to or because the student was not told what to do next to progress towards that goal from WHERE THEY ARE NOW!We have known for a long time that differentiation is important and that all our students are different, but we have also known that differentiating learning to meet the needs of all our students is difficult if not impossible, especially with the limited amount of prep time we are given. BUT since when have teachers shied away from hard work!! And today with technology the ability to differentiate for each of your students has never been easier (please note I said easier, not easy… I know it is still not easy).The best way to know how to differentiate your classroom is to use formative assessment to determine what you do. We need to make sure that the assessment we ask our students to do has the goal of informing what we do next as teachers. If this is the goal of assessment and students see this, then the change in mindframe can begin. Not only will they begin to see a purpose to assessment, but the type of assessment will change because the goal of the assessment is different. Suddenly assessment becomes a tool to support learning not a tool to check..