Background
In my previous work with professional learning communities, I have experienced the stress of formative assessment. The formal PLC model advocated by Rick DuFour includes a component on how teachers will know whether or not their students have learned. When I worked in California, my school district required that formative assessments, the “how,” must include measurable data that could be shared in our teams. The prominent form of this assessment came in multiple choice tests, and during the early years of my career, this is how I viewed formative assessment: it was another test to give students. All of my professional development on formative assessments focused on this attribute, and rarely did I view formative assessment as anything other than a multiple choice quiz.
The “how” component is critical, but the heavy emphasis on multiple choice blinded me to the potential and benefit of formative assessment. Upon starting a new teaching assignment in Washington state, I worked with colleagues and a school district that viewed formative assessment differently. It did not need to be formal, but it still needed to answer how I would know if the students had learned. Colleagues shared tools such as exit slips and questioning, many things that I had done for years but had never viewed as formative assessments. Entering my Standards-Based Assessment class, I had a small collection of tools and a general idea of what they were good for.
Learning and applied practice
Dylan Wiliam’s (2011) book Embedded Formative Assessment has been helpful in the process of learning about the role formative assessments play in my classroom. Wiliam’s definition of formative assessment emphasizes that it happens during learning, and this has had a tremendous impact on my thinking. Stopping instruction to give a test was counterproductive, especially if the results of that test were not analyzed until a later date. By the time my team had gone over the results, the class had moved on to another unit. We knew that was a problem at the time, but we plowed ahead anyway, following a school district mandate. Wiliam’s practical techniques open up the toolbox and allow the assessments to occur naturally and at appropriate times to allow the teacher to influence student learning.
Through the process of writing the assessment into action paper I discovered even more resources. The idea of writing workshops has me excited, as my students can choose the type of feedback and assessment they want through that process. I learned about Kaizena, an app that allows students to record questions and attach them to their papers and allows the teacher to record feedback. These two elements I have incorporated into my practice this year with mixed results. My assessment into action paper focused on establishing writers workshops. My workshops had different stations in which students would peer review, search for “dead words” (overused words, vague phrases, etc.), read aloud, search for grammar errors, and receive feedback from me. Kaizena was another station, but I quickly found that students were hesitant to use the app. The obstacles were technical (not all students had access to a smartphone) and practical (students would upload a paper but had to wait for me to give feedback, which I couldn’t do until much later). Kaizena had better success during later assignments, especially during the research paper, when students uploaded their papers and received feedback the weekend before the paper was due.
Issues encountered
For my present teaching assignment, one dilemma for me will be the lack of a colleague to work directly with. I will be the only AP English Language teacher, so any discussion of how my students are meeting the learning expectations will have to be in the context of vertical or cross-curricular alignment. Fortunately, I have options in this area. By identifying the specific skills students are lacking, I can take those skills to other English teachers and solicit their input. Across the board, English-language arts skills generally are the same at the secondary level, so strategies that work in one class will transfer to another class with different content.
Supported by research
Wiliam’s (2011) book will be critical to my future practice. I appreciate his practical approach to formative assessment and his classroom applications are simply explained and varied in their use for elementary and secondary environments.
Shelby Scoffield’s (2016) article on Edutopia about writing workshops has strongly influenced my approach to giving feedback. This has been a bone of contention for me for years, the ingrained idea that I have to write comments on every paper, but the knowledge that students do not read them. Scoffield’s ideas about organizing writing workshops will help me provide my students feedback they can actually use.
Research by Alvarez, Espasa, and Guasch (2012) found that students respond better to suggestions and questions rather than direct corrections. Later research by Guasch, Espasa, Alvarez, and Kirschner (2013) found that a combination of epistemic and suggestive feedback best improved the quality of collaborative feedback in online situations. The authors defined epistemic feedback as requests for explanations in a critical way, and suggestive feedback as advice on how to proceed that invites exploration.
Finally, the ideas about peer feedback I learned from Gielen, Tops, Dochy, Onghena, and Smeets (2010) will help me develop peer review sessions. Their findings showed that students improved when they were given writing prompts to use for peer feedback, such as “I paid attention to,” and “I found it difficult to” (p. 152). I can incorporate these sentence frames into feedback forms that allow me to clearly see how my students are doing.
References
Alvarez, I., Espasa, A., & Guasch, T. (2012). The value of feedback in improving collaborative writing assignments in an online learning environment. Studies in Higher Education, 37:4, 387-400. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2010.510182.
Gielen, S., Tops, L., Dochy, F., Onghena, P., Smeets, S. (2010). A comparative study of peer and teacher feedback and of various peer feedback forms in a secondary school writing curriculum. British Educational Research Journal, 36:1, 143-162. doi: 10.1080/01411920902894070.
Guasch, T., Espasa, A., Alvarez, I.M., Kirschner, P.A. (2013). Effects of feedback on collaborative writing in an online learning environment. Distance Education, 34:3, 324-338. doi: 10.1080/01587919.2013.835772.
Scoffield, S. (2016). Creating a writers’ workshop in a secondary classroom. Edutopia. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org.
Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.
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