My research on Formative Assessment

From: "Advancing Formative Assessment in Every Classroom" by Connie M. Moss & Susan M. Brookhart, 2009.

Six elements of the formative assessment process:

• Shared learning targets and criteria for success 
• Feedback that feeds forward (next steps)
• Student goal setting
• Student self-assessment
• Strategic teacher questioning
• Student engagement in asking effective questions. 

For my development, I will be focusing on the highlighted areas to start off with. I am going to start using formative assessment in my writing firstly, because writing is our team focus and I have had some PD in writing conferencing which is a form of formative assessment. 

Learning Targets and Criteria for Success

Example: Students are to write a book report. The learning intention is not "to write a book report", it is "read and comprehend the plot and be able to make a personal connection with the story". 

She will instruct them to: "Write two paragraphs- the first should summarise the story so that someone who has not read the story will know what happens. The second is to tell the reader what your favourite part of the story is and why." 

This teacher has given clear directions. She has also started to share the learning intention. 

This, however, is only the first step. While the students understand what they are supposed to do, they will have different ideas of what the paragraphs will look like. 

Showing students good quality examples, at various levels, and then comparing them, will help them to understand what is expected and how they can achieve the learning intention.Students should also be given a rubric with specific descriptions so that their understanding is clear. 

Feedback that feeds forward

Effective Feedback...

• Observes where the work did a good job of meeting the criteria and where it did not. 
• Suggests ways the student could go about understanding the reasons for these observations, building on strengths and improving on weaknesses. 
• Shows students how to look at their work using criteria from the assignment, and thus, by modelling, helps teach them self assessment skills. 

How well did the feedback...

• Compare the student's work with the learning target?
• Describe what the student did well?
• Suggest a specific strategy for next steps?
• Arrive as soon as possible after performance?
• Match the student's developmental level?

Student Self- Assessment

The biggest part of self-assessment is involving the students when developing the success criteria. Question them or prompt them to clarify their thinking "why?" "explain that" "tell me more about..."

End of Term Review- from the student's point of view

What have been the highlights of the term?
technology, reading around the world challenge, making ginger beer, cross grouping for maths, cross country, CSI, run a thon, making lolly cake and oobleck, Big Day Out, inquiry/science, Matariki, applying for jobs, sneaker art, goanimates, ICT, mult/div unit, show don't tell writing exercise.

What haven't you enjoyed? 
cross grouping for maths, not enough PE, science, lack of art, dance at assembly, running training, procedural writing, not doing enough writing, too much transactional writing and not enough poetic, whole class spelling (too easy for some), some work being too easy, the behaviour cards.

What would you like us to do next term?
silent drawing, write chracter descriptions, more silent reading, homework, regular art, more sport and sport challenges with other classes, free writing time, fitness, individual projects, more buddy class, reading in front of the class, more experiments and better experiments, cooking, group points, regular rewards, academic competitions/quizzes.

Do you think you get enough feedback? What would you like to see happen so you know where to next?
individual conferences about progress in all areas, maybe weekly or twice a term.

• Some of the suggestions the kids made were fantastic, because they had some of the same ideas as me. I am definitely thinking of meeting with every student every fortnight to discuss their learning and behaviour, and see if they are happy with everything that is going on in the class. Some of the quiet students can often go by unnoticed, because I am not noticing them as much.
• I also need to get better at using my behaviour management system, as my students told me earlier in the week that they feel I don't use them enough. They also said that they don't really feel like there are enough consequences for when they get an orange card or a red card. We decided to fine students who get a coloured card with the new teacher buck system I have brought in. 
• I have also decided I need to change my writing programme. I am going to try to straight every writing session with free writing for ten minutes, to get the students into mileage writing and get the brains thinking. I may use writing fun to create some sentence starters to get the kids creativity going. 
• I am going to schedule regular art lessons every week, and continue to run my PE on a Thursday, but also may have a sport game every Friday afternoon when there is no assembly. 

Formative Assessment- MaryAnne

To distinguish between formative assessment and summative assessment.

Formative is to improve- identifies students' progress and next steps during the learning/unit. 

Summative is to prove- shows the students' achievement at the end of the unit. 

In reality, if your formative assessment is extensive, then summative assessment should not be necessary!

Formative Assessment Tools:
Traffic lights: student's identify on a 'traffic light' how they feel they have met a particular learning outcome. Green- great, Amber- not too bad, Red- too hard. These can be on little pieces of paper that students glue into their work whenever they have completed a task.
Thumbs up: similar to traffic lights but students show you how they feel about something with a thumbs up/down/to the side, used on the mat or in group discussion/teaching etc.
Learning buddies: students talk to a buddy about something they have learnt, what they found easy/difficult and something they would like to learn.

I will be starting to use traffic lights in my room by printing out little traffic lights on a piece of paper. Students will colour in the traffic light at the end of any task to indicate how they felt they did with it. Update on the success of this to come!

Assessment

Notes from staff meeting brainstorm.

How do you know your students are learning?

• Student voice, self reflection
• Formative notes
• Exemplars of work
• Classroom displays showing progressions/movement
• Feed forward is responded to by students
• Evidence of self/peer assessment
• Book work showing progress/new learning
• Progressions identified in books (e.g. matrices)
• Students supporting students (passing on the learning)
• Parent voice, feedback

Reflection:

I can say where my students are, but how can I prove this? I need to be able to give evidence to support my justifications. Taking on board the formative assessment tools MaryAnne shared with me will help with this. 

Effective Teaching Practice- Conferencing in Writing

Had a great session with Kara this morning on effective conferencing in writing. Being a PRT this is something I felt I definitely struggled with in terms of how to run a conference and how to plan for them.

Kirsty mentioned something that really made me think. We should run our writing like how we run our reading- one instructional group with the teacher, the rest of the students on tasks that are different. We would never send our kids off to complete a follow up reading activity without doing the guided reading with the text first, so why would we be working with one group writing and the others doing the same thing without any kind of instruction? The other great thing is that doing this will eliminate those lines of kids waiting to conference with me!
I am now going to rearrange the way I run my writing, as it is just as important as reading and maths!

Before a conference, students need to:

• Read their writing and think about the conference before coming along 
• Be prepared with questions on parts they want to focus on (post its- then keep these in books)
• Be prepared to read aloud a favourite part- the conference doesn't have to be on the whole piece!
• Be prepared to tell how the listener can be helpful (e.g. "I want you to listen for...vocabulary/the correct tense/a variety of sentence starters"

The teacher needs to:

• Listen to the student read their writing aloud
• Move the student forward as a writer- sharing a writing model, setting goals, finding gems in their piece, reinforcing strenghts etc
• Focus briefly on technical details- but these aren't the focus
• Ensure that students learn something they can apply to their writing in the future. 

My Reflection:

Changes I am going to make:

• a designated conference area in the classroom so that students have somewhere to sit and conference either individually or in a group
• a chart for display and in the students' books of what they need to do before the conference and some sentence starters/prompts they could use when conferencing
• stop neglecting poetic writing because we are teaching transactional- include a fun writing activity most days to mix it up
• spend some initial conferences focusing on looking at the matrix so students really understand it

There are so many other things to take on board but these are the changes I will be making now.