Mastering Formative Assessment Moves

7 High-Leverage Practices to Advance Student Learning

Brent Duckor, Carrie Holmberg

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781416624783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Evaluation & Assessment in Education

How do you know if students are with you at the beginning, middle, and end of a lesson? Can formative assessment offer a key to better teaching and learning during instruction? What if you could blend different formative assessment moves in your classroom, with intention and care for all students, to help make better instructional decisions on the fly and enjoy more teachable moments?

Educators Brent Duckor and Carrie Holmberg invite you on the journey to becoming a formative assessor. They encourage you to focus on these seven research-based, high-leverage formative assessment moves:

• Priming -- building on background knowledge and creating a formative assessment–rich, equitable classroom culture
• Posing -- asking questions in relation to learning targets across the curriculum that elicit Habits of Mind
• Pausing -- waiting after powerful questions and rich tasks to encourage more student responses by supporting them to think aloud and use speaking and listening skills related to academic language
• Probing -- deepening discussions, asking for elaborations, and making connections using sentence frames and starters
• Bouncing -- sampling student responses systematically to broaden participation, manage flow of conversation, and gather more "soft data" for instructional use
• Tagging -- describing and recording student responses without judgment and making public how students with different styles and needs approach learning in real-time
• Binning -- interpreting student responses with a wide range of tools, categorizing misconceptions and "p-prims, " and using classroom generated data to make more valid and reliable instructional decisions on next steps in the lesson and unit

Each chapter explores a classroom-tested move, including foundational research, explaining how and when to best use it, and describing what it looks like in practice. Highlights include case studies, try-now tasks and tips, and advice from beginning and seasoned teachers who use these formative assessment moves in their classrooms.

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Chapter 1

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Priming

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Letting students in on what's coming, what is taking place, and why the class is doing what it's doing goes a long way to supporting the trust and safety students need to take intellectual risks. How can they learn without regularly taking risks to reveal to others where their understandings, especially their confusions and questions, are?

Janey, economics and civics teacher

I start off well with priming for equity of participation. We create equity cards, talk about how they help, and I use the cards. But after that first day, I don't remind us all why equity of participation and their staying engaged is so important. I assume they remember. Worse, I forget to use the cards!

Alicia, English teacher

I could have students use their journals as a way of priming them for elaborating and explaining. I haven't yet, even though I have no reason to not change how students are using their journals. So I suppose my main priming challenge is mine.

Alex, science teacher

What Is Priming?

Priming is everywhere. We hear it when the teacher says: Let's hear from everyone or There are no right or wrong answers to this question or I bet someone could build on this—who wants to try?

We prime the lesson every day when we say: Okay, everyone, take out your notebooks and let's review those hypotheses from yesterday's lab or It's time to put our listening ears on. When we say Let's review what we accomplished yesterday, we're priming.

Priming is what's done to prepare the groundwork. We use it to establish and maintain norms. We do it to support and acculturate students to learning publicly with one another. Priming always remembers that learners are in the classroom learning space together.

Priming moves, as we describe them, aim to support students through the new learning situations. Formative assessors value priming because it honors the confusion, uncertainty, and bottlenecks that come from new procedures and practices when orchestrating "live action" in the classroom. Every lesson can benefit from priming students as they move through the formative assessment-rich classroom.

Inevitably, the situations described in this book will feel strange and uncomfortable at first. For many teachers and students it will never be easy to be asked to listen to a question posed, to pause and wait before offering an answer, or to respond to our probing, especially with open-ended questions. Formative assessment puts high demands on children and asks a lot of ourselves. It asks students to interact and be present with adults and their peers. It asks us to raise the bar on classroom assessment practices, the just-in-time interactions, and the "goodwill" that underpins assessment for learning.

We know from both experience and research that priming for a formative assessment-rich learning environment will ask us all to place equity of voice over rush to judgment. Priming moves emphasize the role of setting up everyone for success rather than rolling the dice and hoping a few students are engaged.

Teachers who are learning to become formative assessors can expect their students to engage in posing, pausing, probing, bouncing, tagging, and binning moves, but only if everyone is primed for action first. Priming moves function preventatively, responsively, and reflectively. They help our students and ourselves to set the tone, understand norms, and take up the risky work of using new academic language, or being challenged to deepen an initial response or see patterns in others' thinking on the whiteboard.

Why Prime? For Whose Good? For What Good?

The learning space is constructed by our expectations, what we think our roles are, and how we enact routines that satisfy our values. If we believe that all voices should be heard, we will remind our students every minute, every period, every day: Has everyone had the opportunity to ask their burning question yet? If we hope for more engagement from students who are typically the least verbal (in our classrooms or others'), then we will set up visible scaffolds to support their use of new academic language and expand the range of voices heard in a call and response routine. Bottom line: If we value every child's right to learn, then our classroom will be primed for reflection and inquiry—with a relentless focus on how kids think.

We prime because if we don't, many of our kids in our classrooms will be left behind. Bringing these students along requires discovering their thinking, making it visible, and responding wisely to it. To make student thinking more visible, however, we need new strategies for listening and speaking in the classroom learning space. Priming moves will figure prominently. They must.

Why prime? Because priming can help make not only learning visible, priming can go a long way toward making students visible. Priming can help teachers and students work together to influence how school is done (Garmston & Wellman, 1999).

Let's remember that teachers who are developing their skills in priming for formative assessment are trying to understand and practice a new way of school life—for themselves and for their students. Many students in the building have become accustomed to "doing school" (Pope, 2001). Lemke (1990) calls it "playing the classroom game." Others refer to it as "doing the lesson" (Jimenez-Alexiandre, Rodriguez, & Duschl, 2000). After years in the graded classroom, our students (and their teachers) have been acculturated to the habits, scripts, and routines of assessment of learning—summative assessment.

Students have learned that most questions are rhetorical. Answers will be supplied by a few. In the higher grades, students who sit quietly (and in back rows) are accustomed to being left alone. Unfortunately, the notion of what it means to be a good student has been largely synonymous with being invisible (Powell, Farrar, Cohen, 1985; Sizer, 1984, 1996; Cuban, 1993).

It's not uncommon for students who have suddenly been immersed in a classroom culture that does school differently to wonder:

• Why is the teacher asking Why? so much?
• Why is the teacher using equity sticks (popsicle sticks with a student's name on each) to call on us?
• Why is the teacher waiting a bit before taking answers, instead of just calling on Carly and Josh, who have their hands up?
• Why is the teacher putting all answers on the whiteboard, even the wrong ones?
• Why is the teacher always answering a question with another question?
• Why can't the teacher just solve the problem and write the correct answer on the board so we can move on?

Our students need to know satisfactory answers to these questions as much as we do. Priming takes this into account and works to help students understand not just the what and the how of classroom activities, procedures, and structures, but also the why.

Formative Assessment Tips

Questioning the Roles We Play

Sage on the Stage, Commander in Chief, Classroom Management Expert—however appealing these roles and moves may be, none of the traditional modalities of teaching capture the challenges of becoming a formative assessor.

The formative assessor, we contend, is not merely a teacher who transmits knowledge: she is also a guide connected to the values, beliefs, and aspirations of her students as they discover new skills, proficiencies, and capacities to learn.

As you read on, we invite you to imagine yourself more and more as a formative assessment (FA) Guide on the Side. The FA Guide takes her students into a new world of classroom communication, where people exchange ideas, give one another feedback, solve problems, and face difficult subjects with intentionality and care. The FA Guide studies how the roles she plays and the moves she makes influence classroom culture and student learning.

What the Research Says

For almost two decades, we've known that formative assessment practices rank among the top interventions that improve educational outcomes. We also know that students benefit from teaching approaches that emphasize learning intentions, success criteria, and metacognitive strategies in the classroom. Hattie (2012) found that, "when teaching and learning are visible, there is a greater likelihood of students reaching higher levels of achievement" (p. 21).

Yet making teaching and learning visible requires an accomplished teacher as evaluator and activator of students' prior knowledge and experience. Research tells us that visible learning strategies are, in fact, visible. They require a formative assessor to play a critical role in her classroom: the role of leading and orchestrating such that every child can indeed engage in a classroom culture that is rich in formative assessment to support their progress toward achieving meaningful learning targets. Every child can participate if first the child knows the scripts, roles, and routines associated with it. Visible learning means laying out, or priming, what we are doing. The moves-based approach to classroom formative assessment we offer can play an important role in the work of supporting visible learning.

Our work adds to the existing knowledge base on the use of elementary teachers' reflective practices to advance the skills required to bring about more powerful classroom mathematics and language arts discussions and to make teaching and learning more visible to students (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Lampert, 2003; Grossman, 2005; Sleep & Boerst, 2012). Fortunately, we also have video and case study examples in middle and high schools of teachers and students who are familiar with priming moves that support a formative assessment-rich classroom culture (Gold & Lanzoni, 1993; Lieberman, 1995; Darling-Hammond, Ancess, & Falk, 1995; Duckor & Perlstein, 2014).

Some literature on adolescent development in general can help inform teachers as they plan their priming. Deci and Ryan (2000) and more recently Elias (2004) and Cervone and Cushman (2014) have spoken to the universal needs students have for autonomy and self-determination, connectedness and belonging, and competency and control in classrooms. Jacquelynne Eccles and Carol Midgley's seminal studies in the 1980s explored how developmental changes in adolescent cognition and social behavior interacted with classroom environments and teacher practices. Damon and associates (2008) have also uncovered the need for purpose and meaning in young people's educational experiences and lives. These experts help explain why many students decline in their school-oriented effort in the middle school years. Their work can also help us better understand the real need for better, more developmentally appropriate priming for formative assessment practices with our students.

Unfortunately, the literature on building, nurturing, and sustaining—what we call priming—a formative assessment culture in today's classrooms is thin. Not much attention is given to how different students experience the cognitive, affective, and cultural demands of formative assessment. Personal and cultural identities certainly play a role (Perrenoud, 1991). We need more conversations and sharing among teachers about FA moves—what is working? For whom and why? How can we ramp up classroom discussions that are inclusive of "unorthodox" thinking or "naive" beliefs? And how can we circle back to students who are not yet ready to join others at the table—perhaps because of a perceived (and potentially real) lack of voice in our schools today?

Although there has been a renewed policy interest in the United States with embedding the core skills of speaking and listening in public school classrooms, we still need more insight into what works and how to set up—how to prime—favorable conditions for educational interventions that will make positive differences each and every day.

Going Deeper with Priming

Priming sets the stage for all other formative assessment moves. Priming is both the glue that holds members of the learning community together and the structural framing that supports what a class can build together. Priming is the careful, intentional, and rewarding process of establishing norms, protocols, and frameworks of inquiry that all stakeholders can contribute to in your classroom.

Although, generally speaking, the benefits of priming in the classroom learning space are universal, can we really expect that priming is also one size fits all? Rather, shouldn't we expect priming to look different in each of the subject areas? And perhaps more important, won't the flavors and directions of priming look different depending on students' ages, maturity, and grade levels?

In this chapter, we, too, lean on studies from Boaler and Humphreys (2005) that have highlighted the importance of social norms in the creation of effective classroom environments. Paul Cobb (e.g., McClain & Cobb, 2001) has identified the importance of subject-specific norms in determining the quality of student-teacher interaction. Along with formative assessment pioneers Black and Wiliam (2009), we agree in principle that "what counts as a good explanation in the mathematics classroom would be different from what counts as a good explanation in the history classroom, although they would also share certain commonalities" (p. 27).

Although priming moves are not one size fits all, priming in different subject areas does share certain commonalities. We assert this based on empirical observations carried out in our preservice teacher credential program that works in more than 30 schools across eight different subject areas in a culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse region of California.

We have found these three basic truths about priming across all contexts:

• Priming involves students. (It is not just "done" to them, without their input.)
• Priming is more than just prepping for and warming up students for a lesson.
• Priming addresses more than students' feelings about learning.

Priming, like preparing lessons, is familiar to all teachers. But priming involves the students directly in "the work." They must, in effect, help prepare pathways to formative assessment-driven lessons. Students must feel empowered to speak to, listen for, and engage big ideas and rich tasks. We downplay the role of students in formative assessment-driven classroom cultures at our peril.

Priming is a process. It requires sizing up challenges that students will have with formative assessment moves. It is not easy or natural for students to know what to do when they are expected to elaborate on an answer to a question.

Priming well takes work behind the scenes—before and after each lesson. It is about preparing students for the process of delving into content, content that will—no matter how carefully chosen, introduced, and thoughtfully spiraled—frustrate, flummox, inspire, irritate, and bore some students.

Planning your priming moves means taking a moment to think: Who will respond to my questions today? Who will come to the board and share an answer on the word wall this morning? Who will feel safe to answer in the group when I ask, "Can someone explain or elaborate or say more?" Who may not? Why might that be? What can I do, or set into motion, that might help?

Priming, however, is not just about preparing students for a test or an assessment activity. Priming is also about supporting them—and supporting them to support each other—through the struggles for visible classroom learning. We are priming our students for lifelong learning, as they journey through school and eventually into the worlds of college and work.

In The Classroom

Priming Is What You Already Do

When you smile and shake hands with your students as they enter your classroom, you're priming.

When, as a physical education teacher, you tell stude...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Praise for Mastering Formative Assessment Moves
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by John Hattie
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Priming
• Chapter 2. Posing
• Chapter 3. Pausing
• Chapter 4. Probing
• Chapter 5. Bouncing
• Chapter 6. Tagging
• Chapter 7. Binning
• Conclusion
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright