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| Sometimes low tech is best. |
Classroom learning should be a process that occurs in a cyclic fashion over time. Once students are exposed to material and allowed to practice a "low risk" assessment is given to guage the levels of understanding. This assessment is called a
formative. My friend on Twitter
Jim Cordery explained the distintion of formatives really well last week on
#sbgchat, when he described this type of assessment as the guiding your instruction in real time.
How It Works
Each day I give my students a short five minute practice question set using the SENTEO response system to record their answers. I've arrived at not having the system show them their grade as I think this makes it to inviting for them to simply copy others answers thus robbing themselves of the honesty in doing it themselves. When all students have finished, we go over as a class. Once that is over, I can then delve into the data more closely while the students are engaged in other parts of class time. In my asynchronous environment there is always lots of interesting things to be doing and students work autonomously which frees me up. Once I have identified particular students that need reteaching on a certain topic in the warm up activity I can work individually with them. My tools of choice are the small portable dry erase board shown above. Each day I have prepared a few mini lessons to address these topics when they arise and I can discuss each standard in detail, wasting little time.
Anecdotal Evidence
This year I have made a concerted effort to make sure that this formative feedback loop has been given a chance to work over a period of three weeks before I even thought about giving a summative assessment. What I'm seeing is students who are much more invested in their own learning, willing to look at notes and past question sets to help themselves, and entire classes that are able to demonstrate mastery on the performance indicators being assessed. So far I just have my observations, but later in the year after I have gone through a few of these cycles I will be giving my students surveys to more objectively learn how they feel about this different style of assessment. For now, however, I will rely on the smiles and high fives I get that tell me
this is really working!
