What is your vision for Formative Assessment?

As we are implementing AZ College and Career Readiness standards, the PUHSD math teachers have also been addressing the alignment between the Curriculum, Instruction, and the Assessment expectations.  When we started transitioning to the new curriculum, we intentionally created structures to provide feedback to students on how they are progressing with the new content.  The teachers didn't want to focus on assessments solely as a grade, we wanted to learn how to use assessments to promote student understanding and student engagement in the Assessment cycle.  After two year of implementation, we reflected on our progress and formalized our Vision for Formative assessment.  We wanted to be able to answer the following questions: 

• How do we effectively integrate formative assessment into our classrooms?
• How can formative assessment support the new curriculum?
• How can formative assessment be used as a teaching strategy?
• What types of formative assessment are most effective for assessing student understanding?
• How do we differentiate instruction in response to formative assessment findings?

Dylan Wiliams (2011), states:  

When formative assessment practices are integrated into the minute-to-minute 

and day-by-day classroom activities of teachers, substantial increases in student achievement—of the order of a 70 to 80% increase 
in the speed of learning are possible. . . 

Moreover, these changes are not expensive to produce. . . . 

The currently available evidence suggests that there is nothing 

else remotely affordable that is likely to have such a large effect. (p. 161)

Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

The Math Instructional Leaders reviewed the Five Key Strategies for Effective Formative Assessments and listed the supporting evidence from their teacher teams. This is our vision and our starting point to truly understand the power of Formative Assessment.   

Summary of Year-Long Learning

Last week, the Algebra and Geometry Teachers finished their exploration of high cognitive demand tasks.  The focus of the February session was to:

• Analyze and complete a data dialogue on the 1^st semester data.
• Utilize the Thinking Through a Lesson Protocol (TTLP) for developing lessons that promote rich mathematical thinking. 
• Describe the thinking behind the selection, support, and implementation of a task. 

This year we have been learning WHAT is a high-cognitive demand task.  We spent time reviewing Type II and Type III PARCC tasks, SMARTER Balanced items, and defining what makes a task a great task.  In November, teams created rich tasks to use with our current curriculum.

Last week, we focused on HOW we support implementing these rich tasks.  Teachers make hundreds of decisions daily, hourly and minute-by-minute on how the mathematical content is going to be developed via the mathematical practices.  To create effective mathematics student-to-student and whole class discourse that promotes a balance of conceptual understanding and procedural fluency, teacher teams collaborate BEFORE a lesson to develop a progression of how the students are going to develop the math content and the mathematical practices for each lesson. The teams last week utilized the TTLP process to identify specific thinking that they should consider when planning a lesson and each team created one lesson that incorporated this specificity of thinking. 

Thank you to all of the PUHSD teachers that have participated in the district-wide training this year and know that I appreciate the sacrifices (sub-planning and more) you make for your pursuit of continual learning!