Formative Assessments

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What formative assessment strategies have you seen your cooperating teacher use?  How were they used, what purpose did they serve, and if possible, what did your cooperating teacher learn from them? Provide at least 2 examples. More are welcome.


I had a really interesting chat with my cooperating teacher about formative assesments. I explained to him that it was formative assessment week in this class, and he shared that his philosophy about formative vs summative assessments is that they don't necessarily have to be vasty different. He described using a specific formative assessment 3 times in a unit, once in the beginning, middle, and end. The last time he administers it, it's actually a summative assessment but since its in the same format its not recognized as one by the students. We then talked about how this was only really possible because of proficiency based grading. In the assessment he looks for their ability to meet a certain standard, and if they meet it they move on, if not they keep working on it. 


This view of summative assessments does not take away from the consistent formative assessments throughout the class time. One that I observed first had the students split into 3 groups, and each group had a different part of the previous days lesson to discuss and share out. This gave the teacher an understanding of what was sticking and what they needed to look more into. (The students did excellent and were super enthusiastic about the content- the first chapter of Stamped by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X Kendi )


Another formative assessment occurred when they were talking about writing summaries. Different summaries of Goldilocks and the Three Bears that the class had written the previous day were shown on the board anonymously. The students all had whiteboards and there were 3 options of what could be improved. (one was it was a run on sentence, another was if there was too much or too little detail, and the third was if they established context..... might have been in a different order) The students job was to read the summary and pick what note that summery could use. It was a great way to see where the individual students were at in terms of understanding the lesson, while keeping it fun and light.

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