Teams that engage in designing, using, and responding to common formative assessments are more knowledgeable about their own standards, more assessment literate, and able to develop more strategies for helping all students learn. In this conversational guide, the authors offer tools, templates, and protocols to incorporate common formative assessments into the practices of a PLC to monitor and enhance student learning
Common formative assessments—the centerpiece of an integrated, standards-based system! Now you have powerful means to closely align curriculum, instruction, and assessment to the standards essential for student success. This timely resource presents the "big picture" of an integrated, standards-based instruction and assessment system, and offers guidelines for: Aligning school-based common formative assessments with district benchmarks and large-scale summative assessments Predicting likely student performance on subsequent assessments in time to make instructional modifications Implementing and sustaining common formative assessments within the school’s or district’s culture
Assessments that improve the speed and quality of learning—fully updated for teacher teams! In this expanded, all-new edition, author Larry Ainsworth provides a system of intentionally aligned components (standards, instruction, assessments, and data analysis) that all work together to improve student learning. Readers will learn to: Build the “highway” to aligned assessments Decide the learning intentions and student success criteria for a unit of study Evaluate and revise assessment questions for quality Plan the learning progressions for students to attain the learning intentions Create quick progress checks to coincide with the learning progressions Use assessment results as feedback to adjust instruction and student learning strategies Upgrade your CFAs using CFA 2.0! CFA 2.0 is so much more than assessment design. It shows teachers how they can intentionally align standards, instruction, assessment, and data analysis in every unit of study.
This book demonstrates how educators can develop effective and efficient assessments. The authors simplify assessment development to give teacher teams the confidence to write and use team-designed common formative assessments that help ensure all students master essential skills and concepts.
Learn everything you need to know to implement an integrated system of assessment and grading. The author details the specific benefits of formative assessment and explains how to design and interpret three different types of formative assessments, how to track student progress, and how to assign meaningful grades. Detailed examples bring each concept to life, and chapter exercises reinforce the content.
Reignite the passion and energy assessment practices bring as tools to guide teaching and learning. Strengthen instructional agility in professional learning communities with collaborative common assessments that collect vital information and consider all levels of the organization. Explore the practical steps teacher teams must take to establish clear, comprehensive assessment systems, and discover how to continually improve results.
A practical, in-depth guide to implementing formative assessment in your classroom! Formative assessment allows teachers to identify and close gaps in student understanding and move learning forward. This research-based book walks readers through every step of the process and offers illustrative examples across a range of subject areas and grade levels. This book explains how to: Clearly articulate learning progressions, learning goals, and success criteria Select strategies for assessment and provide quality feedback Engage students in self-assessment and self-management Create a classroom environment that values feedback as part of the learning process
A teacher presents a lesson, and at the end asks students if they understand the material. The students nod and say they get it. Later, the teacher is dismayed when many of the students fail a test on the material. Why aren’t students getting it? And, just as important, why didn’t the teacher recognize the problem? In Checking for Understanding, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey show how to increase students’ understanding with the help of creative formative assessments. When used regularly, formative assessments enable every teacher to determine what students know and what they still need to learn. Fisher and Frey explore a variety of engaging activities that check for and increase understanding, including interactive writing, portfolios, multimedia presentations, audience response systems, and much more. This new 2nd edition of Checking for Understanding has been updated to reflect the latest thinking in formative assessment and to show how the concepts apply in the context of Fisher and Frey’s work on gradual release of responsibility, guided instruction, formative assessment systems, data analysis, and quality instruction. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey are the creators of the Framework for Intentional and Targeted (FIT) Teaching™. They are also the authors of numerous ASCD books, including The Formative Assessment Action Plan: Practical Steps to More Successful Teaching and Learning and the best-selling Enhancing RTI: How to Ensure Success with Effective Classroom Instruction and Intervention.
Discover the keys to building effective PLCs Creating an authentic professional learning community requires breaking down the walls of isolation and collaborating to improve student learning, because collectively we are more than the sum of our parts. Grounded in the award-winning author’s foundational work with the Coalition of Essential Schools, this book enables educators to hit the ground running with a research-based process that includes: Setting the foundation for collaboration and team building Facilitating protocols Examining student and teacher work Implementing teacher-designed common formative assessments Analyzing and responding to data
Formative assessment is one of the best ways to increase student learning and enhance teacher quality. But effective formative assessment is not part of most classrooms, largely because teachers misunderstand what it is and don't have the necessary skills to implement it. In the updated 2nd edition of this practical guide for school leaders, authors Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart define formative assessment as an active, continual process in which teachers and students work together—every day, every minute—to gather evidence of learning, always keeping in mind three guiding questions: Where am I going? Where am I now? What strategy or strategies can help me get to where I need to go? Chapters focus on the six interrelated elements of formative assessment: (1) shared learning targets and criteria for success, (2) feedback that feeds learning forward, (3) student self-assessment and peer assessment, (4) student goal setting, (5) strategic teacher questioning, and (6) student engagement in asking effective questions. Using specific examples based on their extensive work with teachers, the authors provide - Strategic talking points and conversation starters to address common misconceptions about formative assessment; - Practical classroom strategies to share with teachers that cultivate students as self-regulated, assessment-capable learners; - Ways to model the elements of formative assessment in conversations with teachers about their professional learning; - "What if" scenarios and advice for how to deal with them; and - Questions for reflection to gauge understanding and progress. As Moss and Brookhart emphasize, the goal is not to "do" formative assessment, but to embrace a major cultural change that moves away from teacher-led instruction to a partnership of intentional inquiry between student and teacher, with better teaching and learning as the outcome.
