Over the winter break I finished reading  Outstanding Formative Assessment – Culture and Practice by Shirley Clarke.  The book is based on research and full of wisdom and sound strategies to put into place in any classroom to leverage the use of formative assessment. One of the things that I appreciated about the book is that as professionals our learning around formative assessment is ongoing and that spending time continuing to learn and improve our practices will directly impact the learners in our classrooms.  

A learner being able to identify what they understand or don’t understand is the first step towards them making connections and growing in the depth of knowledge that they have about anything.  Formative assessment empowers learners and allows them to assess where they are in their own learning.

In her book, Clarke provides questions/activities that can be used at the beginning of instruction to push learners past simply recalling or guessing information. She has an entire section of her book that addresses the use of formative assessment to effectively start a lesson. Questioning strategies, exploratory activities and examples of pupil work are used to establish prior knowledge and capture interest.  I created templates in Google Slides for my 4 favorite starters that Clarke writes about. They allow a learner to assess and explore what they know from the beginning of instruction.  Pairing students to reflect is recommended. Clarke emphasizes throughout her book the importance of talking partners. 

I would suggest having these loaded and ready in an app such as Google Slides, Socrative, Pear Deck, Go Formative or Nearpod. (My examples are linked below.) If your students have access to a device, please take advantage of it.  Paper and pencil cannot get you the information anywhere near as quickly or efficiently.

• A Range of Answers  - Students are asked a big question and given a a range of answers to discuss. Example: What does a plant need to grow? Air, Zinc, Lemons, Water, Heat, Soil, Milk, Light, Oxygen. (Students can explain why they selected their answer choices. The range of answers will be wide.) 
• A Statement - Students are given a statement and have to agree or disagree with it.  They discuss their response with a partner. Example: 40% of 500 is greater than 55% of 300. Do you agree or Disagree? Explain how you know. (The statement can also offer answer options of “always, sometimes or never true”.)
• One that works and One that Doesn’t - Students are presented with two scenarios and are asked to explain which one works and which one doesn’t. The discussion allows for students to think, discuss and analysis. Example: Why is this sentence grammatically correct and this one not?
• Start from the end - Students are given “the end or answer” and asked what the  question is.  Example: The answer is 360°. What is the question?   

Clarke writes, “The most powerful educational tool for raising achievement and preparing children to be lifelong learners, in any context, is formative assessment. The research evidence for this is rigorous and comprehensive.”  I believe it’s worth our time to continually learn new strategies to get formative feedback from our students and for our students to use the feedback to self-assess. 

*Tech tip - if you want to use a template of a slide from above in a slide deck that you already have created or are creating, you can import the single slide into your deck.  The screencast below will show you how to import slides into a Google Slide Deck. 

Dunn describes the new way of restaurants, "This new wave of restaurants is not defined merely by long, uninterrupted opening hours; diners and brasseries have those, too. They’re set apart by their genre-bending flexibility, the way they’re engineered to cater to those seeking everything from coffee klatsches to salads on the go to sit-down dinners. Their menus are flexible, too, and affordable enough to encourage multiple visits per week—yet sufficiently polished to appeal for an evening meal. They defy definition as cafes, fast-casuals, coffee shops or bars, but borrow aspects of many of those formats to sync up with the rhythms of contemporary life."

As I read the article I couldn't stop thinking about our classrooms. Are we pivoting to meet the needs of the students that we have in front of us today or, are we expecting them to continue to come to a learning environment that was designed for information that was static and slow to change? 
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Take a minute to read the article and think about ways that you can possibly start a conversation about a pivot in your school or classroom.  Think about homework, grading, classroom procedures and daily schedules.  It all has to start somewhere!

Please leave a comment and share an example of a pivot you have seen in a school or a classroom that is helping meet the needs of today's students. 

Now back to packing up that cabinet.  😀
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At Thanksgiving Kate, my daughter a junior at Baylor University, bounded in the house full of energy as usual. After finding the dog and spending some quality time with clearly the most important being in the house, she unloaded her car bringing in her backpack last. As she placed her backpack on the kitchen table, she let me know she had work to do over the break. What I thought she meant was she had a lot of studying to do to prepare for finals. The work she was challenged with was none of that. She was enrolled in a poetry class and she needed to create something that reflected her work and learning over the semester. Over the weekend, I watched as she looked through her work. She experimented with different ways that she could share or present what she had written. The process made her uncomfortable and pushed her. With her permission, I share what she created below.

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Kate inspired my #OneWord for 2018...CREATE. To create is to bring something new into existence.  I often find myself learning something new and storing the knowledge and not actually creating something from it and sharing it with others. So in 2018 I am committed to creating and encouraging teachers to look for innovative ways that students can show their learning through creating original thoughts, writing, projects and presentations. I also think of creating as making learning visible.  Simply beginning with the end in mind will change much of what instruction and student learning looks like along the way. If it's not going to be a test with a lock down browser that is used to assess the learning, I believe the experience in the classroom will look drastically different. 

Technology now allows for the creation of multi-modal content easily. To take advantage of the resources that we have, we have to make an effort to teach digital literacy and how to use the tools that we have at our finger tips.  Creating and making learning visible doesn't have to be a polished product either. Simply creating a video that explains a concept or sharing a draft at any point along the way is creating. The ability to share what is created along the learning journey with others and receive feedback is something that technology allows to happen seamlessly.

I want to thank Dr. Chloe Honum at Baylor University for pushing and inspiring my daughter to continue to learn, take chances, and create. I am so grateful that her time  over Thanksgiving was spent creating something that is original and beautiful. This is just one of many examples of higher ed is challenging students in a far different way than rote lectures and exams. 

Here is to learning and creating in 2018! ​#Create