Focus+on+Formative+Assessment



• Given our commitment to continuous improvement; effective instruction will be a multi-year focus with an emphasis on assessment in year 1, specifically formative assessment. This is just a starting point for our discussion on Effective Instruction. Many of us are doing this in our classrooms and that when we learn about things like formative assessment it helps us to continuously improve our work in the classroom. It also helps us to clarify information so that we are all understanding the same concepts and ideas. __ Some more information and food for thought on why we need to work on formative assessment: __ Here is an extract from a speech given by Dylan Wiliam (”Inside the black box”) a couple of years ago. He was talking about getting teachers to change their classroom pedagogy with regard to formative assessment. He calls it gradualism. // “Asking teachers to make wholesale changes in their practice is a little like asking a golfer to change her swing during a tournament. Teachers have to maintain the fluency of their classroom routines, while at the same time disrupting them. Teachers should develop an action plan that specifies a small number of changes — ideally two or three — that they will make in their teaching. As teachers establish new techniques in their practices, they can take on additional ones. For those in the school leadership team whose job it is to improve the quality of teaching, there will be a temptation to push teachers to change faster than they might otherwise do, but the result will only be a shallow adoption of the new practices while the teachers are being monitored. As soon as the supervision is relaxed, the teachers will revert to their earlier practices, and nothing will have been achieved.” //