USING ASSESSMENTS IN INSTRUCTION
Searching for effective and efficient ways you can use assessments to guide your instruction? Would you like to learn how to use your learning targets to formulate formative assessments? How you can create learning targets that are clearly defined and direct your teaching? Then “Using Assessment in Instruction” can help. This course will address:
- Assessment Criteria for Success
- Monitoring Student Learning and Providing Effective Feedback
- Self and Peer Assessment:Student Reflection to Deepen Learning
Research shows that regular and high-qualityformative assessment in the classroom can have a positive effect on student achievement. There is firm evidence that strengthening the frequent and effective feedback that students receive from formative assessments lead to substantial learning gains. In addition, the perceptions of students and their role in co-creating success criteria and assessments have a significant impact on student performance. Students who can self-assess their own work are more motivated to learn.
JP’s over a quarter of a century’s experience and expertise can help both the new and experienced teacher learn how effective use of formative assessments lead to excellence!
Module 1:
Learn how to:
- Involve students in establishing their self- assessments and success criteria
- Provide high quality of feedback to students that comes from a variety of sources including other students
- Use your Learning Targets help to formulate the formative assessments
- Write Teacher’s Learning Targets that are clearly defined and taught. They are measurable, specific, student friendly and connected to the learning standards
- Increase the use of rubrics and checklists for students to use to evaluate their progress
Module 2:
Learn how to:
- Provide feedback that is: timely, instructional, descriptive, meaningful, and should increase a student’s academic achievement.
- Make effective instructional adjustments during the lesson based on individual student responses
- Teacher provides Think Alouds and modeling to guide students toward being able to be self-evaluative
- CFU (Checking for Understanding) drives the next instructional steps
- TAPPLE is used as a questioning strategy
- Feedback includes verification, elaboration, or explanation based on student responses
- Teacher provides meaningful repetition on any student responses that are not first time correct
- Teacher’s use of explicit instructional techniques increases: group responses, corrective, immediate feedback, pause and punch, think time
- Robust, text dependent questions are used for CFU
- Teacher recognizes when there is a pattern of errors made by more than one student and stops to reteach.
- For struggling students, teachers guide students towards mastery by focusing on few points and teaching one small step at a time
- Teacher’s feedback for successful students should be descriptive naming strengths and suggesting next steps beyond the required work
- Teacher comments on at least as many strengths and weaknesses
Module 3
- Teachers explicitly teach methods to students on how to self-evaluate
- Teachers increase opportunities for students to self or peer assess assignments.
- Teachers increase involvement in students co-creating their self-assessments
- Teacher’s questions promote student learning and elicit evidence of errors or misconceptions that need to be corrected or retaught
- Teacher structures enough time for students to use and apply their new learning/feedback.
- Technology that provides feedback is incorporated in lessons
- Increase use of Gradual Release of Responsibility- model, leading, testing, retesting
- Teachers see mistakes as learning opportunities and a legitimate part of the learning process
- Standards are translated into student friendly language
- Students are taught how to use rubrics/checklists to monitor their own work and the work of their peers during the learning process
- Teacher’s rubrics should contain: clearly stated Learning Targets, Success Criteria and descriptive levels or graduations of the quality of the desired work.
- Use of Graphic and Semantic Organizers to self-assess is increased
- Teacher uses Anchor Charts with self-assessment steps to provide a visual clue for those naïve students
- Feedback always starts with something positive both on the part of teacher and student
- Teachers increase their use of models of good quality work and poor quality work to help students self and peer assess
- Groups and assignments are differentiated according to the assessments