The analogy from The Hunt for Red October was effective. How have teachers responded to it?

Also, as a field, I think we’ve had more success helping teachers learn how to do formative assessment than helping them know how to use results to shape subsequent instruction. How has the project addressed this challenge?

Teachers have in general responded well to it, particularly in helping them think through the value of slowing down and picking up information rather than continuing ahead with the curriculum. We dedicated time – and developed tools – to support teachers in anticipating how students might respond to the assessments they were developing, and then to think of what we called ‘feedback strategies’ in advance of using the assessments with their students. The learning progression was also helpful in this regard, as it represented to teachers how ideas were related to each other. We are in the process (today, actually!) of looking at classroom videos to see how teachers used these feedback strategies with students.

Very effective analogy indeed.

The formative assessment cycle looks as though it should be helpful to teachers in moving forward beyond project-facilitated work – do you have reports of teachers working through the cycle independently of the project?

I am interested in using this but am not sure how I would implement in my district. I would love to learn more.

Love the analogy! Our school has been focusing a lot on setting clear learning targets, providing thoughtful feedback that connects to the learning target and success criteria, and of course using ongoing formative assessment opportunities to determine students needs and understanding. Very powerful!! Glad to see this is being utilized at the high school level as well!

I am really impressed by what you and your team are doing. I am a pilot instructor for the pilot AP Computer Science Principles course, and am really interested in applying your formative assessment design on this course. I really would like to know what my students have learned by the end of the lesson, and your design for creating an effective and efficient formative assessment on a daily basis. Can you further elaborate about the evidence that you have collected that clearly demonstrates impact this model has on teaching and learning and how teachers work collaboratively to create such formative assessments? Thank you again; really great project!

Agreed – nice analogy! It’s great work, and encouraging to hear that some teachers are applying these ideas outside of the specific areas where you are providing assessments. Based on your work, do you have ideas for effective ways to help even more teachers practice using formative assessment and your model? Do you see your approaches scaling?
I look forward to hearing about the outcomes of the video classroom observations!

I also like your analogy a lot. And I like the results you show at the very end of the video. I wish it had gone on longer. I’d also, like Arthur, like to know more and know more detail about how to go from teachers learning to slow down and moving towards better formative assessment in their classrooms to the habits they form (as Arthur said, how they are doing all this on a daily basis). I don’t know if you have gotten that far or not, but I would think your ultimate goals would be (1) to find ways to systematize what you’ve been doing so that your ways of helping teachers learn can be put in place broadly, and (2) learning how to go beyond the hard work of learning to do these things towards teachers designing and engaging in formative assessments on a regular basis and in a way that gets learners involved, too, in assessing themselves. I realize that wasn’t a question; what I’m looking for is to know what you’ve thought about these things and to push you to think about them if you haven’t. ;-)

Janet, thank you for these thoughtful comments – I have always hypothesized that the practices and design criteria teachers learn about in our professional development model develop ‘long arms,’ so to speak, and extend into their everyday classroom practices. We certainly have teacher self-report data from interviews to support this, but we have not collected data outside the natural selection unit that was the focus of this study.

As for your thoughts about the ultimate goals:
(1) I am currently four months into a new research-practice partnership with an entire school district where we are trying to take this model to scale to coordinate teachers’ assessment design work, and their interpretation of data, across multiple instructional communities (school-based PLCs, whole-district late-start meetings, and instructional leader meetings). The model is certainly having to be adapted in terms of our work as facilitators of the learning, and the tools and resources my team developed around the design cycle are being modified and adapted for this new context.
2) My hope is that teachers do learn to design and engage in formative assessments on a regular basis; in effect, going through this cycle in more of a ‘rapid prototyping’ format rather than over an entire school year, as we did in the study. This has been challenging as teachers’ timelines are so short, and designing (or even locating and adapting) high-quality formative assessment tools takes time. As for involving students in assessing themselves, this is one of the criteria we are hoping to take up with teachers when they look at an assessment and consider whether it will be a good formative activity.

I’m glad to see that your comments are in line with where I’m taking this work! I’d love to talk with you more about how to continue to extend our work in these important directions.

Great point, Janet, about my use of the ‘hope’ language. Fortunately, as part of the Elevate project (featured in the video), we are conducting an in-depth FOI study of all the professional development videotapes to look for similarities and differences across participation in the PD, and then we will link that with classroom enactment and student learning as a way of pulling out design criteria/features of the professional development (e.g. facilitation, tools intended to scaffold teacher learning) that seemed to support teacher enactment of formative assessment. In the new study, we have the fortunate opportunity to work with several in-place PLCs, and I intend to look across these sites to look at, as you say, “what it takes…to foster new habits of mind and gain competency and flexibility in using them.” I am learning from and enjoying this challenging conversation!