The Formative Assessment Action Plan: Practical Steps to More Successful Teaching and Learning (Professional Development)

Join Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher as they outline a clear-cut, realistic, and rewarding approach to formative assessment. They explain how four discrete steps work in tandem to create a seamless, comprehensive formative assessment systemone that has no beginning and no end. This ongoing approach enhances an active give-and-take relationship between teachers and students to promote learning. Where am I going? Step 1: Feed-up ensures that students understand the purpose of an assignment, task, or lesson, including how they will be assessed. Where am I now? Step 2: Checking for understanding guides instruction and helps determine if students are making progress toward their goals. How am I doing? Step 3: Feedback provides students with valuable and constructive information about their successes and needs. Where am I going next? Step 4: Feed-forward builds on the feedback from step 3 and uses performance data to facilitate student achievement. Dozens of real-life scenarios demonstrate how to apply these steps in your classroom, always focusing on the presence or absence of student learning to guide the action. By enabling teachers and students alike to see more clearly what they need to do for learning to be successful, this approach builds students' competence, confidence, and understanding. No matter what grade level you teach, The Formative Assessment Action Plan will help you make better use of assessment data so you can more quickly adjust instruction to keep every student on the path to success. Students perform poorly on assessments primarily because they don't see the relevance of the content they are expected to master, they think they know the material but really don't, or teachers don't recognize that students aren't learning. Now there's a way you can overcome all of those challenges by using the improved formative assessment system in this breakthrough book. Two of ASCD's most popular authors, Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, reveal how to create a failsafe assessment system that covers all three essentials: (1) Ensure students understand the purpose of the assignment, task, or lesson, including how they will be assessed; (2) Provide students with information about their successes and needs; and (3) Capture the performance data that teachers need to guide student learning. Learn how to create purposeful lessons that tap into students' motivation and help with their goal-setting. Discover lots of different ways to determine what students understand, what is still unclear, and how to use their mistakes to determine what to teach next. Along the way, explore effective forms of oral, written, and peer feedback that improve student performance. Embedded throughout the entire book is an instructional plan that ensures this formative assessment system helps you make better decisions about what types of teaching approaches to use in your classroom Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher reveal how to create a failsafe assessment system that leads to purposeful lessons, clear indicators of student understanding, and forms of feedback that improve student performance. --from publisher description Creating a formative assessment system Feed up: where am I going? Checking for understanding: where am I now? Feedback: how am I doing? Feed-forward: where am I going next? Building the formative assessment system.