Formative Assessment - For Teachers

I think we can all agree about the value of formative assessment.  Learners gaining continuous feedback about their level of proficiency makes a profound difference.  Formative assessment typically applies to students - but why not teachers?

Since teachers have the greatest impact on student achievement wouldn't it make sense to provide formative assessment so teachers can improve as well?  Principals will need to ratchet up their ability to supervise instruction, through both formative and summative assessment.  Most principals try to conduct walk-through observations of teachers, which can provide ongoing conversations leading up to a summative evaluation. 

Some suggestions to using formative assessment of instruction include:

• Develop and use a common language of instruction. You can't discuss instruction without vocabulary.  Name the strategies so they can be replicated.
• Get feedback from the teachers about the formative assessment.  Let them test drive the instrument on themselves so they have a better understanding of what will be collected.
• Provide a variety of assessment methods. Self observation, peer observations, as well as principal walk-through observations should be used.  People will see trends if the information comes from a variety of sources.
• Set goals.  Teachers should use the formative assessment data to set goals for instruction, as well as new strategies to try.
• Get out of the office.  Set weekly goals for classroom visits; the benefits to the principal go far beyond observing the individual teacher.  Students will see the principal from a different perspective and the principal will have a keener understanding of curriculum and instruction.
• Utilize technology to make gathering the formative assessment data more efficient.  Good principals try to have the information collected by the time they leave the classroom.  Needing to go back to the office to write up the formative observation prohibits frequent visits. For example, Google Forms can be used to gather and send the data on a variety of devices.
• Follow-up.  Have teachers respond to reflective questions, discuss what was observed and what can be changed.

Committed teachers generally want to improve their craft and formative feedback only makes sense.  The principal doesn't need to know everything about the content or even all the strategies, but they do need to provide a process for reflection and improvement. 

Special thanks to Mitch at Dorchester and Jen at ESU 6 for their work on developing quality processes.

Toby