On Wednesday, February 14th of 2018, I sat down with Terri Klemm to talk about formative assessment. Terri is a life-long educator who spent many years as a teacher before delving into administration. She is now an instruction and leadership coach with the International Center for Leadership in Education.
Terri is one of those people that just exude excitement and wisdom. The moment I identified my topic, I knew she was someone I wanted to talk to. She was more than willing, and when she walked into my classroom, leather bag in tote, I knew I was going to get some great information. She smiled eagerly as she sat down at one of the student desks. She was relieved that it was just an audio recording, as she didn’t have to put on her lipstick.
The first thing I asked Terri was how she defined formative assessment. She said that she “keeps it in [her] heart and head” as something that “informs your instruction; it informs everything you do in your classroom. [It] is where the student is at that moment, where they’re going, and how [the teacher] is going to get them there.” To add on, she gave a wonderful analogy, which just happened to utilize a lyric from one of my favorite songwriters—George Harrison. “If you don’t know where you’re going,” Harrison sang, “any road will take you there.” As Terri explained it, teachers who don’t use formative assessment are “just going willy-nilly.” Since formative assessment tells a teacher “exactly how to teach the next step,” without it, “you’re just talking to yourself.”
Terri made it clear that formative assessment should be the foundation of all classrooms. She did acknowledge that “summative [assessment] has its place,” but she referred to it as “the autopsy,” an analogy that I absolutely loved. She emphasized that with summative assessment, “you’re looking at what has already been done and you really can’t change it; you can change it for the next time, but you can’t change it for the student.”
As a contrast, Terri highlighted the fact that “formative assessment is showing growth,” and that it is important that [teachers] “share formative assessment data with the students…” and “that if they knew where they are and where you want them to go…they can see that and they can track their progress.” To that she added a punctuation mark: “[Formative assessment] really tells us exactly where we’re going and is so, so powerful.”
When I explained to Terri how adopting a more formative-assessment based approach in my classroom has changed the structure of my planning—for the better, as I no longer plan entire units in advance—she explained the importance of having both long-term and short-term goals for students, the long-term being the overall objective of the unit and the short-term being the skills in which students show a need for improvement. Further, she clarified a common misconception: “The one thing about formative assessments that I think a lot of educators have problems with is they make it very teacher labor-intensive, and there are ways that you can do quick checks, and they don’t have to be long, but they’re deep in understanding.”
One strategy that Terri really likes as an in-the-moment formative assessment is the quick write, which allows the teacher to, within minutes, get a snapshot of what the students know or don’t know, either by listening in on conversations or having students read what they wrote. “Conferring is another formative assessment,” she added. She emphasized the fact that “there are lots of ways to ‘dipstick’ to see what it is [students are] doing and what they know. Then it’s also empowering kids to let us know what they don’t get or that they need more, that it’s becoming metacognitive—thinking about their own thinking and knowing what they’re doing well and what they’re not. So it’s a huge—it’s a paradigm shift that we’re bringing them into that assessment mode with us so that they can understand what’s happening with them.”
Finally, I shared with Terri the ways in which I used data gathering to track student growth. Initially, I was reluctant to take on the task, because I didn’t think it was feasible to collect data for upwards of 150 students and utilize it in a timely manner. Terri agreed that it can certainly be a challenge if not approached in the appropriate manner: “The word data scares people—scares them, because it’s a bunch of numbers. So I always try to have people think about formative assessment as information gathering, that very targeted information.” She recommended using small white boards as a quick method to gather data, explaining that “[y]ou can just quickly assess if they really get it or not, and it’s not that you’re dragging all the papers home over the weekend and grading them, because formative assessment is immediate and then it really changes what happens in the classroom.” That was a suggestion that certainly made my ears perk up.
The Teachers Tribune 