Does the word formative assessment bring you anxiety? Is it just another task you are being asked to do in addition to your multiple preps you have each day, the countless grading, and all the ‘extra’ duties you are responsible for in your building? In my experience working with educators, these are often the barriers that prevent many educators from implementing formative assessments into their daily lessons.
Knowing how useful formative assessments can be to student learning I began to ponder how I could support educators to bring these tools to their classroom. Remembering time is the barrier I knew the tool I created needed to be easily accessible, require little prep time and be universal in design. It needed to be something a teacher could use during their instruction and not just at the end, when the moment to learn may have passed. I had been there! I taught a great lesson, I asked students to demonstrate their learning through homework, collected it, graded it, all to realize they didn’t learn. This data was too late – several days had passed and we were moving on, where would I find the time to reteach? It was these moments that inspired me to create the formative assessment tool kit.
The tool kit uses a variety of pre-prepared materials to quickly implement formative assessments at ANY time into ANY lesson. Need a pre-assessment? Use true/false questions from your text with the myth or fact flags to start your lesson. Presenting a topic and see students losing interest? Have the students grab turn and talk cards. These cards include 5 questions that can be used for any topic. No time to prep for a class? Ask students to read an article and use the foil stars to mark their reading. Having the tool kits available allows freedom to quickly choose a variety of activities to easily engage and quickly assess student learning. This immediate data allows for quick intervention and increased student learning.
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