Alien Pedagogy

My understanding is that formative assessment tasks should not be for marks since it penalizes students for learning slowly, rather than rewarding them for learning. However, I’ve always attached some grade to formative tasks, fearful that students wouldn’t complete the assignment if I didn’t attach a grade to it.

In summer school, I decided to do formative assessment. I’m glad I did.

For one thing, the students often did pick up skills slowly. So having more than one opportunity to demonstrate skill and receive feedback before assessment was really helpful. So when students started getting high grades, they were quite surprised that their learning had been recognized.

I realized that formative assessment should have real feedback — perhaps more detailed than summative feedback. This struck me as counter-intuitive at first — shouldn’t the graded assessment have more feedback? However, if the graded assessment is the last time that we assess that skill then the time that the student is given to learn comes from the formative assignments.

I realized that formative assessment should be recorded. This fall, I’ll add formative assessment tasks to my gradebook but with a 0% weighting. In this way, it is transparent that students are learning, or that they’re not. I think it has additional benefits, including: increased student motivation, it imposes UBD planning on the teacher’s unit plan, and it provides diagnostic data for the learning community.

Coming to this point, I’m quite embarrassed that I didn’t get here sooner. If the last two years counted for marks, I suppose my teacher grade would take a hit because of it.

I’ve asked students to give feedback in a variety of ways — guided writing, surveys, class discussion. This time, I invited students to write me a letter during class time. I asked them to follow the positive / needs improvement / interesting format that I often use when offering students feedback.

Students liked:

• Variety of activities
• Humor
• Redoing their work for full credit
• Challenging assignments
• Freedom to speak
• Positivity
• The classroom library
• Emailing questions
• Drawing activities
• Visual notes

Students disliked:

• The way groups are assigned in the honors course
• How short DEAR time lasts
• How tough the tests are
• Messy handwriting on the white board

Interesting Comments:

• “Sometimes you talk so loud my ears hurt.”
• “You always dress so neat and tidy.”
• “Sometimes I think about bananas in your class because I get hungry.”
• “Sometimes you remind me of he who must not be named!”

Our school’s IT guru reports that her students often check their online grades for my class during her computer programming class.

The only thing that I’ve done to earn whatever level of student awareness is steady timing in feedback.

I tell students when I plan to mark their assignments, mark them during that time, and immediately post the scores.