J.P.

Caruso
Final Assessment Project

A Formative Assessment Handbook for New

Teachers to Lincoln High
Rationale
Formative Assessment can improve student achievement as well as improve
teacher effectiveness. A problem I have found, however, is that there seems
to be very little consensus among teachers within my community as to what
is formative assessment. As a result, I question whether formative
assessment is used as effectively or as meaningfully as it could. As I have
mentioned in past reflections I have found that many district and building
administrators put too much faith in the idea that their teachers have a real
understanding of formative assessment as well as its promise for improving
student learning. Erroneously, it seems that there is this underlying hope
that if we keep using the phrase formative assessment enough times
without attempting to define, apply, and discuss what it actually isteachers
and administrators are just going to eventually get it. Teachers cant teach
what they dont know and unless they are encouraged to reflect upon their
own assumptions about how students learn and how good teaching supports
learning, they cannot change their teaching practices (Moss, 2009).
Formative assessment can both help teachers be reflective as well as
support learning.
Prior to taking this course I believed I had a satisfactory understanding of
formative assessment and its potential as an instructional tool in the
classroom. I also felt comfortable talking with my colleagues about the
subject. This is not to say that I felt that I was the end all be all regarding
formative assessment because I knew I was not. Yet, I apparently felt
comfortable enough to question how it was being used throughout my school
district. In sum, if given the opportunity to assess my level of understanding
of formative assessment prior to this course, I would have labeled myself as

being a proficient practitioner. However, as a result of the readings and

discussion early in this class I believe I was very wrong.
My understanding of formative assessment has slowly evolved. In the late
nineties as I began my career, I believe I thought formative assessment was
about using homework and classroom activities to build a students
understanding of a given subject; in other words, the process through which
students undertake learning a new concept was formative in nature. When
either I felt that the students had learned what I had hoped that they would
learn, or the pressure of the calendar pushed me, I would have a sizeable
test and we would move on.
Gradually, that understanding evolved into one that I have had up until this
course. This understanding revolved around the idea of change. I believed
that formative assessment was some sort of small and relatively informal
assessment conducted by a teacher. What made this formative, however,
was that the assessment required some sort of change, on either the part of
the teacher or the learner, and ideally both.
The problem as I practiced this, however, was that more times than not, if
change was to occur, it generally happened only on my part. I would change
some element of my instruction in order to help students learn something
that I believed that they did not know. The problem was that while the
change or changes that I made may have helped a few students, even the
few that were helped were not cognizant of what was happening. As such, I
was never completely satisfied with what I was doing with formative
assessment. As I began to experience similar feelings this past fall I
attributed my lack of feeling successful to my need to reacquaint myself with
the classroom, after having been out of it for the last three years, and that
with some time and with better content and lesson planning things would
improve.

Through class discussions and the reading of our text, however, I began to
rethink my understanding of what was formative assessment. The more I
read the more I began to feel that that the promise of formative assessment
could be tremendous if one could really engage a student in the process. In
other words, both the teacher and the student have a role to play in
formative assessment. The key element lacking in my understanding up to
this point was that real formative assessment was collaborative rather than
teacher directed. Students needed to be truly central to the formative
assessment process in order for it to have the impact that Black and
Williams (1998) path breaking work demonstrated.
As I I look at my classroom this semester, despite an increased focus on
knowing the daily learning objective, students as a whole have only a slightly
better grasp of understanding what they need to know, and still have almost
no understanding of what they actually know prior to a summative
assessment. The more I read about formative assessment in my course work
the more I began to realize that my students this semester, most fall into one
of two categories. The first discovers that they do not know the content for
the summative assessment until they are actually sitting for the exam. The
other group seems so detached from what we are doing that do not
understand that they do not know the material until after the assessment
has been graded and returned.
As I have come to realize, the vast majority of my students this year are not
actively engaged or involved in the assessment process. As we have learned,
the formative assessment process engages students how to learn (Moss,
2009). Imagine what might happen if I was to have a conversation with
myself about where students were in terms of a learning objective, and my
students had a similar conversation internally and then both of us were to
come together in some way to share what we had found out? What if my
classes were to engage in the process that Moss and Brookhart advocated

when they advocated for the three questions that both teachers and
students needed to use to guide the formative assessment process:

Where am I going?
Where am I at now?
What strategy or strategies can help me get to where I need to go?

If all teachers and students were to engage in this conversation might the
culture of learning at a school change as a result? This is why I am interested
in formative assessment and thus my reasoning to explore this topic more
fully. The attached booklet represents a starting point from which I would like
to offer the administrative team at Lincoln High for possible inclusion in their
new teacher orientation program next fall. With feedback and time, I believe
that this could be a very usable product.