Cultivating Classroom Climate

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"Formative Assessment: an Enabler of Learning" by Margaret Heritage, Assistant Director for Professional Development at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA, summarizes the teacher's role, the student's role, and the classroom climate during formative assessment.  Though she has many helpful things to say about the teacher's role and the student's role, I gravitated toward her discussion of the classroom climate. 

According to Heritage, the classroom climate is an "essential aspect" of formative assessment, a fact which I have not seen emphasized in my other reading. She offers three aspects.

1.  "Power and responsibility in the classroom is not just the teacher's prerogative, but is distributed so that the teachers and students work together to share responsibility for learning."  While teachers are active in gathering data through multiple measures, student are not passive throughout the formative assessment process.  Instead, they are to be actively engaged in self-assessment, "generating internal feedback that tells them when they need to make adjustments to their learning strategies."  To do this, students need to first understand the learning target, which should be communicated by the teacher, and they need to know what the finished product looks like, which can be effectively accomplished through modeling and a gradual release of responsibility (as outlined by Fisher and Frey). This would also include holding students responsible for utilizing feedback, whether from themselves, their peers, or the teacher to inform their future work.  

2."The classroom has to be a safe place."  This is incredibly important for a class built around formative assessment practices.  For teachers to collect data on student weaknesses or gaps in understanding, students must be willing to share confusion and difficulty without fear of looking stupid.  Some students would rather not turn in an assignment at all rather than risk trying and "failing" at it.  One way to do this is to communicate the purpose of the formative assessment process.  Students need to understand that it is not a "gottcha" experience to prove that the student wasn't paying enough attention during instruction. Instead, it is to help establish next steps so the student can be more successful.  Also, teachers need to be clear to students about learning being a process of growth requiring endurance, not about being "right" and "getting it" immediately.   

3. "The relationships in the classroom must be supportive and collaborative, characterized by mutual trust among teachers and students."  Another element of the student's role is to engage in peer assessment, whereby "peers assess each other's learning against the same indicators that they use to check on their own learning when they are engaged in self-assessment."  To be honest, I have had mixed success with peer assessment.  When I truly reflect on my teaching practices, I have to admit that most of the time I use peer assessment as a step to force students to do one more draft of a paper or assignment before it gets to me.  My hope is that this helps to take care of some of the larger, more obvious issues in a work (ie: missing thesis statements, no internal citations, etc,), so I don't have to grade as many drafts.  This is fine, in theory, and very helpful for getting students to revisit the requirements for the assignment and look for specific aspects.  However, it does not help students to me more aware of their thinking nor does it help them to analyze and evaluating the thinking of others.  On Bloom's taxonomy, my students are identifying/recognizing when they should be on the higher levels, which means that I am cheapening the experience for them.  To improve, I need to work much more deliberately to front load through modeling, think-alouds, and shared writing.  Students need to have a full understanding of what the learning target looks like and what the performance indicators of that target should look like, so the act of peer assessment is more meaningful and increases metacognitive awareness.  



Other Margaret Heritage resources:

Video lecture- Featured presentation from the 5th Annual Iowa High School Summit
Article on Learning Progressions 
Books
Webinar Slides from presentation given in Rhode Island