If you ask me today what is the best book to read about
teaching, I will say Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam. After the many good books that I’ve read the
past five years, I don’t know why I didn’t come across this gem earlier. No
doubt I will encounter better books in the future, but this one really gave me
that kick-in-the-pants encouragement to make larger inroads into improving my
teaching, which would hopefully improve student learning. Why “hopefully”?
That’s because Wiliam is very realistic about the centrality of assessment in
the learning process. This is not Assessment of the generate-more-paperwork
administrative mandate pervading our institutions. It is the assessment we
should all be doing as teachers embedded in our lesson plans.
In chapter two, where the author makes the case for
formative assessment, there is a section titled “Assessment: The Bridge Between
Teaching and Learning”. I will quote several sentences. “Assessment occupies
such a central position in good teaching because we cannot predict what
students will learn, no matter how we design our teaching… Students do not
[necessarily] learn what we teach. If they did, we would not need to keep
gradebooks. We could, instead, simply record what we have taught. But anyone
who has spent any time in a classroom knows that what students learn as a
result of our instruction is unpredictable. We teach what we think are good
lessons, but after we collect our students’ [work], we wonder how they could
have misinterpreted what we said so completely.”
Before I elaborate on the author’s suggestions, let me first
describe how I presently assess student learning. Outside of occasional project
work and writing assignments, I generally grade four types of content-based
assessments: worksheets, quizzes, homework (or problem sets) and exams. One
might call these summative assessments, although they partly function as
formative assessments – at least in the standard lingo. (It’s not the grading
that makes something formative or summative in my opinion.) I don’t always
collect worksheets or homework, i.e., sometimes the work is ungraded, so to
speak. While a significant portion of my class time is spent systematically going
through worked examples (one of the best ways to learn many chemical concepts),
students also have opportunities to “work problems” and get feedback from me in
class. In addition I get feedback from them as I observe what difficulties they
run into.
In each of the four “graded” items mentioned above, I get information
on different scales. Worksheets tell me immediately which students understood
the lesson material of the day, who didn’t understand it, and who helped whom.
(My classes are small enough that I can circulate through all groups at least
once, often more.) Quizzes tell me if students individually understood one key
thing from the previous class period. (My quizzes are taken in the first five
minutes of class.) Problem Sets tell me if students learned a chunk of material
usually over the course of 3-4 class meetings, and in particular whether they
were able to apply the concepts to different but related problems (not
identical to ones worked in class). Sometimes solving the problems requires
integrating multiple concepts. Exams assess individual student learning over a
larger chunk, usually about a month; the final exam is cumulative Students can
work together on problem sets and worksheets. Quizzes and exams are individual
assessments.
What feedback do the students get? On worksheets and problem
sets, the students get their graded work back along with a detailed answer key.
If there is a particularly egregious common error, I discuss it briefly the
next class meeting. For quizzes, I provide the answer immediately in class
before I’ve seen the student responses. I grade a stack of 3x5 index cards
after class. Rarely do I look through the responses in class. For graded exams,
the students can see what they got right and wrong accompanied by a detailed answer
key, but I don’t discuss it in class. In rare instances, when I observe a
widely common error, I would mention this in class. I attribute the rarity of such
an occurence to students having to work individually on exams. When they work
in groups with other students, the same error tends to propagate widely – often
traced to one of the more capable and confident students who first made the
error.
While I think I am mostly asking the right questions on
exams from a summative assessment perspective, I’m not sure I’m doing well in
the earlier stages. My questions focus on what I think the students should
know, but don’t necessarily reveal how they think or where a misconception may
lie. Of course when I discover a common misconception when grading, I make it a
point to relay this to the students. But my in-class
questions might not being do the best or even the right job from a formative
assessment point of view. Wiliam writes: “Questions that provide a window into
students’ thinking are not easy to generate, but they are crucially important
if we are to improve the quality of students’ learning.”
I think that’s the really hard part: constructing excellent
questions at the formative stage. These should be questions that expose
previous learning and probe for potential misconceptions. Given the brevity of
his book (a good thing overall), Wiliam provides just a handful of examples of
standard questions, and then builds on these with much better constructed
questions. While his examples are mainly in middle school math (his training is
as a math teacher), one gets the gist of the type of question that really gets
at the nub of learning. I need to ask much better questions but haven’t taken
the time to do so. Lest, I use this as an excuse, Wiliam addresses the matter
head-on.
“One common objection […] is that teachers do not have time
to develop such questions, not least because they are too busy grading, but
this just shows how ineffective many of our standard classroom routines are.
Every teacher has had the experience of writing the same thing on [multiple
student] notebooks because the students were allowed to leave the classroom
before the teacher discovered that the students had failed to understand some
crucial point. So the important issue is this: does the teacher only discover
this once he looks at the students’ notebooks? Viewed from tis perspective,
grading can be seen as the punishment given to teachers for failing to find out
that they did not achieve the intended learning when the students were in front
of them.”
I consider myself appropriately schooled. What I really need
to do is build up a stock of excellent questions for formative assessment,
particularly at the introductory level. I have enough teaching experience to
know where the tricky parts are in my courses. I should also work with others
who are teaching the same sections to pool and share knowledge; we have many of
these at the introductory levels. One thing I am going to do this semester is
to devote some time to coming up with good in-class probing questions. And
perhaps, I can do less grading which seems like a more-than-reasonable
trade-off.
Although a short book, Embedded
Formative Assessment is chock full of great practical examples. The author
does a fantastic job getting straight to the point, providing the necessary
theory and scaffolding, chooses good representative examples to make his point,
and keeps moving things forward. All these are marks of an excellent teacher.
His experience shows. On the other hand, as I went through the book I was
partly self-berating myself for not reading this book sooner, and thinking
about how I’d potentially let down hundreds of students in the course of my
teaching while floundering around repeating the same mistakes. (On average I
teach 100-150 students per year.) I could have built up a set of really good
formative assessment questions by now. As it is, I have plenty of great
summative assessment questions (that I do reuse) but a limited set of great
formative assessment questions. The author anticipates my despair! Here’s what
he says in the epilogue.
“The problem with being provided with so many techniques is
that […] too much choice can be paralyzing and dangerous. When teachers try to
change more than two or three things about their teaching at the same time, the
typical result is that their teaching deteriorates and they go back to doing
what they were doing before. My advice is that each teacher chooses one or two
of the techniques, […] tries them out […] If they appear to be effective […]
practice them until they become second nature. If they are [not] … try another
technique or [modify a previous one].”
I’ve decided to pick two things to work on this semester. The
first is to come up with some great formative assessment questions in class. For
a start, I’ll set myself the goal of one insightful one each week that I will
build into my classes. The second is one I had mentioned in a blog post last summer during an assessment exercise. I came up with a great suggestion:
having students critique written answers from students in a previous year. Of
course, these would be carefully curated for maximum learning to take place.
(Wiliam recommends this in his book!) I got so busy this past Fall that I did
not do this at all. Shame on me! This semester, I will remedy things. I dug up
final exams from the equivalent class last year, and I plan to make appropriate
selections when the corresponding topic is covered in class. I should also
commit on blogging about my trials and errors – for accountability!
I end this post with a final quote from the author. He
exhorts teachers to “accept the need to improve practice, not because [we] are
not good enough, but because [we] can be even better, and focus on the things
that make the biggest difference to [our] students”. What great advice! His
book receives my highest recommendation.
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