How's my teaching?
Formative assessment tells the story

Informal writing can be a means of formative assessment, just like a pop quiz.

Each is a quick way for teachers to find out how much students have learned (or misunderstood) and how much they still have to teach before the final exam.

Informal writing is ideal for writing courses because it gives students writing practice in addition to any other benefit it confers.

Use informal writing for quick check

The same informal prompts you use as write-to-learn activities do double duty as assessment vehicles. You still have students write briefly in response to their class reading and discussion, but you look at the results from a slightly different perspective.

Authentic learning and authentic assessment in one package. What could be simpler?

Test informal prompts yourself

Just because a writing prompt is informal doesn’t mean you can just whack out any old thing. You can't have a good formative assessment with a crummy writing prompt.

A poor question will produce poor answers no matter how well students know the material.

Test your informal prompts to make sure they produce the sorts of responses you want to generate.

How do you test a prompt? answer it yourself. That’s right. Get out your pen and write a response.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the first time you skip the testing process, your prompt won't produce the kind of responses you wanted. It happens to me every time I slack off.

Give feedback

Since you required students to write, you are required to read their writing and respond. (Formative assessment is half instruction and half assessment; responding is part of the instruction half.)

I’m not saying you have to correct papers, or grade papers, or any of that standard Miss Inky Fingers stuff. You can respond to informal writing activities in many faster, easier ways.

• Putting one “typical” anonymous response to a question on an overhead or white board and discussing it briefly.

• Making a whole-class comment, like “the class is doing well at learning flabits” or “I must not have explained flabits well. Let me try a different angle.”

• Written responses on individual students’ papers.

Give each student some kind of personal written feedback each week, if possible. If you can’t manage that, do one comment every other week.

Focus on the ideas in the responses. You may mention a writing mechanics error only if you can say it makes the writing hard to understand. Don't make mechanics your main concern.

Encouraging comments are better at motivating to learn learners than critical ones. A phrase or sentence about something specific that’s good about the student’s work is best.

Give A's for effort

You don’t grade informal writing on its quality. Students either do the work or they don’t. It’s an I/O, pass or fail, A or F situation. Don’t phrase it that way to students, however.

For students, present the write-to-learn activities you use for formative assessment as opportunities to get an easy grade. Josh shows up in class, turns in answers to write-to-learn questions, he gets an A.

If you don’t want to give A's to people who come to class only once every third week, you can fiddle with the grading standards. You might require students to complete 90% of the activities for an A, 80% for a B, etc.

What you cannot do is give Josh an F because he thought active voice had something to do with cheer leading. Don’t fall into the “English teacher trap” of thinking you are grading students.

What you are really doing in a formative assessment is assessing your teaching.

If you mess up, you have to teach the whole topic over again until everybody gets it.

Next stop: sample formative assessments.