How's my teaching?
Formative assessment tells the story

Formative assessment via informal writing is a quick way for teachers to find out what they still need to teach on a given topic.

Unlike results of a quiz, informal prompt responses often can show not just what students have not learned, but also why they are having difficulty learning the material.

The responses reveal which students need to be helped more or helped differently in order to master essential content.

Teachers can modify their instruction to meet students' needs before the summative evaluation. It's a lot better to find out in November that something is not working than to find out in June that students did not learn essential material.

Learn to use informal writing to Shape Learning, Reshape Teaching of ELA content. Examples are drawn from writing mechanics topics, which all ELA teachers have to deal with and most find a thankless chore.

Use informal writing for quick check

The same informal prompts you use as write-to-learn activities can do double duty as vehicles to provide you with formative assessment of your teaching. The prompts don't change, but the perspective from which you look at the results does.

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

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.

Test your prompts by answering them yourself. Write your prompts. Let them sit a day. Then write a response. DIY isn't as good as having someone else test the prompts, but it's better than not testing them at all. The first time you skip the testing process, your prompt won't test the knowledge you intended to test.

It happens to me every time I slack off.

Give students A's for helping you

I find it convenient to make the grade for informal writing A or F. Given that choice, most students will go for the A, especially if the task is short.

The grade is a token, a hook to get students to do the work that will really raise their grade.

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

It is totally unfair to assign grades to students based on how well or how poorly you taught. You don't want to have your pay or your job dependent on how well students' perform on tests, do you? I didn't think so.

I recommend that you pay students for providing you with formative evaluations by giving them a way to get an easy grade: Josh shows up in class, Josh turns in answers to the informal writing, Josh gets an A for informal writing.

In exchange, you get all that wonderful formative assessment from Josh so you can can improve your teaching. Isn't that a good trade?

Improve your teaching with feedback

If you require students to write to provide you with feedback on your teaching, you need to follow up with adjustments to your teaching.

That will mean at the very least that you give students feedback about such things as:

Those kinds of feedback do not need to be presented as a list of the correct answers. You can work the information into class discussion after a writing prompt, either by drawing it out of students (best) or by suggesting it yourself (better than nothing).

Next stop: sample formative evaluations.