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Common Formative Assessments

The practice of Common Formative Assessments is a way for teachers to use assessments to beneficially adjust their teaching pedagogy. The concept is that teachers who teach a common class can provide their classes with a common assessment. The results of that assessment could provide the teachers with valuable information, the most important being who on that teacher team is seeing the most success with his or her students on a given topic or standard. It is essential to note that the purpose of this practice is to provide feedback for teachers, not necessarily students, so an assignment could be considered formative for teachers, but summative for students. In essence, as written by Bailey and Jakicic, common formative assessments,

Promote efficiency for teachers, promote equity for students, provide an effective strategy for determining whether the guaranteed curriculum is being taught and, more importantly, learned, inform the practice of individual teachers, build a team’s capacity to improve its program, facilitate a systematic, collective response to students who are experiencing difficulty, [and] offer the most powerful tool for changing adult behavior and practice.    

Developing common formative assessments on a teacher team helps educators to address what Bailey and Jakicic lay out as the important questions to answer when reflecting on student progress. These include:

·            What do we want students to know and do?

·            How do we know they are learning?

·            What do we do when they’re not learning?

·            How do we respond when they’ve already learned the information?

Common formative assessments are a way to address the second question. Teachers can collect data on how students are doing to gain understanding and insight on whether students are learning, and how they are making sense of the lessons being taught. After gathering this data, teachers can proceed to develop systems and plans to address the third and fourth questions and, over several years, modify the first question to fit the learning needs of their specific students.

When utilizing common formative assessments to collect data on student progress, teachers can compare their students’ results. In tandem, they can also share the strategies they used in the classroom to teach that particular concept. With these things in mind, the teacher team can make some evaluations on what tasks and explanations seemed to produce the best student outcomes. Teachers who used alternate strategies now have new ideas for interventions and for when they teach the topic in upcoming years. Teacher teams can also use common formative assessments to review and calibrate their scoring practices. Teachers of a common class should aim to be as consistent as possible in evaluating their students. Comparing formative assessments, or having all teachers evaluate them together, is a way for teachers to adjust their grading criteria before the summative assessment. Through this practice, teachers are presented with an opportunity to grow professionally with the people who know them and understand their school environment.

To make the practice of teacher teams, common formative assessments, and power standards the most advantageous, the practice of backwards design should be utilized. Backwards design is the idea in education that the summative assessment should be developed first and that all formative work and lessons leading up to that specific assessment should be created second. Tomlinson and McTighe wrote, “Although not a new idea, we have found that the deliberate use of backwards design for planning courses, units, and individual lessons results in more clearly defined goals, more appropriate assessments, and more purposeful teaching." More specifically, intervention and re-teaching time must be factored into the schedule. It is unrealistic to think that every student will get every topic perfect and ready to take the summative assessment on a prescribed schedule.