students meet the identified standards, formative assessment emerged as the most effective and efficient manner through which to expedite learning. To be clear, the idea of formative assessment was not new; what was new was the impressive potential of formative assessment practices within the standards-based instructional paradigm.
Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (1998) report that using assessment strategies to guide instruction through descriptive (rather than evaluative) feedback could bring about unrivaled achievement gains, with the lowest achievers benefitting the most. This pivotal moment accelerated the growth in formative assessment studies and produced an aligned position that when schools use assessment formatively, they can close the gap between where a student is and where the standards expect him or her to be (Chappuis, 2014; Heritage, 2010; Sadler, 1989). More than ever, educators now understand how they can carry out assessment during the instructional process to improve both teaching and learning (Shepard et al., 2005), and how it can create a more efficient, effective path to proficiency (Heritage, 2010; Popham, 2008).
Standards represent a clear vision or outcome for what students are to achieve at the end of the instructional experience, which means teachers can now create clearer pathways to proficiency. By unpacking standards (which means deconstructing standards by identifying the learning targets that form the instructional scaffolding necessary to achieve the entire standard), teachers create learning progressions that allow students to see, with much greater transparency, what it takes to reach expected performance levels. Of course, educators have always associated assessment with measurement, and certainly formative assessment is a kind of measurement. However, efforts to gather formative evidence lead educators to intentionally shift to qualitative assessment (descriptive information about misconceptions and next steps). This balances the already embedded quantitative purpose (numbers and data that represent certain levels of proficiency—these data often tell what and who, but not so much the why or what’s next).
Distracted by Data
Educators have, however, lost a little focus. While current assessment practices and tools demand a more sophisticated approach to classroom assessment, the shadow of the accountability movement has arguably diverted too much attention to quantifying every instructional moment. Teachers create formative assessment experiences that resemble a summative that “doesn’t count.” This happens when teachers use points on every assessment and make policies that make summative assessments worth more points and formative assessments worth fewer. Students perceive that those formative assessments, the important moments of practice, “don’t count” because teachers simply don’t add points in the gradebook. This distraction also occurs when every moment of assessment interrupts the learning progression. In other words, the teacher has to stop teaching in order to conduct a formative event. The impact of a teacher’s instruction will not reach its full potential through a series of events that intentionally disconnect assessment from instruction. The first half of the formative assessment equation is timing these assessments within the instructional flow.
The second half of the formative assessment equation is quality feedback that identifies what’s next for the student (Hattie, 2012). The research on effective feedback is rich, long-standing, and makes it clear that feedback in the absence of grades, scores, and levels is most impactful (Butler, 1988; Hattie & Timperley, 2007). In essence, grades and scores actually have the potential to neutralize the impact of educators’ feedback because students either determine feedback to be unnecessary (when they achieve a satisfactory result) or undesirable or overwhelming (when they achieve an unsatisfactory result). Without a productive student response, feedback ceases to be effective (Kluger & DeNisi; 1996; Wiliam, 2011).
To be sure, data play an essential role in guiding a teacher’s instructional decisions as well as determining the effectiveness of his or her instructional maneuvers and the overall general program when examined over time. The reference to data as a distraction is not a dismissal of the important process of tracking student learning. Individual classroom assessments, common assessments, interim benchmark assessments, and even large-scale assessments can provide data points useful for understanding the impact of instruction and can lead to maximizing the available instructional minutes. Data become a distraction when the accumulation of data—not the advancement of learning—is the motive behind planning the instructional activities. There is a place for data, but real-time teaching and learning are responsive to students in the moment, and teachers should not pause to update a spreadsheet.
Assessment as a Verb
At its most organic, assessment is a verb we can infuse within the overall instructional process. Rather than having to stop teaching to conduct a formative assessment (noun), teachers move seamlessly among the moments of instruction, assessment, and feedback; though the lines still exist, they are blurry. The assessment as noun perspective leaves teachers with what appears to be an irreconcilable dilemma: if I’m assessing my students day to day and minute by minute, when am I supposed to teach? Seeing assessment as a noun—as a tangible event—creates the illusion that assessment is synonymous with a stapled package of questions and that assessment and instruction are two separate experiences.
The assessment as verb perspective allows teachers to assess and teach within a fluid instructional cycle where the teacher need not stop to conduct anything. Much like coaches, teachers can keep learning on track in real time and allow for the necessary maneuvers and advice to improve performance at a moment’s notice. There is no moment when coaches are not assessing their athletes; they assess every serve, every tackle, every shot, and every rebound against the level of performance they desire (that is, the standard). In response, coaches provide immediate direction on how to close the gap between what the athlete displays and what they expect. Occasionally a coach will stop practice, however in most cases, he or she provides descriptive instructions during performance and expects the athlete to make the necessary adjustments on the fly. In other words, effective coaches are agile enough to know what needs to happen before the athletes’ next opportunity to perform.
Instructional Agility in Context
Instructional agility does not occur in a vacuum but rather in the context of sound assessment design and execution. In Essential Assessment: Six Tenets for Bringing Hope, Efficacy, and Achievement to the Classroom (Erkens, Schimmer, & Vagle, 2017), we outline a framework through which assessment practices can maximize both cognitive and affective outcomes for students. Instructional agility is one of these six tenets. Each tenet is contingent upon the other five, which means it is essential to understand how each of the other five tenets contributes to a teacher’s ability to be instructionally agile. Figure I.1 outlines the assessment framework.
Figure I.1: The six assessment tenets framework.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/assessment for a free reproducible version of this figure.
At the center of all six tenets is the building of hope, efficacy, and achievement, which means students emerge from assessment experiences with increased achievement, an increased sense of efficacy, and an increased hopefulness for their potential success going forward. As well, the totality of any teacher’s assessment systems should develop and nurture a culture of learning rather than accumulating points or acquiring grades; grades become a reflection of learning rather than an acquired commodity.
From there, the tenets (and their subsequent practices) work synergistically to maximize the power of assessment within any classroom. For the purposes of this book, it is important to understand how each of the other five tenets contributes to instructional agility, as we have outlined in table
