of the best strategies to ensure that every student receives relevant, rigorous, and robust content. Chapter 5 covers the second step of the cycle: providing an opportunity for students to chew, or engage with, the content. We’ll share some of our favorite strategies for reaching the variety of learners in your classroom to ensure that all students master the content. Chapter 6 examines the third step: checking, or evaluating, where students are in mastering the standard. This is the formative assessment step. We’ll explain why it is crucial to examine evidence every day for every student and provide strategies that make that possible. Chapter 7 covers the final step of the instruction cycle: changing, or differentiating, the instruction. We’ll share strategies that allow teachers to more purposefully differentiate their instruction, grouping, pacing, practice, and more based on their formative assessment results. Chapter 8 provides a sample lesson plan that shows you how to bring all the dance steps together for a quality lesson designed for maximum learning. We also include a lesson-plan template, checklists, and self-assessment to help you teach this way.
Let’s dance!
Part I
SETTING UP YOUR CLASSROOM DANCE FLOOR
Building a dance floor starts with design. Then, you deliver quality materials. After that, you nail down the boards and sand the wood to provide a seamless finish fit for dancing.
The same premise is necessary when creating the “dance floor” in our classrooms. The design is the teacher’s mindset and how they establish, manage, and encourage a passion and enthusiasm for learning. The materials are the research-based best practice strategies a teacher uses to ensure student success, and the framework is of course, the standards. Part I of this book sets the stage. First, get familiar with the formative assessment process: chunk, chew, check, and change in chapter 1. Start planning your daily learning target and formative assessment in chapter 2. Continue planning by learning how to get to know your students in chapter 3. By the end of part I you will understand the frame you need to provide a seamless finish fit for learning.
CHAPTER 1
Choreograph Your Instruction With the Cha-Chas Steps
You can sum up brain research, the formative assessment process, and differentiated instruction in four steps: (1) chunk, (2) chew, (3) check, and (4) change. When you dance all four steps daily during all content area instruction and practice, planning instruction gets easier, and the results will amaze you. Before we can swing into our four steps, we must answer the following questions.
• What does neuroscience say about learning?
• What is the formative assessment process?
• What is differentiated instruction?
• Is there research to support differentiated instruction?
• How did we merge neuroscience, the formative assessment process, and differentiated instruction into four steps?
What Does Neuroscience Say About Learning?
Giving students frequent opportunities to quiz themselves or take brief teacher- or computer-designed quizzes to recall information, along with giving them effective feedback, has an effect size of more than 0.80 (more than one and a half years of growth) on student achievement (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Cranney, Ahn, McKinnon, Morris, & Watts, 2009). Effect size is a number that represents the difference between two groups to show effectiveness. In this case, it shows how effective one agent is on student achievement. Retrieving information from the brain—the memory—about what was learned that day and previous days is more effective than rereading the text, taking notes, or listening to lectures again (Agarwal, Roediger, McDaniel, & McDermott, 2013).
This study also finds that recalling and writing an answer to a flash card question (before flipping over flash card) or equation improves learning more than thinking the student knows the answer and flipping over the card prematurely. Bottom line? Researchers say to educators to pull information out of student brains rather than place more information into their brains and provide feedback to students about their learning (Agarwal et al., 2013). Retrieval represents the chew and feedback represents a check and change in our instructional cha-chas. Both are critical components for memory and learning.
What Is the Formative Assessment Process?
Formative assessment isn’t a one-time thing. It is a process that both teachers and students use throughout their work together; each gives feedback to the other so the teacher can change instruction and improve students’ achievement (Popham, 2013). Since educators always want to improve students’ achievement, they should view all assessments through a formative lens—even the main formative assessment. Figure 1.1 shows the progression from preassessment to summative assessment. If you use the preassessment data collected prior to instruction to determine what to teach, who to teach, and how to teach, then it becomes a type of formative assessment because it informs your upcoming instruction. (Chapter 3 on page 22 talks about preassessment in detail.) Ongoing formative assessments occur throughout a lesson and allow you to correct misconceptions or misunderstandings; provide feedback; and change grouping, pacing, content, and assignments.
These daily, ongoing formative assessments inform your instruction on the spot, the next day, or at a future date. Teachers don’t give summative assessments until after many formative assessments and much feedback. It makes sense that if we catch student errors early, they should do better on future assessments as long as we are assessing the same thing at different times in the unit or quarter. If we catch mistakes early and respond to them (with feedback, reteaching, different pacing, and other differentiation), they will learn it before the summative assessment. Teachers should only grade summative assessments. Many teachers and students mistakenly think the assessment process is complete at that point. If you view summative assessments through a formative lens, you can determine areas for student growth from graded work. Technically, any assessment is formative if it informs the teacher and student of how learning is going and how to change instruction versus just recording it.
We’ll answer these questions in the following sections.
• What are the characteristics of the formative assessment process?
• Is there research to support the formative assessment process?
What Are the Characteristics of the Formative Assessment Process?
The characteristics of the formative assessment process are multifaceted, with specific criteria.
• All instruction centers around the learning target, which
