Spotlight on Strategies are creative, research-based instructional strategies, created by teachers for teachers. These simple instructional strategies incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.

What immediately comes to mind when you hear the words formative assessment? I can guarantee that most will say exit tickets, unit tests, quizzes, 4 corners, thumbs up/down, etc... that we give at the end of a lesson to assess learning. Most of our definition of formative assessment comes from the meaning of the word assessment - thinking that it should be some sort of graded test or quiz that assesses a student's learning.

What if I told you that a formative assessment doesn't have to be any of those things listed? The goal of a formative assessment is to assess learning before, during or after teaching a concept. Instead of calling it an assessment, a more appropriate name could be a formative checkpoint because we are checking for understanding as we teach. 

The most important part of formative checkpoints are how we use them to drive our instruction. If we complete a formative assessment with a class, but then never look at the data, there's no point in doing it in the first place.

If you search for formative assessment ideas online, it becomes very overwhelming. One piece of advice I have is to choose one or two new strategies and commit to implementing those in your class within the next week or two. If you do this for an entire nine week period, you will have tried 18 new formative assessment strategies!