Overview

One of the most integral parts of effective teaching is the use of formative assessments to assess student comprehension, progress towards learning goals, and overall academic progress of students. This should occur on a regular basis within daily lessons as well as longer units of instruction. While many teachers at my school would probably say that they use formative assessments, if you asked for a definition in the room, you would receive as many definitions as there are people in the room. In fact I have already run this exercise as a demonstration of how to use socrative.com for open-ended questioning as well as padlet.com as a way to quickly post examples and comments on each other’s postings. If you followed up that question by asking our teachers what they do with the information they glean from formative assessments, you would be likely to receive another roomful of different answers. It is this lack of consistency around formative assessments that my school’s administration wanted me to tackle with this pilot internship project.

The hope was to entice the pilot teachers to formatively assess their students more often by couching the project in terms of learning many different technology platforms to use with their students. This creates the space for us all to be learners about technologies we are unfamiliar with while also developing the comfort to discuss with each other the utility of these platforms for student learning. It is not enough to simply try something out if it does not benefit student learning.

1. By March 2019, create a resource website of various digital platforms with instructions on how to create accounts and different formative assessments to utilize in the classroom for use by the 10th grade teachers.
2. By April 12, 2019, provide at least two sessions of small group professional development with additional one-on-one sessions as needed for the 10th grade teachers on creating formative assessments utilizing a platform of the teacher’s choice.
3. By April 12, 2019, every 10th grade teacher will have created and implemented at least three digital formative assessments using the same platform every time.
4. By April 12, 2019, every 10th grade teacher will have created and implemented at least one reteaching lesson as determined by the data from one of the digital formative assessments.

My group of 10th grade teachers who were working with me on this project consisted of: 2 Math teachers, 2 English teachers, 2 History teachers, 2 Science teachers (including myself), 1 Spanish teacher, and 1 Specialized Instruction teacher. Three of these teachers were brand new to the school and two of these teachers were in the first five years of their teaching career. All teachers were familiar with the mandated online grade system and had access to classroom integrated projectors with smart boards. My school possesses 8 laptop carts with approximately 30 windows based laptops each that can be checked out when testing is not in process.

After our first few meetings and trying out several example assessments I had created, the team selected Formative, Socrative, Quizizz and Flip Grid to pursue. While teachers were free to pursue other platforms, these platforms are the only ones I focused on supporting in meetings, in one on one sessions, and on the project website.

The Internship was an overall positive experience even though we experienced multiple disruptions to our planned meeting structure which made it difficult to fully train my team of teachers in both the technology platforms as well as the design of reteaching lessons based on the assessment data. I know that my fellow Science teacher began to consistently use Quizizz in all of her classes and has voiced that she will continue to do so moving forward. Most teachers at least tried out one of the platforms I presented, but I am not sure that anyone else created at least three formative assessments. With our number of meetings cut from 6 to 2 it became difficult to follow up on individual's work during that time. I would say that I met my first two Learning Objectives, partially met my third and did not meet my last objective at all.

The most important result however, was that my teachers felt very positive about using technology going forward. Multiple teachers expressed a desire to generate a larger 10th grade technology plan going forward into next year. Once PARCC and other mandatory testing is done in May, the team plans to resume meeting and begin to make these future plans so that everyone will have the summer to accommodate new technology and instructional ideas into their planning.