Reply To: Lesson 2: The True Purpose of Assessment – Discussion

[Tania Ash]

The redefining of formative assessment as a process rather than as a tool is a key idea, I think. There’s formative assessment built into a lot of what we do – even when we sit next to kids and have them take us through how they’re thinking about a problem. My struggle tends to be with documentation. I tend to keep a lot of those conversations in my head. I’ve tried sticky notes and notebooks, but I only end up looking back on them much later, when it’s too late. I use the “stuff in my head” to generally guide next steps (do we proceed? do we spend more time?), which, I know, is definitely not the way to go. I do document any written assessments (like checkpoints) on a standards-based system, but it’s the other parts I’m not doing well on.