Leading your FAME team in learning to provide formative feedback

Whether you are new to the FAME project or you have been involved for a couple of years (or, like me, 9 years!) you have probably lamented on the task of giving feedback to students. Teachers feel it is a daunting task when considering time and energy. And it is. Even one of the gurus of the formative assessment process, Dylan Wiliam, is on record about how difficult it is to get feedback right. You can see from his chart below that based on the four ways students might respond to feedback, whether we give feedback about exceeding a goal or falling short of a goal, we have a 25% chance of getting it right! Yikes! 

But rather than making us fearful, let's have it make us diligent in doing it the best way that we can. We know that the first step in making sure our feedback is well-received and well-used is all in the relationship we have with students. So if you aren't where you want to be in building trust in your classroom, work on that too!

Now, FAME coaches, you have been diligently practicing your Cognitive Coaching (SM) skills, I know. I am going to explain to you in this blog post how to adapt one of the activities in your CC training to do with your FAME team. That activity is the Five Forms of Feedback activity that you did on Day 4 of CC. 

I carried out the activity just the way it was done in the training...5 pieces of chart paper and inductive reasoning. Use page 78 of the CC Learning Guide if you want your team members to keep notes on the Five Forms (I didn't.) Then ask them to write examples of feedback that they might give to students or that they have received themselves. Give them a few minutes for this brainstorming. Then have them share while you chart them on the chart paper to which they go. Now, I will tell you that Jane and Carolee make this look easy. Give yourself permission to struggle with this and just do the best you can. Having some items in the wrong columns will not diminish the power of the activity.

After you have charted their examples, see if they can come up with examples AND where they should go. Eventually, you'll want them to try to name the columns, and you can give guidance on this part. At the end, you can give your team members pages 146-147 of the CC guide. (And if you are scared of the inductive activity, you can skip right to this handout.)

Discuss in more detail the Five Forms. There is nothing innately wrong with the first three columns, and there are times we want to "pass judgment" in the form of praise. But when we want to give actionable feedback and when we want to open and deepen students' thinking, we want to use the last two columns in an equation that looks like this:   data + mediative question = formative feedback

From here, with your team, you can look a little deeper into mediative questions. I teach my team members JUST the invitational part of mediative questions from page 64 of the CC guide. Then I also give them a copy of page 67-the mediative questions worksheet. (All page numbers in this blog may be off just a bit depending on the edition that you have.) My teachers LOVE the mediative questions worksheet and most of them post them in their classrooms where they can see them while they teach.

Next, in your meeting, you can spend some time taking those first examples of feedback that the team came up with and work together to craft them into feedback that looks like data + mediative question.

Also, remember that there is a feedback activity in the supplemental guide of the FAME Learning Guide. Some of you may have done this activity at the launch, but it is a great one to come back to. And I think it is even more powerful when looked at again after learning the Five Forms of Feedback.

And then it is crucial that your teachers go back into their classrooms and PRACTICE and then reflect and report back on that practice and reflection. And then, when they stress, and you stress, because this is hard (and it IS hard, let's not kid ourselves!), share this little piece of wisdom with them:

Because we need to remember that the students are our partners in this journey and everything we do should be for and about them!

*Note: there is no right or wrong way to lead your meetings. If something I do with my team doesn't work for you, adapt it!
**Note #2: my meetings are two hours long. If yours are shorter, please do not attempt to accomplish all of this in one meeting!

Flippity!

Back in December, I attended a conference where I learned about the google add-on flippity.net. It has become, easily, my most used google add-on. Flippity works with your google sheets to create an array of tech and learning tools in the classroom. You can create a Jeopardy style game, flashcards, memory games, hangman, spelling lists, random name picker/group creation tool...the list is almost endless. And it is easy! To get you started, here is a video that will show you how to install and begin to use the add-on:

How to install the flippity add-on

I'll follow this up in a couple days with a post showing some of the different ways I've used flippity.

Learning Targets, Learning Progressions, Success Criteria...Making Sense of It All

One of the areas of the formative assessment process that I still need to do much thinking around and work in, is the area of Learning Targets. We know that Learning Targets are crucial in the formative assessment process and they are how we address the question "Where are we going in our learning?" They need to be effectively communicated to students and they need to come from the Standards we have adopted in our states/districts/buildings.

But for me, creating those learning targets is still a muddy work in progress. And when I add in all the information from various formative assessment gurus (Dylan Wiliam, Susan Brookhart, Connie Moss, Rick Stiggins, etc.) I often find myself more confused than when I began. How do Learning Progressions differ from Learning Targets? Should Learning Targets be specific to one lesson, one day, one unit? And where does Success Criteria come into the equation? Do I set Success Criteria for every Learning Target? This seems so exhausting, especially when I consider that I often find my Learning Targets need revision depending on the needs of my students.

In February of 2016, I attended a conference about Learning Targets led by Susan Brookhart. So this post, and my thinking around Learning Targets, Progressions, and Success Criteria are highly influenced by her work. I created the following graphic to represent my understanding. (Susan Brookhart has a graphic that is nearly the same as mine and I would have used hers with credit, but can't find it in a shareable format.)



What This Looks Like In Practice

I teach two classes of Reading Intervention, one of 12 sixth graders, and one of 9 seventh and eighth graders. Because their testing showed they were all close to each other in skill levels, I chose to work with just a couple of Common Core Informational Reading Standards.

Standard 1 is a foundational Standard that says students should be able to "Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text."

To make this Standard accessible to my students, I created Learning Targets, which in my mind are also Learning Progressions in that the targets are progressively higher order thinking skills. So my Learning Targets for this Informational Reading Standard 1 are:
1.1 I can annotate text to show close reading.
1.2 I can find answers explicitly in text.
1.3 I can make logical inferences from the text to answer questions.
1.4 I can draw conclusions from the text.
1.5 I can cite evidence to support my conclusions.

So, in the graphic above, I have completed the top right quadrant. As I think about each individual Learning Target, I think about what will be the Performance of Understanding (bottom left quadrant) for each of those targets, and then for each of those Performances of Understanding, I create Success Criteria or Student Look-Fors (top left quadrant.)

So, for Learning Target 1.1: I can annotate text to show close reading, the Performance of Understanding would be an article that the student has annotated. That means I need to have Success Criteria for annotation. This actually became quite detailed and is aligned to many of our Learning Targets in the class. Here is my Success Criteria for Close Reading and Annotation:




I have since changed the title of each page to First Level Reading, Second Level Reading, and Third Level Reading. This is because my struggling readers often need several readings just to comprehend. So most of them aren't ready for the Success Criteria of a second reading until they have read the article at least twice. Calling it the Levels of reading has made a lot of sense to them. (For some reason, the second and third pages of the document don't seem to show up. If that is the case, and if you want the other pages, here is the Link to Annotation Success Criteria Document.)

Much of my Curriculum for these two classes revolves around Close Reading. Annotating is the Performance of Understanding that makes their thinking visible, so the Success Criteria aligned to the Annotation makes sense to the students and to me. And the cross reference of the Success Criteria to the Learning Targets makes it easy for student to understand why they are engaging in the specific annotation activities.

In addition to having the Success Criteria in their binders to refer to, I also have these anchor charts created and laminated for students to use at their desks. These anchor charts are about the size of a baseball card.
      
So that is some of my thinking and work around Learning Targets and Success Criteria. My formative assessment team has done a lot of talking about this topic. We try to do this work together and to help each other out. We are finding that creating Success Criteria for math seems to be especially challenging. We'd love to have bigger conversations around this. If you would like to share how you develop Learning Targets and Success Criteria in other content areas or if you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, leave a comment!

Incorporating the formative assessment process into planbook.com

Last week I facilitated a training for Michigan's FAME initiative. When discussing the Planning component of the formative assessment process, I mentioned that I use planbook.com and set up a tab where I can keep track of when and how I use the components of the process. The screenshot below shows my planbook open to my plans page, but with the Go to button selected. In the third row of icons, you can see the My Strategies option. This is an area that planbook allows teachers to customize, and this is where I created my formative assessment elements.

There are already some difference sets of Instructional Strategies built into this feature. Here you can see some of the Marzano strategies:

In this screenshot, you can see the area where you create your items. So far, I have included the 3 Modes of Assessment (conference, product, and observation.) I think that teachers are used to intentionally planning for conferring with students and for the products we assign, but I find that planning what I am going to be watching for in my students has really helped me to figure out what they need. I also include the main 6 Strategies of FAME. There are many different conceptualizations of the formative assessment process. In FAME we think of the strategies as the metacognitive ways we want students to think. And in FAME we call the actual "things" that we use to gather evidence "tools." I will continue to add to the tools over time, but the three listed below are ones I use frequently.

So, once you've set your items up in My Strategies, you select them by going to the Instructional Strategies tab and choosing My Strategies from the drop down.

 Select the ones you want and they are added to that tab for that lesson. It's that easy!

On planbook, the teacher has the option to set up tabs in any way. So, I thought I'd do a quick share of my tabs. Because I am teaching two groups of reading intervention, my first tab lists the text for the day. The next tab is the Standards. Then I have Learning Targets. This tab was originally called My List and it is another area of planbook that the teacher can customize. I just added all of my Learning Targets to it and selecting them is as easy as pie! My next tab is the Essential Question for the lesson, followed by tabs for Materials and Assessment. In the assessment tab I give a bit more explanation of the assessment and how it will be used. The next tab is the Instructional Moves, where I explain the procedure for the lesson of the day. Next comes the Instructional Strategies. I will note, that you can choose your own strategies (like my formative assessment process ones) AND the other options as well. So if I used a Kagan structure in addition to the formative assessment components, I can list it all on this tab. The next tab is the Notes and Reflection tab. This is where I make any special notes about the lesson. I also add instructional decisions based on the student evidence in this section. So if I'm making groups the next day based on information from this lesson, I note it here. I think I have my lesson plans well set up to be in line with the dimension of assessment in the 5D Teacher Evaluation system! (The last tab is School List and it is not one that I use!)

So that's my planbook! Feel free to leave comments if you have any questions or suggestions!

What I'm Reading

I did get some good reading done over break...
I finished these:

And I am currently reading this:

And my current edu-reads:

Overwhelmed

So, I committed to blogging every day in April. And here it is, April 10, and this is my first post! Oops. It is also the Friday of Spring Break, so you would think I had plenty of time to keep up with this challenge. I have to admit that part of the reason I haven't been bit by the blogging bug is that I've found the topics difficult to write about. I decided today that that can't be an excuse. I love my blog and I hate when I go so long without posting.

So today my post will probably feel like whining or ranting. I'll apologize in advance. But sometimes I think you just have to let the frustrations out to release the block. That is my hope anyway. This spring break I have slept. A lot. Close to 12 hours every night. I feel refreshed. I feel lazy. I brought a TON of work home to get done but I completed very little.

I am involved with two different projects at the state level here in Michigan. One of those is a formative assessment project called FAME. I love this project. I am so passionate about the formative assessment process and the promise it has to change classroom culture as well as the depth of learning of students. So I have some work around that project that I must have done by the end of June when we head to our retreat.

I am also working with a group called MAISA. Among the many projects they have going, one of their most popular is the creation of Reading and Writing Units that follow the workshop model and are aligned to CCSS. One downfall of the units was their lack of grammar instruction, but over the last year a group of teachers (part of the Mi ELA Network) has been creating grammar mini-lessons for the units. Each summer the group has an institute to help teachers in implementing these units and I will be presenting at that institute...so I have a presentation to complete for that!

And those units I mentioned? This school year was the first year that my district adopted those units, so I have been coaching and modeling for the 6th grade ELA teacher. And I love the units but they are taking much longer than I would think. This is happening at each grade level and I think it will get better as the years progress and students have the background of the previous years' units. Out of 8 units, I am on unit 5 with the 6th grade. I have to wrap that up next week. Then I have 7 weeks to complete 3 units! I'm not sure it can be done, but I was supposed to carve out time over break to plan how to accomplish that. But again, I am not sure it can be done. Because on top of those three units we have...TESTING...

Before I left the school for spring break I had to put together a schedule for three grade levels to complete the new online M-STEP test (which is, let me just say, RIDICULOUS! I tried the practice 6th grade ELA test and there were questions I did not know the answer to!) and the online NWEA MAP test. Which means there will be NO technology for regular instruction basically from now to the end of the year. And at least one full week of testing, probably more once you count up all the time. How can we teach around that with any continuity? How can we expect our middle school kids to take any of the testing we do seriously?

AND the other thing I brought home to work on over spring break? School improvement! Because on top of teaching and testing and planning and reflecting, we are supposed to analyze data from assessments and from student, parent, and staff surveys and conduct a Program Evaluation and write a new School Improvement Plan with an additional Technology Plan for next year.

But you know what I did work on over break? This:

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And it was worth it.