I had the privilege (in retrospective) of taking Miss Johnson’s Latin class in high school. She knew her job was to have us translate from Latin to English. She was on task all the time. She would tell us when an answer was correct. She spent much more time when a sentence translation was not correct. She would go through the translation word by word with the student. She would ask the student probing questions instead of giving the answers. I know realize that she was focused on formative feedback.
What if each teacher either “videotaped” or “audiotaped” a class and then analyzed how many formative statements he or she said during the class? The following chart could easily be a spreadsheet to make the calculations easier and to be able to graph the differences each time. What if each teacher promised to increase his/her formative statements by 20% within three months? Imagine how much formative feedback the students would be receiving on their learning! Imagine how much better the students would be in their learning!
Are you willing to take the formative assessment and improve yourself? Are there ways you can use technology to help you in giving formative feedback to the students?
© Harry Grover Tuttle, 2007
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After every lesson I try to reflect on how it could have gone better. What did or didn’t I do to help my students learn the material and keep them all engaged. After reading the article, i will be sure to ask more leading questions and provide quality feedback to my students about their responses