Fast and Effective Assessment

How to Reduce Your Workload and Improve Student Learning

Glen Pearsall

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781416626336
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Evaluation & Assessment in Education

What if teachers could dramatically reduce the amount of time they spend reviewing and correcting student work and actually see better results in terms of student learning? That's the goal of Glen Pearsall, who shares dozens of classroom-tested strategies that lessen teachers' workload while increasing students' class participation and improving their understanding.

Readers will learn how to

• Refine their classroom questioning techniques to continually check students' progress and provide instant feedback;
• Encourage students to internalize learning goals so they better understand what is expected of them;
• Use fast, formative assessment strategies to check and correct during class time;
• Modify traditional summative-testing strategies to monitor student progress in a formative way;
• Speed up the correction process via student self-proofing, representative sampling, and helpful technology tools; and
• Engage students in becoming actively involved in assessing their own work.

Drawing from his own experience as a teacher and coach, Pearsall offers practical, real-world advice in the form of techniques that are both effective and sustainable in the everyday classroom. The result is smarter assessment—for both teachers and students.

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Chapter 1

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More Effective Questioning

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Teachers who want to reduce the amount of time they spend correcting and grading student work often ask me, "Where do I start?" Intuitively, most teachers want to begin by looking at their marking practices. But a lot of the work associated with correction is actually generated long before students put pen to paper. The way you set up and run a learning activity can have a profound effect on how much correction you have to do at the end of it.

Instead of turning to grading practices, I usually start with questioning technique. Questioning is the basic building block of assessment. Teachers ask, on average, 200 to 300 questions a day (Brualdi, 1998). They use questioning to gauge prior learning, to check for understanding, to elicit evidence, to monitor individual performance, and to encourage whole-class groups to share their insights and learn from one another. Refining your questioning technique, then, can help you improve all levels of your practice.

What does this look like in a classroom? Compare the following exchanges:

Exchange 1

Teacher: Li, is 19 a prime number?

Li: Yes.

Teacher: Tom, what about 119?

Tom: No.

Exchange 2

Teacher: Li, 19 is a prime number. Why?

Li: Because it is only divisible by itself and 1.

Teacher: Can someone rephrase that? Tom?

Tom: It has no other factors—other than 1 and itself.

Essentially, these exchanges explore exactly the same thing. However, in the second exchange the teacher elicits a more sophisticated response simply by asking the student to justify his answer ("Why?"). Similarly, "bouncing" the question to a second student ("Tom?") is another way to elicit a more thoughtful answer.

When I coach teachers, I like to show them how being more deliberate about their questioning can generate better student responses. Questioning is a subtle and, for many, intuitive practice. Many teachers I work with have never been trained in specific questioning techniques. They are unaware of what really effective questioning sounds like. Others I encounter use these techniques so frequently that questioning is an innate part of their practice. These teachers often find it difficult to articulate precisely what these techniques are and how they are using them. Being deliberate about questioning means you can name each specific technique. It means that you can use them in a targeted way. And it means that you have the vocabulary to discuss with your colleagues how to best use these strategies.

The key advantage of this approach is that it doesn't require teachers to use up more of their limited class time or undertake further preparation. Making a few subtle adjustments in how you query your students takes little additional planning time but can substantially change how your students respond, revealing to you more about what they know and ultimately saving you time over the long term.

Questioning for Fuller Participation

A teacher once told me that she felt like a ventriloquist when she ran class discussions: "I answer so many of my own questions I feel like I'm having a conversation with myself!" Another characterized his class discussions as "sort of a play," which he and "a handful of students put on while the rest of the class watch like an audience." As teachers, we are familiar with what has generated these responses: the challenge of running an inclusive class discussion. The aim is simple: we want to create a classroom where all students take an active part in the learning and we don't have to do all the talking ourselves.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Indeed, a small number of students volunteer the majority of answers teachers get to hear (Wiliam & Leahy, 2015). In fact, some studies have found that only around 25 percent of students regularly answer questions in class (Black & Wiliam, 2014). Students who don't take part in this aspect of your lessons are missing out; question-and-answer sessions are an opportunity for them to demonstrate the extent of their knowledge, try their ideas out loud, and learn from classmates.

Obviously, we don't want our students to become spectators in their own learning. What strategies can you use to include more students in class discussion? "Cold calling" and "thinking time" are among the most effective.

Cold Calling

Teachers cold-call students when they ask them a question without first checking whether they know the answer. For example, instead of asking the whole class, "Who can tell me what a zone defense is?" you might cold-call a specific student: "What is a zone defense? Piers?"

Many teachers I have coached are uneasy about cold calling in class discussions. They worry that it puts students "on the spot" and can embarrass them or make them feel anxious. (This concern is heightened if they are working with students who have learning disabilities or are not confident using the target language.) Teachers are also concerned about students "switching off" if they are targeting their attention to an individual student.

These are legitimate concerns but not reasons to avoid this technique. With a few subtle adjustments, you can avoid these outcomes. Take, for instance, the example just provided. If you place the student's name at the start of the question, then other students do tend to fall into the role of spectator, watching to see how that student answers his question. By contrast, pausing and then adding the name at the end of the question ("Piers?") gets a very different response. Asking the question this way means that the whole class is more likely to do the mental work of thinking of an answer—the question, after all, might be coming to them. Here are some other techniques and approaches that help you get the most out of cold calling.

Telling students. Cold calling is most effective when students are aware that you are going to use this style of questioning and understand why you are using it. Make it clear that you ask questions not to find out who can get it right but to discover what each of them is thinking. Explain that cold calling encourages everyone to be involved in class discussion. Make sure that they know that you are well aware of their abilities and that you won't unfairly put them on the spot. Such an explanation could sound something like this:

OK, guys. We're going to have a class discussion to explore what you think the answers might be. I'm going to include everybody by cold calling. I just want to hear what you are thinking, so don't worry if you don't know the answer. Guessing and making mistakes is how we develop our understanding. Remember our motto: Being wrong is not the opposite of right; it is the pathway to being right.

Speculative framing. I have found that students are more likely to respond to cold-call questions if they feel they can speculate about possible responses rather than come up with the correct answer. Using cue words such as might and could signals to students that it is OK to speculate:

Traditional question: Carlos, what is the answer?

Reframed question: What might be the answer? Carlos?

This is a minor adjustment, but for a student concerned about making mistakes in public, the reframed question involves much less social risk. Consider the following exchange:

Teacher: What is the answer?

Student: I don't know.

Teacher: If you did know, what might be the answer?

Student: Twenty-three.

Teacher: That's right.

In this exchange, the student didn't think of the answer between the first and second question, but it became safer to speculate. This kind of framing, popularized by Dylan Wiliam, legitimizes conjecture and encourages your students to voice their tentative first thoughts as their understanding develops. This type of questioning is a powerful tool in mixed-ability classes and one of the first things I show teachers who want ways to differentiate their questioning for students who are struggling.

Answer scaffolds. Using answer scaffolds is another way to make it easier for your students to respond to cold-call questions. An answer scaffold is a list of phrases that maps out the typical sentence structure of an answer. I usually give it to students as a worksheet or write it on the board so it can be used as a reference during the discussion. This approach reduces the "language demands of the task," allowing students to focus on the content of the answer (Fisher & Frey, 2014, p. 23). If, for example, you wanted your class to answer the question "How have you revised your understanding of this novel?" you could give students a worksheet with these sentence stems (Olson, 2011) to help them formulate a response:

I used to think ____________, but now I think __________.

One way I've changed my mind is____________________.

My latest thought on that is____________________.

Students are more likely to respond to all types of questions if the form of the answer is familiar to them (Fisher & Frey, 2014), but I have found this approach works particularly well with cold-call questions. If you have a high number of English language learners (ELLs) in your class, then this approach is one that should be part of your repertoire.

Think-Pair-Share. There are many thinking routines that you can use to give your students a structured way to gather their thoughts before initiating a classroom discussion with cold calling. Think-Pair-Share (Barkly, Major, & Cross, 2014) is the best known of these routines. The process has three simple stages:

Think: Give your students some time to silently consider a question or stimulus material.

Pair: Ask them to share their thoughts with a partner, identifying the most compelling of their initial responses.

Share: Finally, get the students to share their insights with the whole class group.

In the Think-Pair-Square-Share variation (Millis & Cottell, 1997), you add one more step: ask each pair to match up with another pair (making a "square" group of four) before sharing. Whichever variation you use, thinking routines like this one ensure your students have been given an extended time to formulate an answer before they might be called on.

Question relay. Teachers who are trying out cold calling often ask me what to do when a student responds with an automatic "I don't know." There is nothing wrong with a student (or a teacher, for that matter) saying "I don't know," but if it is a student's unthinking first reaction or a strategy used to avoid reflection, then the teacher must deal with it.

I usually recommend trying a question relay: respond to the student by telling her that you will ask two other students for their thoughts and then come back to her to see which of those answers could have been hers. What does this sound like in an actual classroom exchange? Here's an example:

Teacher: What are some of the health problems associated with smoking, Taylor?

Taylor: I don't know.

Teacher: OK, I'm going to ask a couple of other people. Please listen to their responses because then I'm going to ask you which of those answers you might have used.

Teacher: Carlos, what are some of the health problems associated with smoking?

Carlos: Respiratory problems like emphysema and cancer. Heart problems.

Teacher: Lucinda?

Lucinda: Cardiovascular disease, stroke.

Teacher: Which of those answers might you have used, Taylor?

Taylor: Probably lung cancer or even just heart attacks.

Of course, question relays do not work every time. I have had, more than once, the other two students I asked also respond with "I don't know." This told me that the question might have been too hard in the first place and I needed to change it. This did not detract, though, from the key message that I was sending with this technique: saying "I don't know" is not the end of thinking but the start of it.

Selecting students ...