April is National Formative Assessment Month!

Okay, I lied. April is not officially National Formative Assessment Month. But you can't blame a girl for dreaming.

How about we make it happen anyway? If you'd like to focus more on formative assessment, make it your April goal (could help pass the time until school vacation, at any rate).

Want to increase how often you check for student understanding? Want to think about and try out some ways to quickly analyze some student data? How often do you find yourself using student data to inform your teaching, either that same day or for the next lesson? Want to increase how often you're able to do this?


Trust me -- there are ways to do this without adding an enormous amount of work to your already busy plates. It's amazing the information you can get from flipping through a stack of tickets-to-leave. Assessing a longer piece of student work? Try out an error analysis. Or you can use student self-assessments in formative ways. You could even try out on-the-spot formative assessment -- talk about quick and easy!!

Once you've done your pain-free analysis, you may or may not see the need for differentiated instruction. If you do, your options are many: you could split the class in half, you could decide on small groups, a tiered lesson, partner work, etc., etc., etc.

If you're interested, let me know. Let's make this National Formative Assessment Month thing happen -- maybe we'll be responsible for the start of a movement!  :)

Happy Spring (again, a girl can dream)!