[Music] One of the things that comes up when you get into differentiated class, let alone one that's standardsbased, is you have to begin to weigh formative versus summitative assessment. Now, summitative assessment is actually anticlimatic. It really refers to postarning after all is said and done. So it's a final declaration. Usually there's not a lot of capacity to go back and revise one's efforts and be assessed and accredited a new. But one thing that teachers forget is that something that was intended to be summitive child does poorly for whatever reason. You're allowed to make it a formative assessment. Some that was sum something that was summitative now becomes formative. That's actually okay. It's with within your prerogative. But what about formative assessment? Well, of the two, teachers tend to spend the majority of their time designing their summitive assessments as if that was the most important aspect. But really, it's formative assessment. That's the most important aspect. It has the greatest impact on student achievement on on on feedback to the teacher. Everything, the whole enterprise of teaching and learning really boils down to that formative assessment. Can kids learn without grades? Yeah. Can they learn without formative assessment and the feedback that comes from it? Not at all. So, we want to emphasize that. In fact, I would suggest that teachers spend at least the same amount of time, if not more, designing formative assessment instead of summitative assessment. But what is this formative assessment? Well, formative assessment obviously is the ongoing assessment. It's the checkpoints along the way. But here's the kicker. The best formative assessment actually involves descriptive feedback. Not just, "Hey, thank you for finishing on time." No, it was you had your supplies. you're able to do this and this and this and that helps all of us. It's kind of like uh Jim Fay and his love and logic books, point and describe. Uh National Association secondary school principles and many other uh folks who are into assessment talk about three aspects of of descriptive feedback. You help the kid discover or you pointed out yourself what was the goal, what was the original intent, the objective, where are you in relation to it? And what are we going to do to close that gap? three different parts of good descriptive feedback. When a kid can take that and use it, we find that formative assessment is any assessment that's done where the kid is allowed to revise his efforts in light of that that feedback and then be assessed and accredited a new perhaps there's some relearning in there as well, but it's ongoing and that's the focus. If our focus is summit of assessment, students don't learn as well. Dylan William, one of the great researchers in this, he did this wonderful manifesto inside the black box with Paul Black. And man, it turned America on on its its ear with in 1998, we started looking at formative assessment and started transforming schools. So, how do we give feedback to kids? Is there formative assessment in my lesson plans? In great lessons, I should be able to circle the formal formative assessment and feedback going to students. There's also informal, you know, where you observe, maybe get some feedback right there in the spur of the moment. But I should see lots of checks for understanding and kids getting that feedback. In fact, Bob Marzano and many others talk about the the effect size, the impact of some decision. And it turns out the effect is much greater if you do an assessment and there's going to be descriptive feedback. If there's no feedback, it turns out the assessment, the tasks, the assignments don't have much instructional value compared to when there's feedback. So, in the same planning breath, as I design my assessment, I'm going to design how will students get feedback on this and how will it inform my lessons. In fact, I should be able to walk down a hallway and stop a teacher cold. They don't know I'm coming. they don't know the questions coming and say how did formative assessment inform one of your decisions today or this week with a a student a subset of students or a class and the teacher should feel very comfortable I found out this about these students I decided to do that that's one of the big pillars of differentiated instruction and it turns out classrooms where teachers focus on formative assessment test scores go up if you use that as an indicator but really mastery student achievement it all goes up and again I Wonder what goes unlearned because a teacher didn't get into, didn't understand, didn't apply formative assessment principles.