Formative Assessment

The learning intention is what to learn, not what to do. Finishing the task is not the same as achieving the learning. Keep them distinct in your planning and in what you say to students at every stage of the lesson.

The learning intention is what students are meant to learn. The task is what they are meant to do. They aren't the same thing, and conflating them is one of the most common planning errors there's.

Ask students what excellent looks like before they begin. Their language, not yours, becomes the standard. Criteria they articulate themselves land far more deeply than criteria handed to them.

Rather than handing out success criteria, build them with the class before they begin: what would a good one of these actually look like?

Show work at different standards before students start their own. Students spot quality in someone else's work more readily than in their own. A rubric tells students what quality is; an exemplar shows them.

Ask students to name what they learned at the end rather than copy an objective at the start. Generating the answer embeds it far more reliably than copying from the board.

Do not give the objective at the start. Ask students at the end to say what they've learned, in their own words.

A hinge question is a diagnostic question at a lesson turning point. Wrong answers each map to a known misconception. Responses tell you whether to move on or go back. Never improvise it.

Engineer wrong answers as carefully as the right one. Each distractor should map to a real misconception. Every wrong answer a student gives tells you something precise. Wrong answers are the diagnostic data.

Select who answers deliberately, not at random. Track participation so nobody stays invisible across lessons. Where appropriate, target the students whose thinking you most need to hear.

Decide who answers rather than taking whoever volunteers, and keep track so that nobody goes a fortnight without being asked.

All students write their response and hold it up simultaneously. The teacher reads the room in seconds: full participation, no waiting, no dominant voices. Works across all subjects.

Every student writes an answer and holds it up at the same time. You read the room in seconds.

Give each student a card: A, B, C and D. Pose a question and all students hold up their answer at once. No hands, no opt-out. The spread of responses shows instantly where misconceptions lie.

Each student holds a set of lettered cards. You pose a multiple-choice question and everyone shows their answer at once.

Eliciting evidence only works if every student can respond. Offer written, verbal, visual and digital means of expression. The method you choose decides who gets to show what they know.

Offer more than one way to respond: written, spoken, drawn, digital. The method you pick decides who is able to show you what they know.

Individual thinking first; paired discussion second; nominated response third. Nomination makes the report-back evidence, not just the most confident voice. Without it, the share is optional.

Think alone, then discuss in pairs, then a nominated student reports back. All three stages, in that order, with the nomination made by you.

Remove grades from work in progress. Research showed comments alone produced the greatest gains. Adding a score to a comment cancels it out: students read the grade and ignore the feedback entirely.

Return work in progress with comments and no grade attached.

Feedback must be more work for the recipient than the donor. Pose questions rather than writing corrections. If feedback requires no response from the learner, it is not feedback; it is merely information.

Feedback should require more work from the student than it did from you. Pose a question rather than writing the correction.

Feedback with no time to act on it has no value. Begin the next lesson with students reading and responding to feedback before anything new. Time to act is where the learning happens.

Record class patterns rather than individual comments: common strengths, recurring errors and two or three next steps. Teach to the gap, not to the individual paper. Workload stays manageable.

Return work with three questions rather than corrections. Students must respond before moving on. Cognitive effort belongs with the learner. Feedback that corrects for them removes the struggle.

Independence is the destination, not the starting point. Before students work alone, have them practise with peers in structured steps, checking each other's responses at every stage before moving forward.

Ask students to write questions that could appear in an assessment on this topic. Collate the best and use them for review. Generating questions demands higher order thinking than simply answering them.

Peer feedback only works when students understand quality. Use exemplars first so students assess against shared criteria. Without shared criteria, peer feedback is opinion, not evidence.

Peer assessment against shared criteria, with exemplars used first so that students know what quality looks like before they judge it.

Low stakes quizzing on prior content, not today's lesson. Returning to older material at increasing intervals is one of the most robust findings in memory research. Re-reading notes is not the same as retrieving.

Low-stakes quizzing on content from previous weeks and months, not today's lesson, returning at widening intervals.

Quiz students on material before you teach it. Triggering the feeling of not knowing primes attention and improves retention. Students who struggle before instruction remember the answer better.

Quiz students on material before you teach it, so they experience not knowing before they're told.

At lesson close, each student anonymously writes the one thing they are least clear about. The teacher addresses the most common muddy points publicly at the start of the next lesson. Two minutes; high value.

Begin every lesson with a brief review of prior content: yesterday's, last week's, last month's. The most effective teachers check understanding constantly. If most students cannot answer, adjust the pace of teaching.

Teach students to quiz themselves rather than re-read notes. Re-reading feels productive but produces weak retention. Self quizzing feels harder but works. Retrieval effort drives long term memory.

Teach students to quiz themselves rather than reread their notes, and to space those self-quizzes over time.