Formatively Assessing Students and Teachers to Drive Development

• In Event: 49.081 - Building Expertise for Teachers of English Language Learners in the 21st Century

Abstract

In this paper, the authors discuss the importance of developing teachers’ and leaders’ formative assessment skills as an integral part of pedagogical and leadership practice relating to the quality teaching of ELLs. The need for assessment that can inform instruction and provide real-time guidance is particularly important for ELLs (Heritage, Walqui, & Liquanti, 2013), whose simultaneous learning of language and content occur as socially co-constructed moment-to-moment adaptations (Larsen-Freeman, 2013). In a context in which measures of teaching quality have become increasingly quantitative and summative (Cochran-Smith, Piazza, & Powers, 2013), educational leaders also need formative assessments of their teachers that can provide actionable information to inform teaching and leadership practice. By providing a framework for formatively assessing both ELLs and their teachers and a description of an effort to operationalize this framework as a learning tool with coaches and principals, this paper can both inform professional development initiatives and research regarding formative assessment for both teachers and students.

Formative assessment, as we use it here, refers to a fundamentally situated practice occurring within instruction (Heritage, Walqui, & Linquanti, 2013). To appropriately use formative assessment for ELLs, teachers must first identify their students’ ripening linguistic skills in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1978) and use scaffolding, or contingent support (Walqui & van Lier, 2010), to help them “close the gap” between their current capabilities and desired goals (Black & William, 1998; Heritage, Walqui, & Liquanti, 2013). Similarly, educational leaders, in observing their teachers, must identify what teaching skills are on the verge of maturity and decide what feedback and/or coaching to provide to the teacher to drive their development forward. However, because formative assessment practice unfolds on a moment-by-moment basis as an integrated part of pedagogy, apprenticing others into these skills in decontextualized professional development settings poses a challenge.

Multiple processes encompass formative assessment for ELLs, including the statement of clear learning goals and related performance criteria, the collection of evidence of linguistic development, the interpretation of data, the provision of feedback to students specific to the linguistic understanding desired, and the use of data to adjust or inform instruction (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Sadler, 1989; Trumbull & Gerzon, 2013). Using these processes, the authors designed a guiding framework for formative assessment that teachers and instructional leaders can apply in various learning exercises.

After presenting the framework, authors describe the professional development effort, which includes the problematizing summative assessment for generating actionable information regarding teacher and leadership practice for ELLs. After the framework is discussed, written and video-taped vignettes which feature practice focused on development of disciplinary language are analyzed along the following dimensions:
1)What emergent (linguistic understandings/understandings of ELL instruction) may be identified?
2)What types of evidence of (student /teacher) development may be used to assess these understandings?
3)Based on this evidence, what principled decisions may be made regarding (instruction/coaching)?
4)What meaningful feedback can be provided to (students/teachers) to drive development forward?
5)How can (teacher/students) be engaged in their own assessment?

Authors

• Kathryn Jill Strom, California State University - East Bay

• Leslie Hamburger, WestEd