My Formative Assessments 

This week, I was asked to come up with some formative assessments for my grade level, and also to have them peer reviewed by other members of my cohort. I found the peer review that I received to be a very effective tool to think about my own teaching ability and how I assess the students. It's useful to have outside observers comment on my work while looking for specific areas to improve. 

Overall, the peer review suggested that my assessments would be effective and relevant for my grade level, although I did also gain some new knowledge that will help me in the future when designing formative assessments.

Perhaps the most important that I tend to overlook is the importance of collecting sufficient data and basing future lessons around that. Although my first math assessment proved to be effective demonstration of the student's abilities, it's also important to be able to collect data from it. Since there is no physical data that the students are turning in in this case, perhaps I would need to take notes on my observations while the students are playing the game. For my other assignments, one has physical evidence of the students ability by showing their ability to make sentences on their own. The other, being an online activity, will have the data saved online for me to view later. I also think that changing the Kahoot activity from a quiz to a "discussion" will be more beneficial to the entire class and not just the one student who happened to answer most quickly. Perhaps the best use of Kahoot would be to use the Discussion mode as the assessment of the entire class, and use the Quiz function as a warm-up review at the start of another lesson. 

Another strategy I have used and will continue to use is a large focus on group-based activities, with an emphasis on pairing high level students with low level students. Although I already do do this in many other cases, Altynai was even able to find a place where I could add it to one of my assessments for the assignment that previously didn't even make use of this strategy. As it turns out, Kahoot has a separate mode for letting multiple students share one device. This might be a better way to utilize the tool while the students are grouped. Altynai was more correct in her assessment than perhaps she even realized, because it turns out that my class does have a large language gap currently. Overall, grouping the students as often as possible is particularly effective for my school. We do teach the students a variety of subjects, but at its core, English learning is the primary goal of the school, and this strategy enhances the language component of any lesson in any subject. 

This session of thinking critically about designing formative assessments has certainly given me a lot of information about how to better my assessments for my students. I feel better equipped to assess my students in the future.