In other words, formative assessments allow me to help my students help themselves.
I use my formative assessment data (mainly through the use of progress checks in Edmodo or Juno, but sometimes they are more informal) to design what students can do to learn, not what I can do to teach. However, since I give formative assessments in some shape or form at the end of every class, this means I do a lot of my lesson planning from day to day. Sure, I write weekly plans (posted in a Google calendar on my class websites) because I am required to by my district, but I am constantly driving students and parents bonkers by changing them at the end of each day in response to what my students' learning needs are. For some reason, parents and students have this mindset that lesson plans should never ever change once they are written. But, to me, lesson plans shouldn't be static--they should be responsive and flexible and aimed towards maximizing student learning. I feel I would be doing students a huge disservice if I were to know they were having trouble with concepts, but yet plow on ahead through my plans because that's what's written on the website.
And this was exactly my rationale for abandoning and rewriting my plans in my Physical Science classes this week. We are studying Newton's laws of motion, and students had spent some time doing an internet activity, using diigo to highlight and sticky note web page readings, and then stating their own understanding of the laws in their own notes. After they finished, I gave a quick formative assessment in which students had to state Newton's 1st and 2nd laws in their own words, and then explain how inertia was connected to those laws.
The results were not pretty. You see, I won't allow them to parrot back my words or the words they read in the internet activity they did to me, and they know this. If they do, they know they get 1s and 2s on my standards based scoring scale. They were struggling to connect concepts and put the concepts in their own words. And I knew that I had to help them fix this. I had to change my plans. And it couldn't involve doing the same thing again only louder; it had to be different--and meaningful.
After a quick collaboration/consultation with the Physics teacher, I grabbed a collision cart and track along with some weights and did a short demo where students had to predict the acceleration of the cart after I manipulated the force and mass of the cart. They then got into teams, and wrote down the relationships between force, mass, inertia, and acceleration in their own words collaboratively in a Google Doc. I then did what I call a "thumbs up/thumbs down" activity where students show me with their thumbs whether the relationships between the variables are directly or inversely proportional.
And then I had them write stories about chickens.
Using a chicken, they had to create a story about that chicken's motion using the traditional story elements (it had to have a beginning, middle, and an end, and it had to have a conflict between the chicken and another character of their choice that would be resolved) and using the relationships between force, mass, inertia, and acceleration we had just reviewed.
It was the most animated I have ever seen my Physical Sciencers. They were busy in their teams, Google Doc-ing away, putting chickens on roller coasters and roller skates, having their chickens meet untimely and tragic ends in the name of unbalanced forces, or creating chicken love stories. Usually I have a hard time getting them to talk, but they took this activity and ran with it. I was proud of them, because usually my Physical Science students are grossly underestimated. The label of "not smart enough to be in Biology" is slapped on them once too irritatingly often for my tastes. They are smart--they just have to be provided the right opportunities to show off their different kind of smart.
And, speaking of smart, their stories told me they did get it now. Were there still bits and pieces of learning that still needed fixing? Absolutely, and we addressed those the next day. And then I assessed them again to make sure they retained the knowledge. But, the point is this: if I had kept on trucking through my planned plans they would still be floundering with these concepts, and the non-understanding would have compounded like interest as I progressed through the unit--only to be revealed that they still didn't really know anything when we got to the summative assessment.
Does this take time? Yes. But, as Alfie Kohn says, real learning takes time, and the time it takes must be spent wisely. Please don't be a slave to a lesson plan book or some textbook planning guide or someone else's idea of where your students should be by a certain day.
Do right by your students. Plan with your students in mind.