One of the most important things we can ask ourselves as we go about our planning is how we will know if our students learned what was taught.  In February of this year, Susan Prior wrote about the many layers of unit design in a post titled “To Plan Together or Not to Plan Together…” She includes a stage of “unpacking the standards”, which are essential in understanding what it is the actual learning we’d like kids to take on. A powerful way to unpack standards is to develop checks for understanding or “mini formative assessments.” These quick applications give teachers valuable insight into the extent students achieved the intended learning over a short period of time. When teachers know this, they can make important along-the-way adjustments to their unit plan! Here are some examples:

Let’s look at an example of a third grade teacher team planning session. We’ll call them Abby, Cindy and Beth. The team designed a unit plan over the summer, and are meeting to plan upcoming language arts instruction of standard CCSS.RI.3.1, to “[a]sk and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers.”  Before sharing ideas of activities and practices, Abby asks, “At the end of the week, how will we know students got it?” Cindy shares a graphic organizer of key ideas versus key details. Beth had thought of asking the students to select the most important sentence in a portion of the reading and explain why it was the most important. Abby planned a set of text-dependent questions. The team realized that they have each drawn upon a different aspect of the same standard, and needed to clarify what it really was that they wanted students to learn how to do.

The team talked out what students had already been exposed to in reading nonfiction texts (i.e. students had learned the features of nonfiction texts, how to use the features, how to ask questions prior to reading.) They took a closer look at the book they had chosen. They also addressed what they had noticed in their students in terms of gaps in understanding. Together, they refined their learning outcome to be: “I can revise my predictions based on new evidence from the text.” From here, they decided a good check for understanding would be a constructed response to the prompt: “I predicted __________. Then, I read _____. Now, I think ____________because ________.” With this application in mind, teachers were able to target their instruction around how readers use clues from the text to change their thinking as they read. Figuring out how will we know led to focus, cohesion, and a deeper understanding of that reading standard for all involved.

Planning common checks for understanding brings clarity to the learning target, and also sets teachers up to review student work….. together! A week later, Abby, Cindy, and Beth began their meeting with a review of their students’ constructed responses. Cindy proposed they start by sorting samples into three piles: got it, kind of got it, and didn’t get it. Naturally, they moved into putting descriptors to each of the piles. It seemed like the kids who “got it” started off with a detailed prediction closely related to the content of the reading. The more specific the prediction, and the more related, the more likely the reader was able to alter their prediction along the way. The teachers also noticed the samples in the middle pile might have provided evidence from the text, but either lacked relevant clues or lacked the reasoning (or language of reasoning) to justify the changed thinking. Their insights quickly led to teachers identifying upcoming learning targets in response to student needs. This responsive teaching is what best sets up students to meet the outcomes of the BUF or unit plan!

For teachers and teacher teams who would like to refine their unit plans, I am offering a summer course “Checking for Understanding in Language and Literacy”. Here is a link with more details.

The course will draw upon some professional texts that include:

Readers: What resources do you draw from to design “mini” formative assessments for your students?