Formative Assessment During Phonics

Carla Stanford: Let's talk about assessments. Assessment during phonics is crucial. These are quick assessments that happen throughout the day. They're not formal. They are not summative necessarily. They are more what we call formative. This formative assessment is supposed to inform our instruction. They're quick, they're in the moment, and we adjust. If you do a cycle where you teach content on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Friday, you assess. You see how your kids are doing, and then you can move to your new content. So one of the things I like to do is have a grid with everyone's name on it, have it on a clipboard. As I am walking around during phonics, I can take notes on what I notice. I'm assessing in the moment, and then I'm immediately adjusting. Adjusting, adjusting, adjusting all along the way. I'm walking around the room. I see kids are getting it really quick.

I'm like, okay, they have it. They have this down pat. Let's move on. Let me add some suffixes. If they know a prefix, let me add a prefix. Build on the content, because I'm constantly adjusting because I'm assessing my students. The other very powerful thing is if your kids write on dictation paper every day, the same paper, and they put the date on it, and they write in pen — flare pen, smelly marker, doesn't matter. Or if they write in golf pencils where they can't erase, and you have them hug their mistakes instead of erase. At the end of every single lesson you have proof of learning. I like to really call it tracks of learning. Tracks of learning all throughout the lesson. You have it for the entire week, and if you save it, you have it for every single lesson. And it's a really nice way to lay out your kids' papers and see, where is the growth?

Where are kids having some struggle that I need to step in? Because if they're having struggle, more than likely it's an area that I have not been as explicit in, and then I can adjust my teaching. And then the Friday assessment, whether it be on Friday for you or not, once a week, you can choose a day where you — during dictation — while you call the words, they repeat it, they tap to themselves, they write without you checking. You take that and you look at it, and you sort by the content that everyone got. What did they not get? You take notes and you're ready for your Monday lesson. You know what to put in your deck because you saw the sounds that kids maybe missed. You know what words maybe they struggled with. You can look across the patterns to see if there's something in common. You can look at your sentences. Are kids, do they have the stamina? Do they have capital letters and the punctuation? Are they able to work on their handwriting? What is it that you need to lean into next week? So when you are building your lesson, you can adjust. So assessing throughout the lesson and throughout the week with a final assessment on Friday is a really essential way to know what your kids have mastered and where they're ready to go next.

Narrator: Reading Universe is made possible by generous support from Jim and Donna Barksdale; the Hastings/Quillin Fund, an advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the AFT; the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation; and anonymous donors.