Employing recent research on effective professional learning using classroom video, WestEd’s team set out to design advanced learning in formative assessment that is entirely teacher-led and creates learning experiences in which teachers engage with evidence of practice, provide one another peer feedback, and conduct self-assessment, all to support individual learning, growth, and advancing expertise.
Teacher-led Video Study Groups involve cycles of new learning, classroom practice, collaborative review of new teacher practices, and protocols for individual and group reflection. During new learning, teachers engage with consensus tuning of formative assessment practice using “student-facing” rubrics, which were developed by WestEd. This consensus tuning process supports teachers developing formative assessment expertise, both to develop shared understanding of the daily instructional routines, as well as to more accurately assess how the student role shifts over time, as students engage in formative assessment routines.
The Video Study Group course is a blended online model. All course materials, along with teachers’ posted classroom videos, are housed online in a safe, secure learning management system. Teachers meet in person to collaboratively analyze video evidence of current lessons, and use suggested protocols to guide dialogue, feedback, self-reflection, and goal setting.
Course outcomes – Teachers will be able to:
- Cultivate a learning culture and classroom routines that promote key attributes of student agency, including student metacognition, self-regulation, and motivation
- Strengthen daily instructional routines to model, explicitly teach and provide feedback to students on their use of self-regulation and metacognitive skills, through key formative assessment routines
- Learn techniques to integrate daily use of peer feedback, self-assessment, and discourse as tools for teachers and students to elicit, interpret and use evidence to guide learning
“What I would like to see continue in my classes is the same style of [peer] feedback because it really helps me identify what needs to be fixed without directly stating it. This allows me to question and push myself.”
Student
“I started to care about the quality of my work for the first time and the quality of the feedback I gave my peers.”
Student
“I notice that when I build in time and I guide students through the self-assessment process and the peer review activities, the quality of student work and their investment in the educational process increases.”
Teacher
Related Resources
- Video reflections of teachers and students who participated in the Video Study Pilot (called Student Agency in Assessment and Learning Course) can be found here.
Contact Us
To learn more, contact Nancy Gerzon at [email protected]