Happy Back-to-School Season!

This season we are going to take you through Utah State Board of Education’s 2023 "Formative Assessment Process Toolkit" with the aid of Derivita’s SpotCheck one step at a time. 

Hopefully, armed with both this toolkit and SpotCheck you can create, manage, and deploy formative assessments quickly and easily in your math classroom on a daily basis!

Download the USBE "Formative Assessment Process Toolkit" here:

Check back every Tuesday to see the latest blog post on how to best utilize SpotCheck to support your instructional practices and the creation of digital formative assessments in your daily math classroom. 

Step 1: Clarifying Learning Intentions

According to USBE, this step “requires educators to identify what they are trying to assess which helps keep the instruction on track”. By utilizing SpotCheck as a classroom introduction or an “icebreaker” is a great way to not only clarify your learning intentions but inform your intentions as well.

SpotCheck as an IceBreaker 

You, as a K-12 math teacher, can start your class off with a set of SpotCheck questions that go over the basics or the essentials of concepts you taught previously. These basics may be required for your students to fully grasp what you are teaching in today’s class, so a little review to encourage confidence and warm up the class is a great start!

With the results you can quickly identify which students are still struggling with the previous concept, which part of the concept your class has mastered or needs a little extra practice on, and if your class is ready to move on to today’s instructional content or if they need further review. 

SpotCheck as an ice-breaker activity to get your class going allows opportunities, for you as the instructor, to offer moments of clarity on the “what”, “how”, and "why" of learning a new mathematical concept.

Opportunities for Clarity

What:

I think we can all agree that a student walking out of a math class thinking, “What the heck did I learn today?” is not a great sign. Instead make it clear, maybe after the SpotCheck with its opportunity to review, to clearly indicate what the goal of the day is and how you and your previous lesson plans are going to help your students achieve it. You students should know within the first few minutes of class what is simply on the agenda. They might not know how to do it or where to start, but they know what their intention should be throughout class and where they want to end up at the end of class. 

How:

You can showcase to your students why mastery those previous concepts, that they struggled or succeeded with, are necessary to understand today’s concept. It is important to not only remind students of the importance of everything they’ve learned so far and how far they’ve already come, but how what they’ve previously learned is going to factor into their new learning adventure today.

Why: 

Here is the chance for you, as the teacher, to remind your students of the real-world context and situations that require a mastery of the previously-taught concept. You can also introduce the same real-world situations for the concept you’ll be teaching today. 

By doing this at the start of your class, you give your students an immediate answer to these 2 questions: 

1. Why am I learning this?
2. Why am I learning this today?

How do you clarify your learning intentions in your classroom?

Let us know in our FaceBook Derivita User Community by clicking below