Building Student Self-Reflection and Self-Assessment: One Teacher's Success

As you all already know, one of the big drives here at East this year is getting students to do more summarizing of their own learning throughout a class period. We do a lot of work as a staff thinking about our own practice, what we could do differently, what worked and what didn't about a lesson, etc., and many of us also pass this line of thought on to our students.

While the lesson may change and the content varies, students can gain a lot of insight into their own work by being trained and taught ways to self-assess. One teacher in particular, Dan Zomack in the English department, is having success with his standard 9th graders by zeroing in on the following questions, which his students use frequently to self-assess their work:

Understanding the Assessment Task:
1. Looking back over the task, what will you need to do first, second, third, etc. to fully address the task in your response?
2. Who are you writing for, and how can you select and explain evidence from the text to suit the audience who will read this assessment?

StepBack After Completing the Task:
1. In ____ words or less, what did you include in your response that makes it complete, thoughtful, and accurate?
2. When faced with a difficult part of the task, what did you do to overcome the difficulty?
3. What more did you learn about the text by completing the assessment task?

Some will recognize the language of IFL in these questions, and these types of questions certainly drive a lot of the IFL units taught, but think about how they can apply to other content areas as well. What would this look like in another classroom? How might they be modified to generally have a student check their own progress in another course? How could the teacher use the information from these questions in planning instruction?

Consider this cycle also:

As teachers, we ask these questions of ourselves daily. We go through that cycle shown above also! Think about what this might look like for our students if we aren't already using some sort of self-assessing technique with our kids. There is a wealth of info to be gleaned. Thanks to Mr. Zomack for sharing his technique!