Peoples Top Picks is a new initiative that delivers insights on how educators across the country are addressing current hot topics in education.

Monthly Spotlight: Formative Assessments

According to education.com, “Formative assessment is commonly referred to as assessment for learning, in which the focus is on monitoring student response to and progress with instruction. Formative assessment provides immediate feedback to both the teacher and student regarding the learning process.”

There are many different types of formative assessments that teachers can give, in groups or individually. Educationpartnerships.org lists a few types of formative assessments that may be helpful depending on the students and the type of classroom. They include “role play, games developed by students and/or teacher, short and frequent tests/quizzes,written reports and homework exercises.”

Formative assessment can be evaluated on either a small or broad scale: at the individual, classroom, school, and even district level. Not only can teachers use the results to evaluate the students to see how well they are doing and whether they are attaining the information given, but the students can also use the feedback to change and improve their own learning. Peoples Education has made it easy and has customized an online formative assessment program called Measuring Up Insight™!
Measuring Up Insight™ is a Web-based formative assessment program that delivers the capacity and flexibility that educators need in order to determine how students are doing on an ongoing basis. This online program is full of precreated diagnostic practice tests and the ability to allow educators to create unique assessments to meet any need.

To learn more, visit measuringuplive.com.  
 
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Straight from the Source

Opinion Editorials by a Seasoned Educator

You are asleep when the phone rings. You grope for a pencil and paper, take the message, but cannot read it in the morning. A student takes notes, does not look at the paper, and cannot read them the next day. It obviously matters if you can see what you are writing. Although the word on a screen is there, when another sense is involved, tactile as well as visual, the writer deliberately aligning the words, there is a connection surpassing merely typing, thinking, reading, or talking about a subject. Cursive handwriting makes whole-word, neurological imprints, just as practicing a musical instrument makes a passage meaningfully connected.
             
I was puzzled when the first high school student asked, “Does it have to be in cursive?” I said yes and explained that cursive writing is faster and less tiring. The response was, “Why not printing?” to which I answered, “Machines print. People letter.” Sometime between 1959, when I began teaching in Pennsylvania, and 1975, after we moved to Texas, many schools in the U.S. stopped teaching cursive writing. Enter the word processor!
              
Now even some teachers cannot write, and many students never lift a pencil to copy onto notepaper what is on the blackboard (What is that?), overhead screen, or PowerPoint projector, because they have word processors that work the miracles of checking spelling and grammar. If the school system can afford the outlay, students have laptop computers on which to type. Shortly before retirement in the early 21st century, the questions put to me were increasingly disturbing. “Why can’t you just give us a printout, so we don’t have to write our own copy?” When I wrote the day’s objectives on the board in clear, well-practiced, Palmer-method writing, some objected, “We can’t read that stuff.” They could neither do it nor read it!
               
Private, charter, and small-district schools still teach cursive writing. Moreover, parents and their elementary school children now ask when they will learn to do “big kid” writing. The objections that it is no longer necessary or that it will require time in an already overburdened schedule are frivolous. There are still undeniable physiological advantages to the practice: eye-scanning, material alignment, spatial relationships, spelling sense, and informational imprinting. Teachers can observe and diagnose vision, retrieval, processing, and even some emotional problems in students’ cursive writing. Those are not frivolous reasons for revitalizing the practice in the early years of education.

—Deborah Seigman, retired teacher from Killeen High School, Killeen Independent School District, Texas

At Peoples Education, we continually seek input from educators at all levels to improve our partnership with schools and districts. Your opinion counts! Each month we will reach out to the education community for feedback on a specific topic. We will post what we learn in this newsletter and on our informative Facebook page. 

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See you next month!

Sincerely,

Peoples Education

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