Making Learning Visible:
Formative assessment strategies to deepen student learning and engagement in
English Language Arts
FA Strategies & Ideas
1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding
goals for learning and criteria for success
with learners
 Help students understand learning intentions
and expectations.
 Design tasks/activities that require students
to apply their understanding and
demonstrate developing proficiencies.
2. Engineering effective classroom
discussions, questions, activities, and
tasks that elicit evidence of student’s
learning
 Activities where students develop their ideas
and thinking through talking
 Formulate questions & activities that reveal
student thinking (re-framed questions)
 Practice interpretive listening vs. evaluative
listening (authentic born out of true interest
in what students are thinking rather than
interrogations or looking for ‘right’ answers)
 Intervene in ways that focus on improving
work or the quality of student thinking –
non-judgmental.
Examples / Possibilities
Students are asked to propose success criteria, and
therefore drawn into questions of quality and
judgment.
Students analyze and compare exemplary or
professional quality work against work that is clearly
unsatisfactory (surface assessment criteria).
3. Provide feedback that moves learning
forward
 Prompts a cognitive response rather than
an emotional one
 Requires learner to do something with the
feedback
 More work for recipient than the donor
 Ask questions to cause thinking
 Help students formulate their next steps for
strengthening their work
 Actionable feedback - provide time for
students to act on the feedback they receive
in process not at the end when the task has
been completed
 Ensure feedback relates back to the
Provide specific directions for advancing learning and
promoting a growth mindset.
Create multiple feedback loops throughout the draft
stage of a piece of work
“Rewrite your thesis statement so it provides direction
for the reader”
“Rewrite thesis so your stance towards the topic is
clear.”
“Order your supporting arguments from strongest to
weakest with number 1 being your most compelling.”
“Convert your essay into an outline to enable us to see
how you have organized your ideas.”
“Highlight topic sentences in 1 colour and supporting
details in a second colour. What’s left?”
“ Identify your best word choices/phrases & worst –
strengthen your worst 2.”
Generate tasks/activities that extend and develop
student thinking.
Make learning & thinking visible (concept maps,
think-pair-share, analysis of writing exemplars)
Expose students to and have them discuss work of
varying quality i.e.
 Partners sort effective thesis statements from
weak statements and generate rules for what
makes a thesis statement effective.
 Generate a thesis statement and work in a
group to examine various thesis statements
based on criteria Based on collaboratively
established criteria, students make
suggestions for improving thesis statements.
 Students look for and bring in examples of
effective thesis statements they discover
outside of the classroom and prepare to
discuss with peers
Formulate discussion questions that require students
to think deeply about important concepts and Ideas
assessment criteria that has been
established
Provide written feedback that is dialogic – prompt
thinking by asking questions to encourage the
development of ideas
“Why do you think this?”
“Could you explain this further?”
“Tell me more about…”
4. Activate students as owners of their own
 Post closing thoughts, ideas, questions on a digital
learning
post-it (using cell phone and Linoit App)
 Peer and self-assessment enable students to
 Podcast self-assessments
understand what constitutes effective written  Google forms to gather insights from class
and oral communication in different contexts.  Blogs
 Help students identify and understand for
 Discussion groups
themselves what they need to do to improve.
 Self assess using established criteria
 Responses to teacher prompts on exit slips
5. Activate students as learning resources
for one another
 Teach students how to peer assess
 Establish group goals & individual
accountability during group work
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Form discussion groups in a Google doc where
students respond to one another’s ideas
Pair share & open discussions
Have students record their discussions then
review and distil it to 2 minutes of their most
insightful ideas.
Peer assess using established criteria