Educators Brent Duckor and Carrie Holmberg show you how to plan, enact, and reflect on feedback practices within lessons and across units using an accessible, comprehensive, and innovative framework that illuminates the path towards equity and excellence for all. With evidence-based research and real classroom examples, Feedback for Continuous Improvement in the Classroom answers: What is formative feedback? How does it influence student outcomes and teacher pedagogy? Why are well-defined learning goals, aligned with rich tasks and progress guides, essential to making feedback truly formative? What are essential facets of teacher, peer, and self-driven feedback? How does feedback work best in whole-class, small group, or individual configurations? What can make written, spoken, and nonverbal feedback modalities more effective—for all? How can focusing on feedback improve learning across all subject matter disciplines? Prompts for self-reflection, videos, vignettes, and scaffolds throughout help readers see how effective feedback can be embedded into classrooms and school communities committed to discovery, growth, and deeper learning.

Duckor, B., & Holmberg, C. (2023). Feedback for continuous improvement in the classroom: New perspectives, practices, and possibilities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

With a Foreword by John Hattie internationally recognized scholar and author of Visible  Learning, educators Brent Duckor and Carrie Holmberg invite you on the journey to becoming a formative assessor by encouraging you to focus on seven research-based, high-leverage formative assessment moves: priming, posing, pausing, probing, bouncing, tagging, and binning.

As teachers use these moves to develop formative assessment skills, they learn how to uncover students’ misconceptions—as well as their own sense of deeper learning in the classroom. Each chapter explores a classroom-tested move, including foundational research, explaining how and when to best use it, and describing what it looks like in practice. Highlights include case studies, try-now tasks, and tips and advice from beginning and seasoned teachers who use these formative assessment moves in their classrooms.

This book has been endorsed by leading scholars and researchers in educational assessment including Professors Jim Popham, Lorrie Shepard, Gene Glass, David Berliner, Lee Shulman and P. David Pearson.

Duckor, B., & Holmberg, C. (2017). Mastering Formative Assessment Moves: 7 High-leverage Practices to Advance Student Learning. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Students may struggle with such questions if they’re unfamiliar with assessment practices that seek to promote student learning, rather than those that merely focus on evaluating achievement. This article looks at seven moves teachers can make to improve their formative assessment techniques and become better, more responsive formative assessors in the process. These include priming students first, posing good questions, pausing during questioning, probing student responses, bouncing questions through the classroom, using tagging to generate a wide range of responses, and using binning strategies to make sense of their students’ learning progressions.

Duckor, B. (2014). Formative assessment in seven good moves. Educational Leadership, 71(6), 28-32.

Research on teacher professional learning has shown that formative assessment can improve student learning more than most instructional practices (Hattie 2012). Empirical evidence indicates that thoughtfully implemented formative assessment practices improve students’ learning, increase students’ scores, and narrow achievement gaps between low-achieving students and others (Black and Wiliam 1998).

Given the role that students’ achievement in middle school mathematics classes can play in college-going trajectories (Balfanz 2009), articulating how formative assessment can support equity in mathematics classrooms is critically important. Some conceptualizations of formative assessment are more explicit than others in their focus on language use (Hakuta, 2013).

In this article we present our conceptualization of formative assessment with the FA Wheel, introduce the FA moves—priming, posing, pausing, probing, bouncing, tagging, and binning—and illustrate the moves at play in one middle school mathematics class. Each of these moves lend themselves to sustaining focus on the development of academic language for all students, which is critical to fostering equity in mathematics learning and teaching.

Duckor, B., Holmberg, C., & Rossi Becker, J. (2017). Making moves: Formative assessment in mathematics. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 22(6) 334-342.

Lovell, J., Duckor, B., & Holmberg, C. (2015). Rewriting teaching practices in our own voice: When lessons become texts and texts become lessons. English Journal, 104(6), 56-60.

In the authors’ 2017 book Mastering Formative Assessment Moves (ASCD), they outlined seven high-leverage formative assessment strategies that promote ambitious teaching and deeper learning. Since then, they’ve worked with pre- and in-service teachers who are implementing the new English Language Development Standards (2014) in California, and they have begun to see how these strategies can serve as the natural bridge to help English language learners reach greater proficiency in their understanding of academic language.

Duckor, B. & Holmberg, C. (2019/2020). 7 High-leverage formative assessment moves to support ELLs. Educational Leadership, 77(4), 46-52.

Attention to student thinking—and to teachers’ thinking about student thinking—is key to advancing standards-based mathematical and next generation science learning in the classroom (Coffey, Hammer, Levin, & Grant, 2011). Fostering teachers’ attention to student thinking and getting to know teachers’ thinking about student thinking are also key to instructional leaders’ and instructional coaches’ efforts to nurture learning environments where students and teachers hold joint responsibility for their interactions and learning

The moves-based formative assessment framework facilitated teachers’ attention to feedback loops in classroom talk, while promoting instructional spaces for students to use academic language to reason mathematically based on common assessments and NCTM Standards.

Findings indicate the middle school teachers’ use of video stimulated recall involving their classroom instructional practices and facilitation from university coaches enhanced participants’ reflective practice. This form of peer-to-peer instructional coaching, centered on formative assessment driven lesson study, supports deeper understanding for teaching mathematics in diverse middle school settings.

Duckor, B., Holmberg, C., & Rossi Becker, B. (in press). Focusing on Moves-based Formative Assessment to Increase Equity of Voice in Middle School Mathematics: A Case for Video-based Professional Development. In S. B. Martens & M. M. Caskey (Series Ed.), The Handbook of Research in Middle Level Education: Preparing middle level educators for 21st century schools: Enduring beliefs, changing times, evolving practices. Washington, DC: AERA Press.

Duckor, B., & Holmberg, C. (2023, May). Feedback for Continuous Improvement in the Classroom: Empowering Students and Teachers to Size Up “What’s Next?” Invited presenter for Center to Close the Opportunity Gap Spring Speaker Series, Long Beach, CA. https://ccog.calstate.edu/webinars-recordings

Duckor, B. & Holmberg, C. (2017, July 27). Making real-time formative assessment moves that make a difference: An introduction to the FA moves framework [Webinar]. In ASCD Summer Boost Webinar Series. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/professional-development/webinars/mastering-formative-assessment-moves-webinar.aspx

Duckor, B. (2023, April). On feedback for deeper learning: From normative theory to practical usage in classroom settings. Invited talk at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca/Kolozsvár, Romania.

Duckor, B., & Holmberg, C. (2023, July). On measuring feedback for deeper learning: From normative theory to practical usage of tools and practices in classroom settings. Invited talk at the Educational Measurement Interest Group at the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.