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The Halfway Check: Formative Assessment You Can Use Tomorrow

Five illustrated mini whiteboards in a row on a ledge, showing two check marks, two circles, and one triangle, next to a progress bar about halfway along.

Many new teachers find out what students learned when they grade the exit ticket that night. By then the lesson is over. The information is useful, but it arrives too late to change the lesson it came from.

Tip 32 in the book treats formative assessment as feedback in real time: checking student progress during the lesson and using it to improve instruction and feedback. The site's Try this tomorrow move is specific: place one all-student check halfway through tomorrow's lesson, and decide ahead of time what response will make you reteach, continue, or offer a scaffold.

Why it matters

Black and Wiliam's 1998 review of classroom assessment research is a widely cited starting point on this topic. They described formative assessment as the activities of teachers and students that provide information used as feedback to change the teaching and learning underway. Information that is not used to change anything is not really feedback. Collecting the evidence is not enough. The adjustment is the point (Black & Wiliam, 1998).

That is why the planning step matters more than the check itself. A check with no plan for what to do next is just a pause in the lesson.

Step 1: Pick the moment

Look at tomorrow's lesson and find the point where students should be able to show the first important step. That is usually after your model and some guided practice, before independent work. Halfway is a guide, not a rule.

Step 2: Make it all-student

Calling on two volunteers tells you what two students know. Use a check where every student responds at once: mini whiteboards, a show of fingers for a multiple-choice question, a one-line response on a sticky note, or a quick digital poll. Keep it to one question that targets the step you care about.

Step 3: Decide the three moves before class

This is the step that is easiest to skip. Write down, in advance:

  • Continue: what response pattern means most students are ready, and what you do next.
  • Scaffold: what pattern means some students need support, and what that support is. A worked example, a sentence frame, or a small group at the back table.
  • Reteach: what pattern means the class missed the step, and how you will teach it a different way, not the same way louder.

Deciding in advance keeps you from making a rushed call while thirty students wait.

Step 4: Act on what you see

Ask the question, look at the responses, and make the move you planned. Then tell students what you noticed. "Most of you got the setup. A lot of us dropped the units in the last step, so let's look at that together."

Step 5: Note it for next week

After class, write one line about what the check showed. Over a week, those lines tell you which parts of your teaching land and which need another approach.

A classroom example

Picture a seventh grade math teacher teaching students to write an equation from a word problem. After modeling two problems and working one together, she gives one more on mini whiteboards and asks everyone to hold up just the equation.

She planned three moves. If most boards are right, students move on to independent practice. If several boards show the right numbers in the wrong order, she pulls those students to a table with a partly worked example. If most boards are wrong, she reteaches using a diagram instead of the words alone.

The check takes two minutes. The decision was made the night before.

A question to take to your mentor

What will you do differently for each likely response pattern? Bring tomorrow's check to your mentor and talk through the three moves before you teach it.

Sources

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