At the end of November, I stumbled upon this great idea from English teacher Kelly Culp:
The basic premise is that students do a “brain dump” of sorts about a specific reading and share everything they know about it with you through text and images. I decided to utilize this strategize to do a formative assessment with student independent reading about 10 days ago after giving students a day of reading time in class. Here is my version (you can make a copy of the Word document):
Students jumped in and began working hard on the task right away:
Below are some of the finished products:
As you can see, many students were creative in how they shared their understandings and what information they felt was most important as well as questions, connections, and ideas they were thinking about related to the text. Several also incorporated their TQE thinking from their TQE annotations the previous day. What I love about this form of assessment is the variety of responses and the built in choice factor for the assessment. It can also be used with a wide range of tasks, including an assigned reading. You can also adapt and use this across multiple grades in middle and high school; I think it would also be adaptable for upper elementary. In addition, I think teachers and librarians could even modify this to assess students’ understanding of an article they are reading for research. I am indebted to teacher Kelly Culp for sharing this idea on Twitter and inspiring my classroom practice.
In addition to this task, students also had time to complete this activity as well. Many students liked the “chunked” aspect of this learning task for their reading they completed in class December 5 and at home that evening. I highly recommend this resource for assessing assigned or independent reading.
Living in the Layers 