Fast forward to yesterday evening. Christmas Day had come and gone, presents were opened, my parents had returned to their home and Christmas day dinner was cleaned up. What was there to do but surf the internet while my boys and my husband took control of the tv and looked for sporting events? Since I can't turn off my teacher brain 100% I found myself looking up the strategy, "My Favorite No," on youtube. I took a few minutes to watch the video.
The teacher in this video did a fantastic job using formative assessment in her classroom. She posed a warm up problem for the students on the board. Each child is provided with an index card to solve the problem on. After a few minutes the cards were collected and the teacher quickly sorted the students' work into to piles, correct and incorrect. Then she then choose her favorite no, or wrong answer from the incorrect pile. It was an answer that was not correct, but should some good math skills. As a whole class, the teacher and the students talked about why that card was chosen. Positive feedback was provided to the student anonymously about what was done correctly and where the mistake was made and how to fix it. The only problem I had with this is that this is a math strategy and I teach social studies. I wanted to be able to adapt and use this in my classroom, so I began to think of how to adapt and use this strategy in my own classroom.
This is what I came up with:
1. Ask students to define a vocab word on an index card, pick one that has an incomplete definition.
2. Ask students to use a vocab word in a sentence, pick one where the word is used incorrectly.
3. Ask students to answer an open response question, pick one that could use more elaboration and examples.
It is not a perfect fit and I still need to think about it some more. For now let's just call this a work in progress.