Empowering Students as Partners in Learning: Descriptive Study

In 2011, Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (now McREL International) was awarded an Institute of Education Sciences grant to develop and study a program aimed at building middle school mathematics teachers’ knowledge and skills for implementing high-quality formative assessment. The foundation for the professional development program, Learning to Use Formative Assessment in Mathematics with the Assessment Work Sample Method (AWSM), was built on authentic samples of student work, because reviewing and discussing student work helps teachers shift from thinking of teaching as something teachers do to a focus on learning as something students do (e.g., Hattie, 2009). Through our evaluation of the program’s impact, we learned that the formative assessment practices supported by AWSM improved the class culture and encouraged students to take more ownership of learning, and during this process, connections between personalized learning and the formative assessment process advocated by AWSM began to materialize. In this chapter, the comprehensive definition of personalized learning described in Through the Student’s Eyes: A Perspective on Personalized Learning (Redding, 2013) most clearly reflects the focus group statements voiced by teachers in the study. Thus the description, “personalization ensues from the relationships among teachers and learners and the teacher’s orchestration of multiple means for enhancing every aspect of each student’s learning and development” (Redding, 2013, p. 6) is used. This chapter discusses the challenges to mathematics teaching and learning, the AWSM professional development program, focus group feedback, and how the formative assessment process connects to personalized learning.