Chapter 1, page 6
engage students in debate about historical documents, he never teaches them how to do it. He does not
help them learn any particular strategies for thinking about historical documents but assumes that they
will somehow just learn just by doing it. He is baffled at the end of the year when he discovers on
RateMyTeacher.com that that almost all of the students who rated him think that he is a bad teacher who
does not actually teach them anything.
This history teacher’s problem is a mismatch between his goals and assessments, on the one hand,
and his class activities, on the other. His assessments are admirably tied to his goals, but he does not
provide instruction during class activities that prepares students properly for the assessments. He does not
teach them useful strategies that can help them think about historical documents. If he wants students to
learn the difficult strategies involved in thinking like a historian, he must provide instruction that helps
them understand how to tackle historical documents—how to interpret them, how to evaluate their
credibility, and how to draw conclusions from them. This instruction would enable his students to benefit
from the many opportunities he gives them to engage in historical thinking.
These two examples illustrate some of the problems that can arise when goals, class activities, and
instruction are not tightly aligned. Goals, assessments, and instruction must be considered together.
Unit 3 emphasizes that assessment needs to be part of each and every lesson—not just the unit test
at the end of a set of lessons. In each lesson, effective teachers are gathering evidence from a variety of
formal and informal assessments of students’ understanding, and this evidence should feed back into
teachers’ day-to-day plans. Teachers assess student learning through a diverse array of methods—not only
through formal tests and quizzes but also through short quizzes, students’ written assignments, carefully
listening to students during group work and class discussion, and so on. These frequent assessment
activities are called formative assessments, because they guide teachers as they form their ideas about
how to teach each day.
Let’s consider a third high-school history teacher, this time focusing on the teacher’s formative
assessment. Like the second history teacher, this history teacher tightly aligns her assessments with her
goal of promoting historical thinking using primary source documents. Unlike the second teacher, this
teacher also strives each day to help students learn to think historically with primary source documents.
Over a period of six weeks, she coaches students and conducts mini-lessons on different strategies for
engaging in historical thinking. Her students seem quite interested and excited about the classes. Then, at
the end of the six weeks, she gives them the unit test and discovers, to her dismay, that her students have
not performed as well as she had expected. She realizes from the tests that the students had difficulty
understanding that the authors of historical documents may be biased, and they did not know how to take
these biases into account when they evaluated the documents. Regrettably, she did not gather any
formative assessment data during the unit that would have allowed her to provide some remedial help.
Frequent formative assessment could have greatly improved this third teacher’s unit. Because she
waited until the end of the unit to gather careful information about how her students were doing, she lost
the chance to revise her instruction mid-course. If she had systematically gathered information about how
her students were doing week by week along the way, she could have made needed changes to her
instruction before it was too late.
We will discuss formative assessments as well as other kinds of assessments in Chapters 8 and 9.
These chapters will give you many ideas about how you can use assessments to improve your instruction.
Unit 4: Creating Learning Environments
The fourth and final unit of the book is about creating effective learning environments. Learning
environments refer to everything that is part of a situation in which students are learning. It includes the
physical setting (e.g., a history classroom), the instructional purposes (e.g., to help students understand the
significance of the civil rights movement), the instructional materials that are used (e.g., a table full of
books, audio, and video materials on the civil rights movement; websites with historical information), any
technological tools (e.g., computers to create PowerPoint presentations and to browse websites), the