Sprint Episode: Taking FIRME Action

In this "sprint" episode, Jeff tackles a topic in under five minutes. Today, Jeff reviews a concept known as FIRME Action, developed by Research for Better Teaching. This checklist can be used during instruction or between classes, whenever you're reviewing formative assessment data.

Transcript

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Welcome back or welcome to the Level Up Health Education Podcast. My name is Jeff Bartlett, and I'm here to help you level up your teaching in health education. Today's episode is a little bit different. It's what I'm calling a sprint episode. I'm going to talk about a topic for five minutes. The actual episode will be a little bit longer, just as I go over some brief housekeeping things. By the time you hear this or it's published, it'll be Tuesday, and I'll be on my way to the Shape America National Convention in Kansas City. So if you are there, please say hello. And I am presenting on Friday about the skill development model in health education. I'd love to see you there. I appreciate all of your support, and I'm looking forward to seeing many of you there as well. So on to today's episode. I've been lucky in my district that we have a lot of PD that is actually useful. I know that there is kind of a stigma attached to being on the receiving end of PD. I forgot to start my stopwatch. I'm giving myself five minutes. Um but in my district, we have some PD that is pretty valuable to us. And when I present at workshops and conferences around the country, I know some teachers ask, like, where did you learn this part of teaching, the pedagogy, the classroom stuff outside of the health world, especially from people who are trained, you know, in a physical education background or setting? And I say, well, it's a district that I work in. And one of the things that we've done a lot of work on over the years, and yes, some things do repeat, right? A lot of PD is circular, uh, but the most valuable PD was around formative assessment. So our district has done some work with an organization called Research for Better Teaching. They are the ones behind the skillful teacher book and the skillful teacher course. When I started teaching, we were required to take that course, and it was district, uh district funded within our first three years of teaching. And so I learned a lot of good things in that class. It's a great organization. I am not affiliated with them in any way, but I wanted to bring up something that we went over from them as part of the FAR cycle, which is the formative assessments for results cycle. And this is an acronym about taking FERM action after reviewing formative assessment data. The firm acronym is F-I-R-M-E, and it stands for feedback, investigation, reteaching, reengaging, or regrouping, moving on, and extension. Now, this is not something I've come up with. I've been very clear that this is RBT or Research for Better Teaching that has come up with this, but I want to just give some examples about how this has uh played out in my classroom. But I'll start by going over each part of the acronym. Feedback. How you give feedback is up to you. Maybe it's verbal, maybe it's written down, maybe you're demonstrating something. But the feedback that you give after you analyze formative assessment data should be specific and linked back to your learning objective. We also want to be, or sorry, not be judgmental when we give feedback. And I know that I am always working on that. It's easy to say, hey, great, excellent, or not so great, things like that. Um, but I always bring it back to a specific objective. When we look at formative assessment data, sometimes we only give feedback, but sometimes we decide to investigate. And this refers to investigating student thinking, especially if we need more information. For example, you might be unsure as to why so many students in one class didn't perform as well on a particular formative assessment or skill practice compared to a different class, or maybe it should that one class did well on the first skill practice, but not on a second one. So you ask students to walk through their reasoning that they gave for an answer or a demonstration in order to try to find out like why they put down what they did. And you might find out that they misunderstood the question. Maybe there was even a word, a vocabulary word that they were unsure of. So taking this short step to determine the why behind their answers uh can then redirect you as a teacher to the next proper action. And maybe that's giving feedback or reteaching or moving on. The R stands for reteaching, re-engaging, or regrouping. And this would be making sure that you're reteaching students or re-engaging them with the work in a different way than you previously taught them. So for me, I think about an example with the skill of analyzing influences. I had to use a different example of an influence. And when I made an influence that was more relevant to them, I think it was a video game, um, that that clicked in their brains of what they needed to do. And reteaching happens so often, anyway, in a skills-based health and program. Uh, it's a pretty natural fit. So if you do have the time and space, regrouping is a great strategy. It's really not practical for me in my current setup. Um, but reteaching is something that always happens. Moving on is M. And sometimes we know students get things right away, and it's time to move on to the next thing, and that's awesome, and it's great when it happens. Um, but this would always be a default last step. It is, I know for me personally. And then E is extension. So we know that some students might demonstrate proficiency before others, and the extension allows them the opportunity to extend their learning. You could also combine this with regrouping if you have the time and space to do so. So, just a couple other notes as I'm down on like 30 seconds on my stopwatch. Um, when I'm looking at formative assessments, I really just make general notes about what I see, usually on a sticky note. Um, it's not fancy, and this allows me just to compile trends that I see and go over them with students in our on our agenda slides through the next class. And that's part of uh my entry task and how I start off is I always review uh based on what I've seen. This firm action can be done in the middle of class, it could be done in between classes when you're looking back at work, but it's also something that saves you as the teacher a lot of time. And my stopwatch is now over five minutes. So there's a lot left unsaid, and this definitely will be something that I consider expanding upon more. But at the end of the day, firm action is something that you should think about when you are reviewing formative assessment data from students. Should you give feedback? Do you need to investigate? Do you need to reteach, reengage, or regroup? Can you move on, or do you need to extend? As always, thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with uh a more usual length episode, but I'm also hoping to record some stuff with other people at Shape this week. So stay tuned for that. Thanks.