Many schools and institutions are working with formative action and many teachers are enthusiastic about it. Not only do they recognise that it can motivate pupils or students, but they also see how it can help them adapt to students needs, for example, or solve other day-to-day problems.

But I also often hear the sigh: ‘I don’t have time for formative action’.

In this blog, I discuss what is behind this regular complaint and what practical advice I give to teachers who are struggling with the issue of ‘time’.

No time, what do you mean?

When teaching are enthusiastic about an approach, but think they don’t have time for it, it’s an interesting reason to keep asking. In recent years I have found that this complaint can mean three different things:

1. No time to do the processes – Doing a process of formative action takes time. You ask a question, students write something on a maths board, you have a teaching-learning conversation about the results, you do something with the information, and then you check again to see if the follow-up action has worked. This takes time, which not every teacher has. The same applies to strategies such as teaching quality awareness and transformative feedback.

2. No time to do something with the information – Teachers may find that the programme is so full that they prefer not to investigate what pupils or students understand or do not understand because they do not have time to actually do something with the information. They want to avoid the risk of not being able to complete the planned programme on time.

3. No time to design processes – Designing processes of formative action requires teachers to think about potential misconceptions and how to anticipate them in their teaching materials before a lesson. Not every teacher experiences having enough time to do this.

Practical tips

Time is a major consideration for many teachers when deciding whether or not to do something. Some would say the most important!

In the following tips I offer suggestions on how to overcome one or a combination of the above objections. The trick is to combine formative action, or aspects of it, with what you are already doing. And on the other hand, where necessary, perhaps start to use some new techniques or tricks.

Tip 1: Any question you ask lends itself to formative action.

A key misconception reflected in the above is that formative action is something that ‘is in addition to’, when in many cases it is about doing more effectively what you were already doing, such as asking questions in class.

When you stand in front of the class, you ask a wide range of questions, from content questions “what kind of climate do we live in?” to process questions “what was the homework for today again?” to personal questions “how are you feeling today?

In formative action, step 2 of our model, you try to get all pupils to think and generate. You let them vote, or write on a maths board, or use random questioning methods. Assuming this is all you would do, as a teacher you are already using the positive effects of thinking, remembering AND generating. So you can already make your lessons more effective and more activating by having a large proportion of your questions answered collectively in class, even though this is not formative action in the strict sense of the word – after all, you are not necessarily doing anything with the information.

Ferris Bueller’s economics teacher would have benefited greatly from this tip!

Tip 2: Practice speeding up steps 2 and 3, e.g. with Walkthrus.

Of course, most teachers will not stop at step 2. That sea of miniwhiteboards in the sky provides a lot of useful information. So you will want to interpret it and probably ask further questions about it (step 3), ‘what did you answer and why?

Experience from classroom visits shows that a lot of time can be lost in this step because teachers use ineffective conversation techniques. Formative action is then not so much a ‘time problem’, but the problem arises because a lot of pace is lost in the lesson because teachers do not approach such a conversation very effectively. As a result, processes regularly take minutes longer than they need to.

Valuable time is lost, for example, because students too often say “I don’t know”, or don’t know how to formulate the answer to a question, or don’t respond constructively to each other’s contributions.

You can make these situations more effective by using the right classroom discussion techniques and practising them with the group. It is therefore recommended that you practise Step 2 and Step 3 as much as possible, for example using Teaching Walkthrus (book) or Teach Like A Champion techniques (TEACH) (book with instructional videos). Consider techniques such as Cold Call and Wait Time.

Again, if you don’t do anything with the information you collect, it is obviously not yet formative action, but if you have regular conversations with the class about the results of Step 2, they will be more motivated to participate in these classroom activities and the effectiveness of your teaching will increase.

Tip 3: Use dead moments

As a teacher, I used to do a lot of exit tickets. An exit ticket is a question that you ask at the end of the lesson and that the students hand in when they leave. Not only was this functional for me, because I could use the information from it in my lesson preparation for the next lesson. The advantage for me was also that it allowed me to make much better use of an ineffective moment in my lesson – the last five minutes. Usually the students were already restless, packing up or chatting distractedly. Using an exit ticket, I made them think about some relevant questions in the last five minutes. This meant that no lesson time was lost for me – and I still had to prepare my lesson, but I could now do it more effectively using the information from exit tickets!

So there are more teachers who routinely incorporate formative action into teaching moments they are somewhat dissatisfied with: from the start of class to homework done outside of class!

Tip 4: Doing it more often makes pupils or students more independent in interpreting information

In the beginning, formative action takes more energy. As a teacher, you may need to get used to it, but so do the pupils or students! It may take some time for pupils to understand that they should not look at each other when voting with their fingers on a diagnostic question, or how you want them to react to someone else’s wrong answer.

Not only will this become more apparent as you repeat processes often, routinely (in the sense that certain forms of work occur with some regularity). Pupils or students will also become increasingly independent in going through such processes. This means that they themselves become more adept at interpreting information and arriving at obvious follow-up actions.

Tip 5: First lose time, then gain (a lot of) time

For anyone who has fully incorperated formative action in their lessons, the statement “I don’t have time for formative action” may seem a bit strange. First of all, of course, it is true that many teachers often find out through formative action that a planned lesson is not necessary at all – an immediate time saving! But there is a second important point.

The research literature often reflects that more effective teaching practice not only leads to better results, but also that students absorb the material more quickly.

This is not an illogical finding, of course. Formative action allows the process of knowledge building to take place much more precisely. As a teacher, you have much more insight into what knowledge does and does not exist, and this makes it possible to build further only when the foundation is solid enough. So the paradox is that you can spend more time at the beginning to lay a good foundation, but you gain time as you go along because of that good foundation.

Failure to do so creates what is known as the ‘leaky pipe’ syndrome. Because there are leaks in all sorts of places in the teaching process, the teaching process becomes increasingly inefficient over time. By consistently checking for understanding, the effectiveness with which children learn new material increases all the time.

When I was teaching, I was able to reduce the time it took me to ‘cover’ a complex chapter in vocation (age 15) on the area and content of space figures from two months to five weeks. In addition, the average score on the test was 1.5 grade points higher.

Conclusion

In my blog I have explored the challenge of lack of time when implementing formative action in education. While I find that many teachers recognise the value and potential of formative practice to motivate students and improve their teaching outcomes, the perception of insufficient time remains a significant barrier for them.

Interestingly, despite initial perceptions, formative action can ultimately save time through more effective teaching practice and faster absorption of knowledge by students. To me, this highlights the importance of rethinking our approach to time management in education, and suggests that investing in formative action is not only has pedagogical value, but also practically feasible through smart integration and use of available time and resources.

Of course, one could also make room for formative action through curriculum design. More on this in a future blog.