In this blog we present the pedagogical roadmap as a concrete tool for teachers to determine when it is useful to organise a process of formative action in the classroom.

Formative action refers to the behaviour of teachers and learners in the pedagogical process (see Figure 1). In this process, teachers gather targeted and specific information based on a thoughtful question/assumption and a corresponding prediction. They interpret this information with or without the students and arrive at an informed follow-up action. The outcome of this follow-up action is necessary to determine whether or not the follow-up action was successful in relation to the intended goal. We see ‘formative’ only as an attribute of purposeful action and the kind of decisions that are made on the basis of that action. That is why we talk about formative action and formative decisions.

Figure 1: The process of formative action

Formative decisions

The process of formative action shown is needed to make formative decisions in the classroom.

• What do I need to do as a teacher based on what I saw in step 2?
• What follow-up action do the students or you as the teacher need to take?
• What do you want them to revisit and think about and why?
• Something to repair, clarify, add to or repeat?

In contrast to – preferably limited – summative decisions, which focus on determining whether independent mastery has actually occurred, formative decisions focus on determining the appropriate next steps in the learning process towards that independent mastery. Thus, formative decisions are always pedagogical decisions and are best made on a large number of occasions. But beware! These decisions are explicitly not meant to be administered, but to be immediately translated into follow-up actions.

1200-1500 decisions per day

By definition, teachers make many decisions, consciously or unconsciously, while teaching. Jackson (1968), in his research in primary education, found that teachers have 200 to 300 interactions with pupils per hour (that is 1200-1500 per day!), most of which involve unplanned and unpredictable demands on them to make formative and summative decisions. Depending on the teacher’s experience and expertise, this ongoing decision-making process is quite complicated and its quality is influenced by many factors. Examples of these factors include teacher expectations, pupil characteristics and classroom climate. Because a teacher makes many implicit decisions based on many types of student information, we often do not know whether these are the best decisions in terms of the student’s learning process and the teacher’s instructional process.

How can we make better formative decisions?

Formative action is a wonderful tool to help a teacher make more informed and thoughtful decisions, but it takes a lot of time and trial and error to put the underlying principles into good practice. In addition to an extensive pedagogical repertoire, an understanding of instructional design is an important prerequisite for the successful use of formative action. How can we help teachers to think about how to make better formative decisions?

In this blog we present the pedagogical roadmap as a concrete tool for teachers to determine when it is useful to organise a process of formative action in the classroom. The maxim is not to act formatively as often as possible, but to act functionally formatively at those times when it is in the best interest of all students.

Meet PedRo!

A pedagogical roadmap visualises the path that students need to take to reach an intended goal. As a metaphor, think of a journey you take from your home to a particular destination, or a subway map (see Figure 2).

This journey will rarely be linear, but will have side roads, resting places for reflection and contemplation, but will also require hard work and careful attention. From now on we will call the pedagogical roadmap PedRo.

Making a Pedro involves a series of design steps with a specific yield. These steps should preferably be carried out in a number of iterations and result in an appropriate form, for example a mind map. There are a number of tools for this, such as Padlet.

Step 1. A clear main goal

You start by defining a clear objective. What is the goal you want to achieve with your students in a given period of time, and what does mastery of this goal look like? Think of a particular skill or task that students should be able to do independently after a number of lessons or a period of teaching. Examples include being able to analyse a historical source, write a business letter or argument, cook a dish, or solve an economic problem. The complexity of the skill and task is partly determined by the time you have available to work with students on it. There should be a balance between the performance expected and the conditions under which it is to be achieved.

Step 2. A number of intermediate goals and the connection between them

Step 2. A series of intermediate destinations and the connection between them

Getting to the final destination – even in a real journey – does not happen all at once. In the second step, as a teacher, you start to think about which intermediate steps are needed to get to the main goal and to interpret the connection between the goals. What is the first goal that a student needs to have achieved in order to move on to the next goal? For example, in writing an argument, this might be that the student first recognises the characteristics of an argument or is able to write a certain type of sentence. Which objective builds on a previous one? Which objectives can students work on at the same time? In this step, it is very important for you, the teacher, to put yourself in a beginner’s position: what is the first step a beginner takes to move towards mastering the main objective?

Step 3. An overview of (conditional) knowledge

When the main goal (the destination) and the intermediate goals (the stages) are clear, in the third step the teacher makes explicit what knowledge is required to achieve each intermediate goal and how these knowledge building blocks lead to the main goal. This includes questions such as

• What knowledge and skills do students need to take the first step towards the first intermediate goal?
• What knowledge do students need to recognise the characteristics of an argument, for example?
• What knowledge do you expect students to have at the beginning of the course?
• Where are important interfaces?

Step 4. An indication of critical milestones

In order to identify later where formative processes are needed in the classroom, it is useful in this fourth step to think ahead about where the road is likely to get a bit bumpy for the students.

• In your experience as a teacher, which intermediate goals do they often struggle with?
• What are the reasons for this?
• For example, what knowledge or skills do they lack?
• Are there typical misconceptions that you can predict well at this stage?
• Where do you think you need to spend more time or provide more practice?

You indicate in PedRo where these bottlenecks are, e.g. using red squares with a description of the expected difficulty/misconception.

A disclaimer

Time for a disclaimer. We are aware that in some subjects it is easier to describe a clear path to a goal than in others. For example, the maths teachers in our training programmes say that it is fairly easy to argue that students need to have certain knowledge and skills before they can tackle new material. This is much harder to argue for a subject like history. History is primarily about teaching students to reason historically, using specific knowledge about a particular period/content (for example, analysing a historical source about the Second World War or the Cold War). There is no objective logic in history as there is in mathematics.

The core of the subject

Here it can be very helpful to use some structure (such as causality) to structure the knowledge to build a PedRo. It is often helpful to think about the core of a particular chapter. What do you really want students to understand about it and how do you lead them to that understanding?

Regardless, in any subject there will be key objectives that can be identified that require a particular path or paths to get there, and it is important to think about this very deliberately. The challenge is to explore what that path might look like for your profession and your chosen major. We are convinced that this is possible for any subject and any context.

Conclusion

PedRo becomes a rewarding friend when you feel like thinking about how you currently organise your teaching and why you do it that way. The point is not that you immediately have a perfect Pedro in which everything is worked out in detail, but that it increasingly becomes a compass for making pedagogical choices, especially where a process of formative action is needed. A Pedro serves each learner.

One of the next blogs on this site will discuss how to turn a PedRo into real formative action.

More?

Read more on the design process in our book Formative Action: From Instrument to Design.