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When you have an opportunity to spend three days with Dylan Wiliam, Thomas Guskey, Susan Brookhart, and Jay McTighe, you can bet you’ll learn a LOT about assessment practices. If you joined us at the 2019 Formative Assessment National Conference, you know what we mean when we say you’ll also take away some powerful ideas that will stay with you long after the closing keynote.

We’ve put together a list of 10 “aha moments” that attendees took back from DWFA19. If you were there this year or in previous years, we’d love to know: What has resonated most with you?

1) We almost never realize when we are learning.

2) An achievement gap is actually a daily learning gap in core instruction compounded over time.

3) The purpose of feedback is to improve the student—not the work.

4) It’s a teacher’s reaction and response that make an assessment formative in nature.

5) Feedback isn’t feedback unless it can feed something.

6) Learning is a change in long-term memory—how much a child will still remember three weeks from now.

7) We all love to be right, but we learn a lot more when we make mistakes.

8) It’s impossible to determine the learning needs of 30 students based on one student’s answer.

9) Grades should reflect what students have learned—not how they compare to others.

10) The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. (Ausubel, 1968)

Thinking about joining us next year? Fill out this form to let us know and we’ll keep you in the loop!