Yesterday, I described the pivotal role that assessment plays in defining the unique needs of readers. Today, I thought I would share a tool that emerged from inquiry work I facilitated in several local districts three years ago. Take a peek: GRInterventionIdeas A little bit about that: as teachers began expanding their definitions of what it meant to be a “successful” reader, the assessments they used to define the strengths and needs of those they were…
“…simply treating formative assessment as a series of more frequent mini-assessments misses the point about its value to learning – a value that is rooted in theory and research. At a time of unprecedented opportunity, it is regrettable that roles of the teacher and the student in enabling learning are not at the center of current thinking about formative assessment within the proposed next-generation assessment systems. This may well result in a lost opportunity to…
Thanks to the support I’ve received from various members of my learning community (particularly Julie Kopp, Theresa Gray, and Jennifer Borgioli), I’ve discovered much more about the power of formative assessment practices in recent years. Reflecting on questions like these helped me begin shaping a vision for the sort of assessment work that I wanted to begin myself and support other educators around. The realizations below guided much of that thinking. Next week, I’ll share…
In recent months, I’ve been growing more and more concerned about the ways in which folks tend to confuse the words testing and assessment. I also have some substantial concerns about what people are calling rubrics these days and the purposes for using them–but I’ll save that for another post. For the next week or so, I’ll be trying to articulate where I am in the progress of my own learning around the topic of…
Several weeks ago, I posted a reflection of a demo lesson that I had recently completed. This lesson coached students in their ability to identify main idea and supporting details, and one of my professional goals was to model the process of formative assessment that I am encouraging the teachers that I am working with to adopt. I used this process myself in my work with the students, and it guided my instruction along the…
The feedback that I received yesterday and the reflection I’ve been doing in response to that have inspired the following question: we spend so much time planning as educators, but how often do we attend to reflective practice and how often do we formally assess our own work? There has been so much talk about formative assessment lately that I guess it’s only natural for me to wonder how often any of us ask our…
When I first began teaching, I was passionate about performance-based assessment, and the first groups of students that I taught found themselves engaged in upwards of ten different performance-based assessments each year. My seniors wrote I-Search reports ala Ken Macrorie, and when I taught eighth grade, my students were performing everything from the meaning of their vocabulary words to the scripts that they wrote as a part of their Cast of Characters projects. These were…
Several years ago, I was invited to lead a regional deep curriculum alignment initiative that brought teachers from across Western New York together to define what was understood and what was not about the New York State English Language Arts standards and assessments. Charged with the task of creating a topologically aligned regional curriculum, our group worked collaboratively to accomplish much more than this, and in the end, it was evident that the product that we created…
Nearly ten years into my career as an independent education consultant, I can say with confidence that a large portion of my time has been devoted to supporting teachers with assessment design. If you’ve walked a similar path, then you know how hard and humbling this work is. Perhaps, like me, you stand on the shoulders of assessment giants like Douglas Reeves, Rick Stiggins, Dylan Wiliam, Susan Brookhart, or James Popham. Perhaps you still define yourself as…
Just a quick post on the fly this morning, really–but one that I’ve been formulating in my head for some time now. I’ve spent a good portion of this fall working with over 150 teachers of grades 3-12 who have been capturing formative assessment data about their students as writers during guided and independent practice. They have also been gathering information and reflecting on their instructional practices as teachers of writing. Just this week, they’ve…