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It’s been well-established in the literature around professional learning communities that team-developed common assessments can serve as powerful tools to monitor students’ level of proficiency in the essential standards (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, and Mattos 2016). Read more
A deeply held and widely shared belief in education is the “summer slide.” For nine months, teachers and students work tirelessly to build student achievement only to have it unravel over the summer. Upon returning to school, teacher conversations are laced with laments of the learning lost. This blog post is not an argument concerning the reality of the summer slide; rather, I am pondering why the idea of a summer slide makes me so uncomfortable. Read more
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I have been working with a teaching colleague in her first and second grade combined classroom for the last number of months. Together, we have been exploring ways to enhance young learners’ abilities to self-assess. Over a series of lessons, we have focused on inviting students to practice some of the sub-habits needed for self-assessment (I have outlined these habits in a previous blog post). This past week, we were working on the sub-habits of revisiting, revising, analyzing, and decision-making (all important parts of a strong self-assessment process).
The average…I can’t remember how many times as a student I was told, “It will all average out in the end.” It was said time and time again that things would be fine even if I had a low score here and there. Read more
Have you ever done a quick Google search of the word “formative”? I was inspired when I recently did and read, “serving to form something, especially having a profound and lasting influence on a person’s development.” What exactly is it that we are trying to form through our formative assessment processes? In my classroom, I hope to develop strong, capable learners who take charge of their learning, learn from mistakes, and develop a growth mindset. My hope is that they view assessments as a method of communication between us and see the value in making mistakes and growing from them. Read more
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With all of the published materials and frameworks available, teachers often ask why they should invest their time in unpacking standards. Consider the following:
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Almost every conversation about moving from traditional grading practices to sound grading practices (even standards-based grading) seems to end up with discussions and debates about when students get out into the real world. While I understand the intent of this sentiment and the concern it expresses, this real world conversation can devolve into an overly cynical perspective from which to examine the experiences of our students and seems only to serve as a justification for punitive practices along a very narrow set of circumstances. Read more
I have long asserted that one of my favorite things about working in education is the ability to experience a new beginning and a consistent end to each academic year. In the span of one year, we have the privilege of traveling alongside groups of students as they experience new content, new contexts, and new relationships each year. We structure environments that support learning over time and we have the opportunity to capture and celebrate each moment of growth through purposeful observations, conversations, and performance tasks. Read more
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Early on in my career I was a very traditional grader. Homework was scored, retakes weren’t allowed, and I even gave extra credit. I’m not proud of this, but it’s the truth and helped shape the educator I am today. I realize now that I was teaching my students to play the game of school. They were to accumulate the desired amount of points to be rewarded with the grade they were working towards.
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By now the process of analyzing and unpacking standards is familiar to most educators. In this era of standards-based instruction, unpacking standards to identify specific learning targets and underpinnings, then organizing those targets and underpinnings into a purposeful learning progression is almost ubiquitous. Read more
