We had the beginnings of a great discussion at the last Student Achievement Team meeting. I am a little put out that Ian got his thoughts published first, but I am doing my best to be gracious. He breaks down knowing your students into three categories:
knowing them personally
knowing where they fall on the learning continuum, [...]
It’s been a long time since I worked with rubrics. For a while, when performance assessment and authentic assessment were flavor of the month, I did a lot with rubrics. I was a curriculum coordinator, and I worked with groups of teachers to develop rubrics. I used McREL’s Dimensions of Learning framework, which I really [...]
Stacy gave me this great Malcolm Gladwell article from the New Yorker. (If you don’t recognize his name, you’re sure to have heard of his books The Tipping Point and Blink. He has another book out more recently that Ruth lent me but that I haven’t read yet.)
Ostensibly, the article is about how you can [...]
I can’t remember who told me about freerice.com. It’s just a vocabulary game, but they use their advertising to donate rice to people in developing countries, hence the name.
I like to read, write, speak, and listen. Most of my days are spent in meetings; reading reports, books & articles; and writing reports and emails. [...]
Under Where Am I Going? there are two strategies: clear target and examples of strong and weak work.
Under Where Am I Now? there are also two: descriptive feedback and monitoring understanding. And I realized this afternoon that descriptive feedback is the strategy we’ve spent the least time on.
I learned today about some of the subleties [...]
In this training, there are people like us who have a great deal of exposure to CASL and use it a lot. And there are people who’ve no previous experience with formative assessment. And at our table, there are people from Houston ISD, which has 250 schools and several hundred thousand students (the fourth largest [...]
Last spring and summer we sent a good many district leaders to training in Classroom Assessment for Student Learning (commonly abbreviated to CASL), and it is my main source of information for how to rethink our use of assessment.
In particular, we use the Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning (7S). It was Kelly who pointed [...]
I’m sitting in my hotel room in Portland (yes, this is my anticipatory set) thinking about what to write about the day-and-a-half training I’m just about to register for, and I decided to scroll through previous blog entries to see if there was anything I wanted to revisit. And I came across the one about [...]
When we wrote the ELTs, I was thinking about them in terms of using them as the basis of PLC discussions and writing common assessments. I took the teaching them part for granted. I don’t think we knew that we were embarking on a quest to use them well for classroom instruction.
Over a year later, [...]
