My Teaching Evolution: Assessment

Physics teacher Dolores Gende is shifting her teaching to a student-driven learning model by selecting some areas of focus each year. This year it’s assessment. “I see assessment as an ongoing process that informs me and my students and gauges the progression of learning. I partner with my students, and they appreciate not being constrained by fixed deadlines and dead-end quiz scores. They prefer the ample opportunities we create to demonstrate they can accomplish all of our Learning Objectives.”

1st Graders Self-Assess: "I Want To Be Excellent."

I’ve nodded sagely as people discussed whether students should help create their own assessment rubric. Of course they should. Why doesn’t everyone do this, I wondered? It just never occurred to me to do it in MY classroom. It wasn’t that I didn’t think my students could do it. I somehow didn’t get my thinking from the “should” to the “I’m doing it.” Until this week.

The Only High Stakes Test

Cross-posted My two older children, Ben (grade 5) and Elisabeth (grade 4), start NECAP (New England Comprehensive Assessment Program) testing today.  My youngest daughter, Emma, is too young to be tortured by them. But, Ben and Elisabeth join all 3-8 and 11th grade...