Choice Lit Topic: Assessment Tools
Making sense of the enormous amount of student data in any classroom or school is probably the biggest challenge we face individually and in our school communities. Here you’ll find everything from one-page templates created by teachers for use in their classrooms to videos of staff teams poring over large data sets. We don’t have all the answers, but we do provide tools to help you ask better questions as you evaluate students and talk about assessments with your colleagues.
Results
Just Ask Them: Including Students in the Feedback Process
As educators, we put on our curiosity hats. After a year of focusing on using success criteria with students, wonders were swishing around in our minds. Do you think the...
Fostering Independence with Tools
I have heard more than one colleague mention that over time, our anchor charts become “wallpaper.” It is true that when charts hang on our walls for an extended period...
The Right Moment for “I Can” Statements
I spent the last year diving in and getting to know our new resource for teaching math in third grade. There is an expectation that we are using the new...
Beyond “I’m a Third-Grade Teacher”: The Power of Role-Specific Prompting in Educational AI
Everything is changing at warp speed with the landscape of AI tools for education. Many educators find themselves frustrated with inconsistent or underwhelming results. Or, worse yet, some default to...
Can AI Help with Assessment?
Recently, I tried something I probably wouldn’t have considered good practice one year or even six months ago. I used AI to help me grade essays. Faced with a pile...
Building Thinking Classrooms in Literacy
One of the latest innovations in teaching mathematics is Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. It has been a game changer for me because my students engaged in math,...
Got Criteria? How to Help Students Engage with Success Criteria
Driving home from my young daughter’s first-ever basketball game, we filled the air with appreciation and praise for her performance. "Wow, you did great!" my son said to her excitedly....
Alternatives to a Literary Essay: Two-Voice Perspective Poems
In our seventh-grade classroom, our last unit of the year places students in partnerships reading books in verse, with bi-weekly meetings to discuss some aspect of the books together. Books...
Know/Wonder Chart
Teaching young kids to read is uncomplicated. Please do not misunderstand: Teaching young kids to read is hard, hard work. It takes intentionality, perseverance, systematic planning, knowledge of how the...
Creating a Teacher Notetaking System
Sometimes I feel like our reading intervention room should have a revolving door rather than the typical classroom door on hinges. So many kids pass through that door each day....
Developing a Mindset for Looking at Student Writing
This PD2Go focuses on intentionally developing a mindset for looking at student writing by pairing an article by Heather Fisher and a Quick Take video by Ruth Ayres.
It’s Time to Admire: Sharing in the Beauty of Students’ Writing
I admire anyone that has the guts to write anything. E. B. White “What is this young writer doing?" I asked encouragingly to the team of teachers gathered around for...
Level Two Unlocked: Using the Language of Video Games to Engage Students in the Assessment Experience
In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. —Mary Poppins Ching, ching…one point. Brush up and down. Ching, ching…two points. I watched as my son...
One-Page Reading Response to Assess Theme
This PD2Go focuses on giving a practical approach to assessing students' understandings of theme by using a one-page reading response by pairing an article by Christy Rush-Levine with a minilesson video with Dana Murphy.
One-Page Reading Response: A Simple Approach to Complex Assessment
After a school year filled with literary analysis essays, I was looking for another way my sixth graders could share textual analysis. I came across “A Simple Trick for Success...
Getting to Know Digital Learners: How Playing with Technology Helps Facilitate Our Identities as Learners
Recently Josie’s four-year-old granddaughter became fascinated with slime YouTube videos. We thought the request for these videos was simply a filler during her quiet time. However, she was taking note:...
Student-Planned End-of-Year Celebration
We look around the classroom and see students reading independently, some partner reading, others sharing exciting or surprising events in their reading. Writers conferring with one another, others co-authoring pieces....
Creating Progressions to Meet Learners Where They Are
We’re a family of skiers who have been on the slopes for most of our lives. Each time we get on the mountain, we’re looking for ways to slightly improve...
Mining the Data
DATA. This four-letter word is an essential component in moving our instruction forward. Yet since I started in the role of coach some eight years ago, it has also become...
Making Data Review More Personal
As I finished reading the email from my principal, I exhaled a heavy sigh. “Teachers, don’t forget,” the email read, “tomorrow is data review. Please be on time for your...
Student-Created Assessments
Excitement was high during a game of Mystery Word this week. Markers poised above their whiteboards, the kids waited for me to slip the next word under the projector. As...
