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
Countdown: Keeping Children at the Center of My Plans for the New Year
I did a crazy thing the other day: I started a countdown to school on iGoogle. For those of you who want to know: 23 days, 12 hours, 10 minutes,...
The DIBELS Divide (LITERACY COACH CONFIDENTIAL)
Literacy Coach Confidential is Choice Literacy's forum for answering the toughest questions literacy coaches and teachers face as they work together. Our contributors respond to the questions anonymously, which enables them...
Triangulating: The Importance of Multiple Data Points When Assessing Students
We went to a professional development session a few years ago with Elizabeth City and she gave us a name for something we have always believed - the importance of...
Creating Data Teams
A concern that arises in thinking about the collection and use of data is the number of schools that are assigning the job of "data manager" to their reading coaches/specialists....
Conversation Turns: Recordkeeping and Analysis Tool
One of the best ways I've found to deal with colleagues or students who talk too much during group discussions is to give them a task. I've found keeping a...
The Draw-a-Reader Test: Informal Assessment Supporting Teacher Inquiry
My department was trying to fill a position in science education and we were interviewing a candidate who had worked extensively with inner-city youth to support their interest in and...
Bucking Broncs and Spitting Bulls
The opening moments of the local rodeo were familiar: cowgirls raced their well- trained horses all over the arena and sponsors flags waved in the wind. A local high school...
Reflecting on Student Work in Staff Meetings (TEMPLATE)
Over the last four years our teaching staff has included reflecting on student work as a part of our staff meetings. To be honest, we struggled for probably three of...
Easing into Assessments During the First Six Weeks of School
As Lucy Calkins reminds us in The Art of Teaching Reading, "Once you really pull in close to consider children's understandings (and misunderstandings), it quickly becomes clear that 'simply' giving children...
Looking for Evidence: Seven Questions
Teachers are continually refining our thinking and assessments as we work with children, documenting and assessing reading and writing skills. For the past few months, I met with a dedicated...
From “Data Drowning” to “Data Wise”: What Are We Doing Now?
A few years ago we took a course that we loved based on the book Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching And Learning by Kathryn Parker...
Moving from Data to Practice
Data is now being used by many different constituencies and for many different reasons. Districts are reporting data to state or federal agencies to meet grant requirements; school committees who...
Fostering More Curricular Collaboration in Teams: The Meeting Notes Form (TEMPLATE)
This year our school is moving to a teaming model. The 6th grade teachers had already been working as a grade level team, and we felt like we were doing...
An Assessment Notebook That Works for Me
I have been looking for the perfect assessment organization system since I started teaching over 20 years ago. I remember my excitement when I heard about others who were using...
Assessing Spelling in Writing Workshops Part 1: Thinking Through the Assessment
I have been pondering changes to my spelling and word study program in my first grade classroom this year. Specifically, I wonder how I can look at my students' writing...
Middle School Readers at Mid-Year (SURVEY TEMPLATE)
As a reading teacher, the first thing I do at the start of each school year is try to find out as much as I can about the relationship my...
Assessing Spelling in Writing Workshop Part 2: Noticing Patterns in Individuals, Small Groups and the Whole Group
Regie Routman writes about assessment in her book, Teaching Essentials: Expecting the Most and Getting the Best from Every Learner K-8. She says, Teachers have to develop a mindset that views...
Assessing Spelling in Writing Workshop Part 3: Embedding Instruction
The only way we can teach efficiently and have enough time to teach what's necessary -- curriculum, standards, all discrete objectives -- so all students achieve at higher levels, is...
Grade Level Team Meeting: Test Preparation
In this video of a 3rd grade team meeting, literacy coaches Janet Scott and Gail Boushey help third-grade teachers think through what is going well with test preparation, and what...
Student Reading Interview: Assessing Ana Part 2
This is the second video in a two-part series. Principal Karen Szymusiak interviewed Ana, a second grader, to learn more about her strengths and needs as a reader. In this...
Notetaking Strategies Part I: “In the Midst” and “After the Fact” Notes
Memory is made as a quilt is made. From the whole cloth of time, frayed scraps of sensation are pulled apart and pieced together in a pattern that has a...
