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
Notetaking Series Part III: “Raw” and “Cooked” Notes
Sometimes I learn the most when I am uncomfortable, unsure, and attempting new things. As you use new tools to observe and note events in your classroom, you may gain...
Notetaking Series, Part IV: What Counts and Writing the Unwritable
Most teachers seem to follow that Midwestern principle of better living in their notetaking -- if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. But the most interesting...
Notetaking Series Part V: Getting Out of Notetaking Ruts
Routines are wonderful -- they help us organize our days, weeks, and months in a way that helps us accomplish goals. Yet routines also can lead to ruts -- certain...
Establishing a Routine for Notetaking
Once you decide when you're going to keep more notes, you'll need to find ways to preserve that time. This is no small feat for teachers and literacy coaches. We...
Student Reading Interview: Assessing Ana
Principal Karen Szymusiak interviews Ana, a second grader, to learn more about her strengths and needs as a reader. Here are some sample reading interview questions: How would you...
Helping Students Set Nonfiction Reading Goals
For years, no matter how hard I tried, fiction seemed to take over my students' reading workshop time. I realized that with only one block of time to read, students...
Talking About Tests
For several years, I have been spending about a month before state testing on a test-taking genre in reading. It works like any other genre study, allowing students to learn...
Test-Taking Skills: Reading Strategies for Word Problems Part I
If I've learned anything from the past 22 years of teaching, I know how valuable children's playground philosophies are for dealing with the confusing world created by adults. As a...
Data Cards: Assessment Profiles at a Glance
"Data cards" are ingeniously designed to allow an entire grade-level team to look at the reading levels of all students in the grade. In this four-minute video, "The Sisters" (Gail...
Conferring Close-Up: Test-Taking Strategies Part II
Samantha Bennett's energizing book, That Workshop Book: New Systems and Structures for Classrooms That Read, Write, and Think, asks teachers to reflect on their classroom environments and teaching practices. Bennett...
Test-Taking Strategies Part III: Whole Class Debrief
I am captivated by teachers' abilities to maximize time with students. Only an elementary teacher can check students' understanding of multiplication facts, conduct a class survey based on a student-created...
Collaborative Team Meeting: Assessing and Planning Together
Collaborative team meetings take place every 9-10 days in our schools. In these meetings, teachers from one grade level, literacy coaches, and our principal meet together to discuss individual students,...
Assessment and Curriculum Mapping
In this video from a new teacher study group for grades 3-5 teachers, Jennifer Allen demonstrates how teachers can use assessment data to develop instructional plans for individual students and...
Professional Development Needs Assessment Inventory
Fall arrives and the school is busy with the activity of putting rooms together, team meetings to plan the first few days of school and set goals, and staff meetings...
Conferring with Yourself: A Tool for Anticipating Response (TEMPLATE)
Teachers thinking about making big changes to their literacy programs need a few good voices in their heads. Not the kind that lead to extended stays in padded rooms, but...
Starting Points: Easy Beginnings for Writing Better Narrative Assessments and Report Card Comments
Teachers despise cheaters. We want students to do their own work, take pride in it, and stand on their personal accomplishments as learners. We expect the same of ourselves as...
Enlisting Students as Observers
If you are trying to build more observation into your assessment of students, enlisting students as class observers is a wonderful way to gather more notes daily. The activity has...
Adjectives to Anecdotes: Writing Better Report Card Comments
If your report card allows you to write only a few sentences about each student, a bit of advance planning helps if you want to be specific and concrete. Try...
Two-Column Notes (E-GUIDE)
It's hard to know who to credit for the incredibly useful two-column note tool. While two-column notes are definitely a kissing cousin to the Cornell Note-Taking System (Pauk, 1974), in...
Reflection Sheets: A Tool for Assessment and Conferring
I use reflection sheets a few times a month with my third- and fourth-grade students in reading and writing workshops. The students answer a few questions around some issue we...
Tracking Young Children’s Writing and Development
It's important to us to be aware of each child's writing growth as they progress through the year. Knowing what a child is attempting, experimenting with, and mastering helps us...
