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
Whole Class Interviews: Building Community in Writing Workshop (TEMPLATE)
As I begin to set up my classroom, I can't help but think back to Jonathan's comment on our last day of school a few years ago in June. We...
Criteria for Success
At our end-of-the-day middle school collaboration meeting, teachers often share their experiences with students or classes. One lament that came up often at the beginning of the year was about...
Administering a Pre-Assessment
We’ve launched the school year, and teachers are busy getting to know students both as people and as writers. The other day, I had a conversation with a new second-grade...
Forming Groups Using a Planner
It was late October, and I was feeling great about my one-on-one reading conferences. I was listening more than I was talking, taking succinct but valuable notes, and feeling like...
The 4 Fs of Assessment
Assessment is driving my students crazy. The constant need to collect numbers for determining curriculum gaps or monitoring progress detracts from developing readers. Buried in the obsession to collect data...
Helping Kids Lead Every Day: Changing Who “Owns” Small Groups in the Classroom
One Sunday evening, while planning for my small-group instruction in reading, I paused. Why was I thinking about these groups as my small groups? They are the kids’ small groups,...
Talking About Tests
Teaching the genre of tests can seem far removed from writing workshop. Matt Renwick explores how to teach constructed response in a way that is integrated with the tenets of...
Maximizing Instructional Time at the Start of a New Unit
The launch of a new writing unit is an exciting time. Usually, students have just experienced some sort of writing celebration, and they have felt the pride and energy that...
Choice in Assessment
Text is just ink on a page until a reader comes along and gives it life. —Louise Rosenblatt I was a bright-eyed, open-hearted, new teacher in a room filled with...
Notetaking Series Part II: Honing Your Notetaking Skills, One Strategy at a Time
When we were learning how to take notes, becoming skilled at writing down observations seemed an almost mystical undertaking. We read accounts by anthropologists, war stories from their time in...
