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
Think Small
"Think small" is my new motto. It helps me handle the complicated too-muchness of it all. Maira Kalman (from And the Pursuit of Happiness) This year, when selecting a...
Secret Reader
I stay modest 'bout it, aye, she elaborate it, aye. —Kendrick Lamar, from “Humble” “I have a secret reader in my class,” Betsy told us at a recent professional development...
Assessing in the Midst: Using Charts and Exit Slips
Melanie Meehan shares some ways teachers can press the pause button in the midst of teaching to assess whether they are teaching the right lesson at the right time. The...
Google It!
“Mom, you’re awesome!” Jordan said as he bounded into the house after wrestling practice. Since Jordan is a teenager, I definitely didn’t let his sweet words go to my head....
Mindful Test-Taking
Have you ever lost yourself in a great book and become unaware of the sounds and events happening around you? Have you ever seen a child so engaged in playing...
Building Habits with Short-Term Goals
During the first two of weeks of writing this school year, we were busy teaching “gathering” minilessons to help students fill their heads and notebooks with writing. Since our first...
Reset
I am spoiled by my DVR. I can sit down and watch my favorite shows whenever I want. I can even skip over commercial breaks. However, every now and then,...
When Students Set Intentions
One of the things my yoga instructor always says at the beginning of class is “Set an intention.” Our intention could be to focus, or maybe to work on a...
Avoiding Flat Tires
This spring, I discovered a colossal flat tire on my bike. Not the kind that an air compressor will help, either—the tire, ripped and frayed, didn’t even adhere to the...
Rethinking Spring Assessments
It’s May, and with that comes an unsettled, uneasy feeling stemming from a whole cluster of things: the culmination of a year’s worth of teaching and learning, a limited amount...
Looking Forward with Students
Remember those first weeks of school? That time when you felt like the current class would never understand the classroom routines, and you went home exhausted from the effort of...
Puppy Chow
My little, old dog: a heartbeat at my feet. Edith Wharton One of the most essential teaching moves I make didn’t have a name until Jennifer Gonzalez “verbed” the...
Reimagining Reading Logs
“Henry, are you enjoying Mr. Popper’s Penguins?” Kate asked. She was in a third-grade classroom leading some small groups during a fiction reading unit of study. As she was coaching...
Meaningful Data
As I write this, I am in the season of becoming a runner again. Running is not something that is natural for me—either in inclination or ability. It is also...
Asking Students to Grade Themselves
During a recent field hockey game, my daughter, who is a senior on the team, was constantly on the receiving end of the referee’s whistle. “What was I doing?” she...
Leveraging Reading Assessment Benchmarks
As any primary or upper elementary teacher of reading workshop knows, reading benchmark assessments is incredibly time-consuming, often taking us away from precious conferring time. The importance of administering them...
Students Watching Teachers
Every few weeks, we have a teachers' meeting or professional development before school starts. I do everything I can to make sure teachers are out of the meeting and back...
Bulletin Board of Independence
One of my favorite questions to ask students when I am working with them in their classrooms is about the tools they use. They often tell me bulletin boards with...
Self-Assessment and Goal Setting
It was the end of the school year, and we were busy reflecting on our growth in my fourth-grade classroom. Today the students were completing a self-rating scale on various...
Goals to Habits in First Grade
When I sat down to confer with Grace, I was surprised when the focus of the conversation quickly changed to my own reading, specifically a reading goal that I had...
Goals in Small Groups for English Language Learners
The past few months have been a steep learning curve for me. After nine years in a fourth-grade classroom, I moved to a literacy interventionist position, in which I pull...
