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
First-Grade Reflections: Looking Back to Move Forward
It was the first day back after winter vacation, and I looked at the plans that I had penciled in the week before break. “Review reading workshop expectations: independent reading,...
Assessment Refresh
“I don’t know how to do this,” Jenny whined. “Will you help me?” Jenny was an eighth grader who had dealt with major health issues throughout middle school. She had...
Resisting Rubrics
Our two kids, ages 8 and 10, were busily chatting in the backseat as we drove home from church. “What are they talking about?” I asked as I strained to...
Post It Prove It
Leslie Lloyd preserves instructional time by having her third-grade students share their Post It Prove It notes on a bulletin board throughout the reading workshop. Click here to download the...
Daily Reflection Rubric
“I come to school every day and try to be a good student. I just don’t get why my grades are so bad,” Kaydin complained when he received his first...
Assessment During On-Demand Writing
It's early in the school year. We've started the activities we've planned to build a community of kids who care about each other and value learning. It's time for the...
Using Student Checklists in Literacy Intervention
I don’t know about you, but I am a list person. In fact, I adore lists in all their splendor: lists on sticky notes, on notebook paper, on whiteboards, and...
Super Teacher Reading Workshop
In a recent article, Brenda Power encouraged teachers to reconsider workshop routines, to “knock down” what seems to be a “load-bearing wall” of the workshop and then duck. She warned...
The Scarlet Level
I’ll never forgot the Friday night I tiptoed into my son’s room to give him one last kiss and could not find him. Rather than seeing him snuggled up in...
Student-Designed Development Cards
The other day, I was planning to teach elaboration to fifth-grade students through demonstration, and I wanted to give them each their own printed cards of the teaching point and...
Practical Ways to Connect Students and Goals
We often hear the administrators in our building talking about self-assessment. In fact, the observation model that our school uses places a high value on students self-assessing their work. One...
Tapping into What Students Know
A surefire way for me to get snapped at is to tell my daughter to put on her turn signal while she's driving just as she’s about to do it...
Consistent Feedback in Writing Workshop
As a middle school language arts teacher, I am responsible for seeing that my readers and writers grow and achieve at their highest ability levels possible. That seems simple enough...
Assessing Instruction in the Midst
I began to teach my nephew the game of Hearts a few nights ago. He understood the basic principles quickly. I could tell because he knew to pass me the...
Creating an On-Demand Writing Checklist
At the start and end of each writing unit, we use on-demand writing to assess what our students already know about a particular genre. This practice is one that we’ve...
Expert Students
“You have this way of buzzing around the room and sprinkling what each student needs right over them,” my administrator once told me in an evaluation conference. It was supposed...
The Ins and Outs of Using a Jot Lot
We’ve often talked with colleagues about how reading feels much more challenging to teach than writing: It’s so hard to know what’s going on in their heads as they read....
Quick Take: Evolving Beliefs About Goals
Gigi McAllister gives a brief explanation of how her thinking on goal setting has changed, as well as the ways in which she uses student goals to connect with parents....
Setting Weekly Goals
If you walked into our fourth-grade classroom with our students on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday morning, you’d see our students unpack, set their reading goal for that night,...
The Daily Record
“Toni always starts our dinner conversation with what she learned in class each day and her opinions on people in American history.” Who doesn’t love to hear this from a...
Tracking Student Goals
It seems that every year I have a brilliant new plan to house, track, use, and reflect on the amazing amount of data that I collect about my students. It’s...
