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
Minilesson: Measurable Reading Goals in Fourth Grade
Gigi McAllister has her fourth graders consider what makes a reading goal measurable.
Goal-Setting Ideas for Students
As the New Year approaches, my family begins to think about goals. Even though I’m a big believer in goals, I have never been great at setting them on January...
Quick Reading Reflection in First Grade
Bitsy Parks has her first graders complete a quick reading reflection before a share session early in the school year.
Student (and Teacher) Risk-Taking
In my school district there is a focus on risk-taking for teachers. What does that mean? Essentially, not to be afraid to try something new and perhaps even totally different...
How to Keep Conferring Notes
My husband, Andy, coaches our daughter’s junior league softball team. He is a bit of an extremist when it comes to collecting stats and notes on each player. He keeps...
Finding Clues in Writing Folders
We had just wrapped up our writing celebration—a museum filled with student experts talking and teaching about topics they care about. I was reading through the final published pieces, celebrating...
The Value of Pre-Assessment
Heading into a new school year, or even a new unit, a helpful strategy to remember involves tapping in to what students already know. Pre-assessing at the beginning of a...
Beginnings, Middles, and Endings: The Power of Baseline Assessments
Controlled chaos—or to a passerby perhaps it looked more like complete chaos. A literal buzz was emanating from my classroom during the last week of the school year, to the...
Fostering Thinking Through Play
Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood. Fred...
Writing for Reflection at the End of the Year
The end of the year is a struggle for me. I worry I haven’t taught enough, talked enough, or shared enough. I want to keep them with me. I know...
End-of-the-Year Reflection
As the school year winds down, I have been encouraging teachers to have their elementary students do some reflective work around their writing lives. I’ve suggested an optional assignment of...
Choosing and Refining Student Goals
I love those last couple of days before a school break. I slow down a bit, knowing I don’t have a full week of instruction in front of me. I...
Revising Weekly Reflections
I find that I am constantly tweaking and revising lessons from year to year. Heck, I make revisions as I move month to month and week to week in a...
Temporary Strategies
I observe as the reader continually looks at the picture and then the first letter of the word, the picture again, the first letter of the word, and the picture...
Student Self-Assessment Strategies
Over the course of the year, I have watched my daughter’s level of engagement rise in the work she does for her high school English class. In her AP English...
Tests of Time
The night before the exam, we scrawl The Late Unpleasantness across the blackboard from Sumter to Appomattox, and tack up dates like tattered flags. I dish up Ramen noodles...
Observations and Test Preparation
As I navigated the test-taking arrangement of desks in my fifth-grade classroom while handing out copies of Foul Flora, I knew that students would receive this sample state examination selection,...
What’s a Great Workshop Day?
I used to think that for a literacy workshop to be a success, the whole workshop had to run smoothly, from minilesson to share time. Now I know that success...
Planning and the Tuesday Effect
I used to hate Tuesdays. I began hating them when I was a brand-new teacher. I would spend all weekend crafting a week’s worth of the most perfect lesson plans....
Getting Creative with Writing Celebrations
During my years of being involved in writing workshop, end-of-unit celebrations have typically consisted of students reading one of their finished pieces to an audience. I love to be invited...
Growing Toward Independence
When I first noticed Alex, he was sitting on a stool near the window in his first-grade classroom. His books were on the shelf, but he was actually turned away...
