I’ve been working with the English Department at Starpoint Middle School for ten years, and those who know me well appreciate the high regard that I maintain for this particular group of teachers (and their colleagues at the K-5 level). Very few educators have the opportunity, talent, or tenacity to accomplish what this department has over the last decade, slowly and with very careful intention. I’ve watched them design (and redesign and map) their own curricula, sharpen their…
Thanks to the support I’ve received from various members of my learning community (particularly Julie Kopp, Theresa Gray, and Jennifer Borgioli), I’ve discovered much more about the power of formative assessment practices in recent years. Reflecting on questions like these helped me begin shaping a vision for the sort of assessment work that I wanted to begin myself and support other educators around. The realizations below guided much of that thinking. Next week, I’ll share…
Know what I’ve been rediscovering over the last few days? Developing a useful analytic rubric that produces valid information is challenging. Really. Challenging. I’m going to guess that anyone who has been charged with the task of designing such rubric knows the level of frustration thinking to which I refer. In fact, I’m realizing that I probably grapple with rubric writing more than any other type of writing I do. I also know that I’m…
When I first began teaching, I was passionate about performance-based assessment, and the first groups of students that I taught found themselves engaged in upwards of ten different performance-based assessments each year. My seniors wrote I-Search reports ala Ken Macrorie, and when I taught eighth grade, my students were performing everything from the meaning of their vocabulary words to the scripts that they wrote as a part of their Cast of Characters projects. These were…