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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I’m often asked to present on instructional strategies that support literacy in the content areas, and as you might imagine, I find this somewhat perplexing. Literacy is such a massive domain that it quickly overwhelms the boundaries provided by tidy definitions and concrete strategies. Yet, if we’re to help students become increasingly literate, we need [...]