‘Tackling the Motivation Crisis’ with Mike Anderson
Hacking Assessment to Go Gradeless with Starr Stackstein
What COVID19 Has Illuminated about the Power of Self-Evaluation to Make Assessment Meaningful
Growing Readers Remotely: Three Types of Questions for Personalizing Reading Assessment
‘Tackling the Motivation Crisis’ with Mike Anderson
As the new school year is officially in full swing and the initial excitement of the first weeks has faded, one of the most important concerns on many educators’ minds is how to keep students motivated. Over the Labor Day weekend, I caught up with a good friend and thought partner, Mike Anderson. We met about 10 years ago at an author's retreat hosted by ASCD and immediately became immersed in conversation about perspectives on…
Hacking Assessment to Go Gradeless with Starr Stackstein
I’ve been an admirer of Starr Sackstein and her work for a long time. She’s been a beacon for years on moving away from grading and moving toward a focus on self-directed learning. She has made real movements in pedagogy and ownership of learning through her passion, practical advice, and the way she has grown a supportive educator community. I asked her to sit down for an interview with me in light of the recent publication…
What COVID19 Has Illuminated about the Power of Self-Evaluation to Make Assessment Meaningful
By Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Bena Kallick, and Allison Zmuda Part Three in a Four-Part Series Assessment needs to change as we know it. COVID19 has illuminated the necessity for this change so that our students become increasingly more self-directed and self-evaluating. A significant shift is required so that we squarely focus on giving students a seat at the evaluation table and include them in task design and development of scoring tools that will provide meaningful…
Growing Readers Remotely: Three Types of Questions for Personalizing Reading Assessment
Personalizing the learning for students doesn’t mean an instructional free-for-all. On the contrary, personalized learning demands structure such as frameworks to ensure effective instruction while students have access to authentic, meaningful experiences. Conferring/conferencing can provide that structure when teaching and assessing. In her book So What Do They Really Know? Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning, English teacher Cris Tovani defines conferring as "talking to my students one-on-one" in order to "figure out what they…
Assessing Deeper Learning in Remote Education through Performance Tasks and Project-Based Learning
In an unprecedented move, the president announced on March 20 that standardized testing requirements for states will not be enforced for the current academic year. This means teachers won’t have to spend instructional time on standardized test preparation. At countless schools, test prep involves drill-and-kill exercises and students taking numerous district tests that purportedly assess their likelihood of passing the state-mandated test. The suspension of standardized tests also means that many students will not experience…
Feedback and Learning: How Am I Doing?
Disillusioned It’s a bittersweet sting. After brainstorming and modeling, students begin drafting their thoughts. We’re minutes in and the question enters: "Can you take a look at this and let me know how I’m doing?" Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing students ask questions, but there is just something about this question that tempts me to set the paper down. Through my disillusionment, I realized that students need support seeking goal-referenced feedback; feedback thrives…
The Day the Students Designed Their Test
As an advocate for personalized learning, my perspective is simple: I’m constantly looking for ways to foster learner agency and put students at the center of the learning. To that end, this is the story of a recent experiment with offering learners the opportunity to collaborate on the design of their summative assessment over our recent five-day mini-unit exploring Joseph Campbell’s "The Hero’s Journey." During those sessions, we held whole-group discussions over the phases and…
Refocus on Learning, Not Earning
By Jamie Dicks and Julianna Traxler It was two weeks before the school year began, and we were making about 1,248 decisions about how the school year would go and what preparations we would need to make for the upcoming year. We were fortunate enough to be in a room with personalized learning cohort members from our district, sharing and planning how we would work towards personalizing our classrooms. The topic of reward dollars came…
How Writing Conferences in the World Language Classroom Saved My Red Pens and My Sanity
Conferencing yielded the best papers I have read in years. When I sat down to "grade" the final papers a few weeks ago, I didn’t need several red pens, as I found there were few errors. I didn’t give hours of my weekend away, as the papers read smoothly. I no longer questioned what my students were trying to say as I read, I knew what they wanted to say and I could hear their…
Student Portfolio Models
This is my 5th year using student portfolios in the classroom. Student portfolios can have many different purposes and structures based on what the end goal of the portfolio is. I have to be honest that my use of the portfolio has evolved over time as I have used them more in the classroom. Before deploying them into the classroom, educators need to be clear on their why for implementation. A primary goal for me…