Assessing Your School’s Mission and Vision
It’s no secret that when a principal takes a long look at the myriad of things and tasks to check off daily, weekly, and monthly, there are competing priorities that vie for their attention. In my experience as a school…
Emphasizing Growth, Not Grades, in Parent-Teacher Conferences
Conferences are a special time to connect with parents and guardians. However, too often, parents and students are more concerned about grades than about the learning that takes place to earn them. Unfortunately, by making the report card the star…
Using Student Data to Inspire Goal-Setting
Imagine sitting in your sixth-grade classroom at the beginning of the school year. Your teacher tells you that you are about to take a very important test and to try your best. You sit for over 45 minutes, answering many…
What Role Does Empathy Play In Learning?
So much talk about empathy in education recently. Why? What’s the big idea? The role of empathy in learning has to do with the flow of both information and creativity. A dialogic interaction with the world around us requires us…
Crafting Fair Assessments for Flexible Assignments
Teachers are called to create deeper, more flexible learning opportunities for students to learn at high levels. This often raises questions about how to assess student work, given that student products may range from podcasts to digital storybooks, virtual reality…
Using Discussion as a Summative Assessment
Throughout my two decades in education, I have experimented with a variety of approaches to assessment, including projects, models, debates, and traditional assessments. In the past two years I’ve been teaching high school online, and I’ve abandoned traditional tests in…
18 Inconvenient Truths About Assessment Of Learning
II. It’s an extraordinary amount of work to design precise and personalized assessments that illuminate pathways forward for individual students–likely too much for one teacher to do so consistently for every student. This requires rethinking of learning models, or encourages…
A 3-Step Process School Leaders Can Use to Grow From Failure
Have you had a fail lately? A professional development day that took an unexpected turn or a student activity that got more eye rolls than applause? As educators, we always aim for innovative, exciting, and relevant learning experiences for our…
Learning Math by Seeing It as a Story
I had always hated math. Now I suddenly found myself teaching trigonometry. I was an English teacher in Chicago Public Schools with certification in special education, and when my school was facing a shortage of certified special education teachers, I…
How Interlinking Learning Promotes Critical Thinking in Middle School
Every year around Halloween, our middle school in Spain divided students into four assigned houses, venturing beyond the typical core classes to engage in collaborative activities centered around one spooky concept. One year, it was all about pumpkins; the next,…