Professional Development

When it comes to Assessments, individual teachers, schools and districts often have a variety of Professional Development goals. That may impact how they want to focus their professional development. But it is important to cover all three forms of assessments: Formative, Summative and Performance.

We customize our PD projects to help teachers and supervisors work collaboratively to review, design and administer different types of assessments. Important questions guide the workshops:

What types of tasks should you ask the students to perform in order to assess the essential learning the lesson or unit hopes to teach?
How do you develop assessments that incorporate rigor, conceptual understanding and mathematical fluency?
How do you get a school, or grade level, to agree on what type of response they expect students to record in tackling a problem -- in other words, beyond getting the answer correct, how do they go about solving it? How do you then use that agreement to come up with uniform grading of responses?
How do you determine when less than optimum results signal a problem with the student(s) or a need to improve the instructional process?
How do you communicate results to students and to parents?