Collaborative Common Assessments by Erkens Cassandra;

Author:Erkens, Cassandra;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Understanding Assessments as a Way to Inform Teaching

A very common misunderstanding is that common assessments involve lockstep teaching and the loss of a teacher’s creativity and instructional style. While this can happen if the greater system mandates classroom activity, it doesn’t need to and truly shouldn’t happen that way. Learning only happens for students when teachers are responsive to what is occurring in the moment during instruction. Sometimes this means teachers must go backward to go forward, and at other times it means they have to modify an instructional activity in the moment. If scripted teaching truly worked, then the entire process could just be digitized. In an interview with Jan Umphrey (2008), Robert Marzano states:

The art part of effective teaching is where individual teachers figure out the best ways to use specific strategies in the context of their content area, their students, and their personalities. That’s art, in the sense that people have to adapt the research to their specific situations. There’s no cookie-cutter approach to teaching, but good teaching does include certain things in general. (p. 16)

Collaborative common assessments provide the vehicle for teachers to better understand collectively and individually those “certain things in general.” Together, they must unpack what strategies make a positive difference for their learners, including engineering engaging classroom discussions, creating rigorous questions, responding to right and wrong answers in a manner that compels further learning, and generating quality descriptive feedback. Teachers must be learners too. They deserve the opportunity to learn in a formative, safe context.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.