Connected Educator Month kicks off October 1! As shared in an earlier post, NCTE is a theme leader on the topic of “Innovations in Assessment“. Each week of CEM, NCTE will be hosting and promoting activities related to different topics of the week. Week One, October 1st-8th will focus “Beyond the Bubble“.
Exceptional teachers see little tension between effective instruction and effective assessment because every moment in the presence of students offers the chance to learn more about their thinking in order to shape instructional decisions. Similarly, exceptional school leaders use a wide range of assessment tools to evaluate what’s going on inside and outside their buildings in order to make informed policy decisions. The bigger our assessment toolkit, and stronger our capacity to work collaboratively to use and understand those tools, the better able we are to respond to the needs of the moment. All too often educational decisions are driven by a very narrow set of measures that do not take into account the broad range of new options available. Innovations in things like technology, brain research, and design thinking are pushing the boundaries of what we understand assessment to be. Week One of CEM, October 1st-8th, we’ll explore what’s out there.
Please also join us as we participate in these activities all month long:
- Innovations in Assessment: Read and React discussions will be occurring throughout the month of October. Join this discussion group on the National Center for Literacy Education’s network, the Literacy in Learning Exchange, to read and discuss research articles and studies from a variety of organizations on the topic of assessment. Join Community Facilitator and Professional Learning Specialist Lara Hebert in facilitated conversations around two articles each week. Topics include formative and summative assessment, standardized assessment, portfolios, standards-based grading, and more. Go to the Literacy in Learning Exchange to learn more.
- Using Social Networks to Build and Share Collective Wisdom: #WhatWeHonor. When we begin to think about meaningful and equitable assessments, we inevitably think about those measures of learning that deserve as much and even more honor than standardized assessments because these measures can tell us more about student learning, growth, context, and ongoing needs. And different situations call for different tools and strategies. During the month of October, follow and contribute to the #WhatWeHonor conversations and sharing of assessment tools and artifacts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Tag resources and blogs related to formative assessment; share your most tried-and-true rubrics, observation protocols, conferencing strategies, and more; post a video of your collaborative team discussing the power of looking at student work together; and make any other contributions you can think of that can change the conversation about assessment to focus on more than annual standardized testing.