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?