EDRD 431

At Really Good Stuff, we know that teachers and parents have limited time when it comes to finding free, high-quality online resources for their children.

How do you balance high-stakes testing instruction with fostering a true love for learning? 

“We cannot use the grades on a report card to bludgeon our students into compliance or motivate them to do better.” (p. 115)

“I never want my readers to visit the classroom library during independent reading time. Every minute is precious, so book-shopping, as we call it, happens at another time of the day.” (p. 21)

“If I want to avoid students telling me that they are done, I have to make sure they have enough books for the week.” (p. 22)

“We make decisions about what we feel is important for students to know and be able to do, and these judgment calls reflect our values, histories and cultures.” (p. 87)

“We need to give each student the same knowledge and means to succeed, but adapt the support we give in any areas in which they may struggle.” (p. 89)

“The quality of our assessment and evaluation procedures will be judged by how well they support our teaching, not simply by how well they help us generate grades for a report card.” (p. 90)

“My goal is to have students responding to texts regularly across al three modes and to support these more sophisticated ways of responding through my instructional practices.” (p. 103)

“We cannot effectively use a particular kind of language if the body and other crucial indicators give conflicting messages.” (p. 77)

“They were more generally interested in their students, too, not just in the ideas they contributed.” (p. 78)

“The way we interact with children and arrange for them to interact shows them what kinds of people we think they are and gives the opportunities to practice being those kinds of people.” (p. 79)

“Children who focus on getting praise or on not looking foolish have a much harder time becoming literate than children who focus on engagement in learning activities.” (p. 82)

“If we want to change our words, we need to change our views.” (p. 84)

Love this visual!!

“Children grow into the intellectual life around them and that intellectual life is fundamentally social. The social relationships within which they learn are a part of their learning.” (p. 65)

“’We’ is an invitation to and expression of solidarity or affinity.” (p. 66)

“Understanding ourselves entails understanding others and how we are alike and not alike.” (p. 67)

“Meaning making is not a matter of getting the right answer…” (p. 71)

“As individuals we can evolve only within the limits of our social environment and the discursive tools it offers us.” (p. 73)

“It’s helpful for me to have a limited number of things in mind; otherwise I easily can get sidetracked into spending ten minutes or longer doing more in-depth analysis of one student’s work.” (p. 162)

“Students need time to practice the strategies that I’ve taught them. If they’re always given more instruction, they’ll become swamped with many strategies when they should really be practicing a few skills at a time with more depth.” (p. 166)

“By reflecting to the students their comments, the teacher at once validates their voice, shows that she is listening, and opens the possibility for them to reflect on, modify, or challenge what has been said.” (p. 55)

“The ability or tendency to ask effective questions contributes a great deal to children’s agency, and to their development of critical literacy.” (p. 55)

“How did you know?...The question also turns the emphasis toward knowing rather than knowledge.” (p. 58)

“In many cases, it is helpful to stick with one skill for a while before moving on to a new skill in order to keep the student engaged in the learning process and to help her perform some skills well. Often, less is more.” (p. 102)

“While I always have one eye toward looking for evidence of a particular skill that I recently taught, I want to also make sure that the student is also integrating that one skill with others.” (p. 107)

“Conferring during partner talk and clubs allows me to glimpse inside a readers’ brain, to see the invisible brainwork she is attempting…She is giving me a sense of how she is constructing the meaning of the text.” (p. 117)

“Talking about books not only gives readers a nudge into deepening and clarifying their thinking about the text, but it also gives me insights into the ways they construct meaning from the texts.” (p. 118)

“When I’m being a proficient partner, I can give extra support to readers who need it or push readers who are already proficient to deepen their strategies.” (p. 128)

“Once a child incorporates into his identity a sense that he is a writer doing writerly things (or a scientist, mathematician, and so forth), he can ask himself in a new situation what he might do as a writer, since those roles do not stop at the border of a single activity setting.” (p. 44)

“Else is a very powerful word. It simultaneously builds flexibility and implies a range of other important messages.” (p. 45)

“Connections are at the heart of comprehension or understanding. They provide anchors and retrieval routes. The more connections, the more flexibility something can be accessed.” (p. 46)

“ I want children to see themselves not only as inquiring individuals, but as inquiring individuals who are part of a diverse community that inquires.” (p. 52)

“These assessments are observational frames, designed to hone teachers’ powers of observation and make their understandings about students more meaningful and married to subsequent instruction.” (p. 21)

“As we generate information about our students, we also generate information about our teaching and ourselves.” (p. 22)

“My rule of thumb is, ‘If you aren’t going to analyze it, don’t bother generating it.” (p. 49)

“Conferring is not magic; it’s within reach of everyone.” (p. 132)

“When trying to figure out what to teach in a reading conference, it is often helpful for me to be able to notice what it is that I do in order to comprehend the text.” (p. 134)

“my planning and preparation is not only from general goals I have based on the whole-class level; my planning is, to a large extent, specific to the reader with whom I’m working.” (p. 139)

“Conferring is hard and takes practice. I can’t expect myself to be perfect.” (p. 153)

“If nothings else, children should leave school with a sense that if they act, and act strategically, they van accomplish their goals.” (p. 29)

“Teachers’ conversations with children help the children build bridges between action and consequence that develop their sense of agency.” (p. 30)

“To set up agentive narratives, children have to face problems.” (p. 32)

“Choice is central to agency. Making a choice requires one to act – preferably to deliberate and act.” (p. 36)

“Drawing children’s attention to their successes and showing them how their decisions and strategic actions were responsible for them increases children’s perceptions of their ability and the effectiveness of their focused efforts.” (p. 39)

“We must recognize that our assessments are based on the values we have about reading, writing, and our lives as literate people.” (p. 3)

“Assessment of learning and assessment for learning.” (p. 3)

External Assessments

“The effect of the high stakes associated with external assessments is to reduce what is taught to ‘test prep’.” (p. 4)

This reminds me about how you taught testing as a genre. This is definitely something I can see myself doing in the future!

“Standardized assessments are designed to determine what students cannot do, not what they can do.”

These tests lead to a lot of the deficit thinking in our teachers. They seem to focus on what our students can’t show us on the test and reduce students’ thinking to only black-and-white/right-or-wrong, when in reality learning has a lot of grey area that requires more than a score on a piece of paper to unpack.

  Classroom-Based Assessments

“The information generated through these assessment procedures is used to understand a learner’s growth and progress over time in comparison to him- or herself…this is called a ‘learner-referenced’ assessment.” (p. 5)

“The more we know about our students, the better the decisions we can make about what lesson will be most effective, what texts they should encounter, and what challenges they may face.” (p. 6)

These types of assessments focus on our students as individuals. They clue teachers into what areas need more work and which areas students have a grasp on.

  “The stance is one of inquiry or a quest for understanding. The purpose of the assessments used is to gain a deeper understanding of the behaviors, attitudes and conceptual frameworks of each individual learner…multiple interpretations are encouraged, and each learner transacts with tests and the world to see what meanings they create.” (p. 9)

This reminds me of Rosenblatt’s theory of transaction, and how students learn the most when exploring and working with the material and engaging with it.