#learningcycle

A “bellringer” where students are asked to reflect on their reading of The Color of Water and their understanding of the text’s characters.

After a lesson on integrating quotes, students were given quotes and tasked with writing their own sentences with properly integrated quotes.

Assessment is not an end of the unit task. Instead, assessment is something which should be on-going throughout the entire school year, before, during, and after instructional learning. Assessments are both measures of learning and for learning and this occurs throughout the learning process in different patterns and ways. Assessments should reveal student learning and thinking so that at any point in the period of instruction, educators can adapt and evolve along with their students instead of “parking and barking” and moving on without checking for understanding.

Assessment Before: diagnostic tests, surveys, graffiti walls, “pick-a-side,” speed debates

Assessment During: Checking in with students individually or in groups during lessons, short written responses/1 minute essays, exit-slips, bellringers

End-of-unit/culminating assessments are not more significant than formative checks because the goal of learning should be the process rather than the outcome.

As educators, we must “take deliberate steps to select and organize multiple artifacts representing student learning” and we must recognize that “collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources over time can provide a more powerful tool for understanding students’ interests, abilities, needs, and values” (Edwards et al 683).

The skills students are learning and engaging with through their course work is just as important if not more so than their ability to complete and submit a cumulative assignment that may or may not include and make use of those skills.