How can you ensure your assessments provide accurate feedback? What’s the best way to assess students’ learning? During the past several years, we have developed a process that help us ensure we are using valid, effective, and rigorous assessments with our students—a process that every middle level teacher can use. Step 1. Deconstruct the standards.
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The element of surprise can go a long way in the classroom. “We had homework?” I cringed every time I heard that question as students entered my classroom that first year. Even today, I view homework as a somewhat controversial topic: Is it beneficial? Do students understand the purpose of homework? Is there value in
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It’s time to put your traditional rubrics aside and change the way students learn. In today’s assessment-focused education system, we must change the ways we assess students. Our focus should be on changing our classrooms into environments that are focused on learning with support from teacher feedback and self-assessment. With any luck, you still will
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A commitment to understanding assessment for learning changed this school’s culture. Much of today’s conversations around assessment include discussions about standards-based grading. Missing from this dialogue have been anecdotes about schools that have successfully made the transition from “traditional” grading to something different. Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, did just that. Last year,
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Perspective-writing activities bring “a bunch of dead guys” to life. To young adolescents, historical figures are a bunch of dead guys. Many students believe the issues, values, and perspectives of the people from the past hold no relevance to their lives in the 21st century. However, perspective-writing activities in the middle school social studies classroom
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How are middle grades educators supposed to act outside school? As a middle level educator (since prehistoric times), I am sometimes immune to the many behaviors, antics, and attitudes of early adolescents—those behaviors often interpreted by others as inappropriate, disrespectful, and unsuitable for public consumption. Imagine that! So after a recent outing to the local
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