My son Landen, a sophomore at the American Embassy School, and I were just hoisting a water bottle up on the cooler in our apartment. I generally try to stay out of any discussion with his Spanish classes, but just now out of the blue Landen said, “Dad, the way I’m learning Spanish right now […]

I know it’s a bit early to start thinking about next year’s posters but here are four posters for your classroom. A few of us – Robert, Jen, Annick and I collaborated for a long time – a few years – to create them based on what we were doing with jGR at the time.

Paraphrased from comments between Steve and Claire this morning: We need new curriculum documents. There should be no targets on our curriculum documents. This will be an uphill battle since even our curriculum directors expect targets. Once we change our Scope and Sequence (with the help of documents on my website) we’ll be able to

One might ask right about now on this blog, “Who has time to read the recent barrage of articles and posts on authentic assessment? And why don’t they talk about anything else? I’m too busy and they keep talking about only one thing!” I would ask, “Who can risk not reading them?” Why? Because I

This kind of lays waste, as in flattens, blows up, exposes for what it is, anyone using CI to teach a class but then turning around and assessing the kids in ways that are false, even quick quizzes, my baby from 14 years ago, but which only look efficient: http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=13&n=4 Claire sent the link and

This is an article by Claire as we continue to take the new Authentic Assessment roadster that we just found in the back of our PLC garage out for what have been some wonderful test drives over the past few days: Authentic Assessment in CI Classrooms Since the early 90s, the phrase “authentic assessment” has

Tina said: …it just makes it so important to be very intentional and target very useful words at the beginning so that you can use them as the backbone of future untargeted communication…. This is so critical. We have to delineate between targeting in level one and targeting in level two. Level 1 targeting implies

There was a big rock in front of the assessment tomb with all the kids in it. Five years ago with jGR/ISR Robert and Annick and jen and I tried to pull it open. We got it open just enough to get some air to the kids. Then Claire comes along with those strong and

John shares some important links below, echoing a point made by Robert here recently. That John’s administrators responded positively to these articles is a testimony to his hard work over the past three years to change a deeply entrenched class culture at Berkeley High School, an effort that I find phenomenal. I can only imagine

Claire said: Summative assessments don’t help with instruction. They are important only for retention (determining who can go on to French II), but don’t help once kids are in the class. But Data Turds don’t … don’t understand assessments. Not really. If they had to do real formative assessments, they would have to give up

Here is my response to the data turd that I wrote to the vertical team: Some thoughts after our meeting: Since confidence in students is so important, when we ask them to produce writing or speech to align with some kind of desired outcome written in a document somewhere, in the form of either an