Literacy Speaks Volumes

I will be back to school in a month, and whether I like it or not, we will still be assessing our students on a regular basis. Our system has recently adopted a system-wide pre-assessment to determine which students will need intervention. Those students who do poorly on the initial screening will go on to take another battery of tests. I've always done some sort of pre-assessment: grammar pre-assessment, writing pre-assessment, skills pre-assessment. I also look at standardized test scores from previous years. This past year, I kept a copious data notebook (5 and a half inch binder that was full by the end of the year!) and tested before every unit. The question for me is: Are we pre-assessing so much that we're putting the cart before the horse? When do you have enough information. Anecdotally, I can tell you which students just don't get it. I know by looking at handwriting, attitude, behaviors. Veteran teachers are like moms: we know when something is wrong. Do ...

Today was the first day back after our winter holidays. It wasn't too taxing~while I had developed lesson plans for these two days back, we didn't get to them. I spent part of each class period reviewing some old/new policies and rules. Don't we all seem to forget so soon what we have to do or what we shouldn't do? After the review, we had our annual Spelling Bee. After twenty-two years with seventh-graders, I'm still amazed at the spelling skills (or lack thereof) of thirteen-year-olds. The ones who can barely keep their grades in the black are some of the ones who can spell the best. Why is that? Spelling is a skill that does take knowledge of our language~so why doesn't that transfer into other areas of my curriculum? Speaking of curriculum~count down to standardized testing (sort of). I've been looking at the performance indicators and trying to determine which ones need to be taught in depth and which ones can be barely brushed upon. The stude...

Formative assessment vs. summative assessment~what exactly do the two mean? Are they processes or tools? What is the goal of each? How do you assess students using each of these types of assessments? One of my personal goals this year is to get a handle on assessment~and I'm not just talking about grading papers in a timely manner (although I need to get a grip on that also). I'm talking about using daily meaningful assessment as part of my lesson plan. In fact, I'm now creating two basic plans for each week~one is a lesson plan, an outline of what lessons will be taught on each day of the week; the other is an assessment plan. The assessment plan is a chart that states exactly what I want the students to do to show me that they have learned the lesson (ex. I can identify conflict in a teleplay), how they are going to show me (TLW fill in a chart with examples of least three conflicts in the teleplay), and what I'm going to do if the student(s) cannot do this by...