Assessment, Evaluation & Documentation

Documentation: When does it Make Learning Visible?

Questions for Tuning Up a Lesson Plan

These questions will help you to "tune up" an existing lesson plan to focus more on goals, performances of understanding, and assessment. You can view an outline of these questions below. View the full document by clicking the download link in the right-hand column.

Part 1: Focus on Goals and Performances

I. About the Understanding Goals

II. About Performances of Understanding

III. About the Match between Goals and Performances

Part 2: Focus on Assessment

I. Why will you assess? Criteria for understanding.

II. When will you assess? Opportunities to do an "understanding check"

III. How will you assess? A variety of strategies for giving feedback

IV. Who will do the assessing? A variety of perspectives

Teaching for Understanding with Technology

Teaching for Understanding with Technology shows how teachers can maximize the potential of new technologies to advance student learning and achievement. Using the popular Teaching for Understanding framework, teachers can guide learners to think, analyze, solve problems, and make meaning of what they've learned. The book offers advice on tapping into a rich array of new technologies such as web information, online curricular information, and professional networks to research teaching topics, set learning goals, create innovative lesson plans, assess student understanding, and develop communities of learners. ISBN: 978-0787972301

Teaching as Inquiry: Asking Hard Questions to Improve Practice and Student Achievement

This book offers an engaging and effective approach to improving teacher and student learning. Based on the experiences of leading educational organizations, the authors provide invaluable, research-based guidelines for incorporating inquiry into teachers instructional practices and student work an ongoing responsibility of schools. This volume includes: specific considerations for determining who should be involved, what work should be under review, how it should be reviewed, and how such inquiry should be supported by the school; detailed case studies from urban elementary and secondary schools that illustrate how teachers and administrators have initiated and sustained processes of inquiry that contributed to changes in instruction, improved student outcomes, and their own professional learning; benchmarks for teachers and administrators to gauge their progress in initiating and deepening inquiry in their own schools. ISBN: 978-0807744574

The Facilitator's Book of Questions: Tools for Looking Together at Student and Teacher...

This book is an essential tool for facilitators of groups using protocols, or structured conversations, to collaboratively review student and teacher work. A follow-up to Looking Together at Student Work and Assessing Student Learning, this resource considers the purposes for engaging in collaborative review and provides some of the most effective strategies for using protocols to support successful group work. ISBN: 978-0807744680