Mid-Summer Harvest

Our last class focused on some pretty heavy topics: student assessment, teacher assessment and responsibility and the Common Core Standards.  We discussed how to prepare our students for computer-adaptive assessment (specifically, the Smarter Balanced product) without "teaching to the test." I work with VERY insightful and thoughtful people. We wanted to address the issue that a digital divide exists in the schools, students will be coming to these tests at different digital ability levels and we need to know how to address that so they can be assessed more accurately and fairly. We came up with so many really great ways to familiarize our students with the assessment sans computer.

We talked about writing a passage on the board and have the students identify and fix grammatical mistakes verbally. We also discussed the merits of projecting a passage on the board and having the students Talk to the Text silently in their heads then have a class discussion about it. This will allow students and opportunity to experience how some of the ELA questions will be presented on the test and would, hopefully, prepare them for the test experience because they will not be able to annotate or highlight the passages on the computers. We had a number of other ideas that I will save for a rainy day, but I wanted to highlight two that really stood out to me.

Off to harvest (information for my final papers)...