Learning Stories - Part 2

In my last entry I wrote about Learning Stories, an assessment strategy used in early childhood education in New Zealand. Ever since I first learned about this approach, I’ve been interested in how it would translate to middle school or high school. As I wrote in my previous entry: Learning stories are about documenting, through narratives, what children can do and what they are learning. They represent learning as essentially a dynamic, evolving, and ongoing process. They do not reduce learning to a score that children get at the end of the unit or semester … or a level that defines them as they start a new school year, with a new teacher.

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Learning Stories: Part I

A few years ago, after facilitating a session on assessment in the 21st-century classroom, I was approached by one of the workshop participants and asked what initially prompted me to start reconfiguring my classroom practice and my approach to classroom assessment. I said: “I asked myself a few basic questions: What do I want my students to be now and when they’re older? What skills do I want them to have? Who do I want them to be as human beings?”

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Downloading Evaluative Knowledge

A few years ago, I ran into an old colleague of mine at an educational conference. He was using the lunch break to catch up on his marking. His backpack, placed on the chair beside him, was full of what looked like 2- or 3-page compositions. “Don’t you need a quiet place to focus to mark these?” I asked.

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