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.
Read MoreIn my last post, I wrote about the value of Assessment for Learning as an approach to supporting and engaging students. Whenever we talk about Assessment for Learning, we must also address its key element — timely, effective, and meaningful feedback. Let me take you back in time once again to when I was a young English teacher, facing a loaded curriculum and a semester that, in my view at least, seemed very very short. I had a lot to cover and not much time. Back then, feedback in my mind looked like this:
Read MoreWhenever I think of assessment in the classroom, I am reminded of a rubric I created a long time ago to go along with a short writing assignment for my grade eight Language Arts class. You can see it below. Many would agree that rubrics are excellent tools — they show the students exactly what the expectations are and the scale we’ll use to assess their work. True. However, as a young teacher many years ago, I used this rubric alone and nothing else. I did not have an assessment and evaluation strategy to support my students and learn from my classroom practice.
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