Seven Strategies of Assessment FOR Learning

When:            September 25, 2008, 8:30 am -11:30 am

Where:           National Louis University – Lisle Campus

Cost:             Individual    $100      Team of Three-Five    $250

Why:  There is strong and rigorous evidence that improving formative assessment can raise standards of pupils’ performance. There have been few initiatives in education with such a strong body of evidence to support a claim to raise standards.  Assessment FOR Learning…is students and teachers using evidence of learning to adapt teaching and learning to meet immediate learning needs minute-by-minute and day-by-day.  It’s the quality of the feedback rather than its existence or absence that determines its power.  Feedback is most effective when it points out strengths in the work as well as areas needing improvement.

Background:  Classroom teachers are mandated to teach in a standards-based classroom.  There has been inadequate training to help teachers understand the shifts that need to be made from traditional teaching to the standards-based approach.  Teaching to a standard involves being able to communicate and differentiate essential learning targets from all other content.  It involves designing a feedback system of formative and summative assessments that provide the learner with the ability to track and monitor their progress aligned to the learning targets.  Instruction needs to be focused to assist students learn what they do not know.  Interventions can help teachers differentiate.  The seven strategies provide a fluent process to help both teachers and students raise performance.  CEC’s Perry Soldwedel, Associate Director for Systems Thinking, will facilitate the training.

Goal:  Build capacity of classroom teachers to understand and apply Rick Stiggin’s Seven Strategies of Assessment FOR Learning to raise student performance.  Students need to be able to answer assessment for learning’s three questions:  (1)”here am I going?”; (2)”Where am I now?”; and (3) “How can I close the gap?”  Teachers using the Seven Strategies can assist students be more successful.

   Outcomes:  To assist classroom teachers understand and be able to apply the Seven Strategies of Assessment FOR Learning by:

• Providing a clear and understandable vision of the learning target
• Using examples and models of strong and weak work
• Offering regular, descriptive feedback
• Teaching students to self-assess and set goals
• Designing lessons to focus on one aspect of quality at a time
• Teaching students focused revision
• Engaging students in self-reflection; let them keep track of and share their learning

More Details:  This half-day workshop is a highly-interactive workshop in which participants are given ideas on how to teach to a learning target, how to provide feedback to the learner so he/she knows what they know and are able to do and what they do not know and need to learn next, and finally how to provide extra time and support for those learners who have not mastered the learning target.  Elementary and secondary examples are provided.  Suggestions are made in how to integrate RtI requirements into the process.  

Registration:    Please register by September 15th

For Further Information:    Contact Perry Soldwedel  perry.soldwedel@cecillinois.org