Differentiating Instruction for Adults and Adolescents
You Have to Know What They Know
Diagnostic or pre-assessment is essential to an effective and responsive classroom. You have to know what your students know in order to provide the appropriate level of challenge for each learner.
Leave this workshop with:
A dozen ways to pre-assess your students' knowledge, interests and attitudes
An understanding of why pre-assessing for misconceptions is so important
Strategies for using pre-assessment information to determine next steps in teaching and learning
Assessments that Inform Instruction and Encourage Achievement
When you have a limited amount of time, put your creative energy into developing formative assessments because that is where most of the learning happens. In this session you will develop formative assessments that are easy to create, implement and assess and that will help you to take appropriate next steps with your diverse learners.
Personalizing the Assessment Experience
Students develop their metacognitive skills, become more engaged in learning and are able to self-advocate when they understand who they are as learners, how they learn best, and where they still need to work.
Leave this workshop with:
Ways to personalize rubrics and other assessment structures so they make sense to your students
An understanding of the role of feedback in self-assessment
A variety of tools for self, peer and group assessments
Evaluation in the Differentiated Classroom
If the format of evaluation we use does not allow students to show us what they know, what should we do? We should change the format. In this workshop we will examine the various formats available for summative assessments and how to assess student understanding, knowledge and skills fairly and accurately whether our students are writing, drawing or role playing.
So What? Getting Them to Care About Data
Data has to be 'sticky' before it will be meaningful. In this workshop we look at ways to make data and evidence meaningful so that your audience- whether superintendents, administrators, teachers or parents - will understand the data and will be inspired to take action.
Creating and Sustaining an Evidence-Based Culture
An evidence-based culture is a culture of: inquiry; continuous improvement; continuous learning; collaboration, and accountability. In this workshop, we will review simple processes that can be easily applied in your school, department, or district to help teachers and administrators learn to analyze data, interpret data, and take effective action.
Tools and Techniques for Effective Assessment
This workshop, built around Karen's book, 50 Tools and Techniques for Classroom Assessment, provides teachers with a wide variety of practical assessment strategies and an understanding of which strategies are most effective for which areas of learning and at what times in the assessment process- before, during, or after the learning.
Differentiating Your Teaching Based on Student Readiness - Engaging Young Adolescents
Readiness to learn and student engagement varies from student to student and concept to concept. We need to "start where they are" for learning to take place, but it is challenging to address a wide variety of starting points in a whole class setting. In this workshop, we look at simple pre-assessment strategies that help to determine each student's readiness, and differentiated strategies that provide appropriate challenge. We will explore characteristics of engagement, particularly as they apply to young adolescents and assessment approaches that have the potential to enhance student learning and engagement.
