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Assessment Professional Learning
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Our On-Site Assessment Professional Learning
Rely on Solution Tree for on-site professional development with the power to reduce failure rates and increase student success in every classroom. Our assessment experts will guide your school in developing grading practices and assessments for learning. Discover how your school or district can implement effective student assessment activities such as self-assessment and common formative assessment.
Where are you on your professional learning journey?
Your Goal
Building Your Skills
One‑Day Services
Keynote
Whether you’re kicking off the school year, launching a new assessment initiative, or wanting to address specific challenges, a customized keynote presentation will help your team implement and sustain effective assessment practices and procedures.
Overview
Get a comprehensive overview of effective assessment practices, and receive customized guidance and support from an expert. Potential topics for this one-day on-site service include the basics of balanced assessment, cultivating assessment literacy, and developing a common language in assessment.
Rebooting Assessment: How to Balance Conversations, Performances, and Products
Assessment is overdue for a technology-supported reboot. Written tests simply don’t provide adequate evidence of the full range of educational outcomes that come from 21st century learning. This engaging professional learning session will share strategic, practical ways to triangulate assessment by employing a balance of oral, performance, and written tasks. You and your staff will leave this training with new ideas and inspiration for gathering evidence of complex skills and competencies.
- Explore how balanced classroom assessment leads to deeper student engagement, greater equity, and increased reliability.
- Discover the role of formative and summative assessments and how to use triangulation to assess student learning outcomes.
- Learn how to use technology and digital evidence to support assessment, including student self-assessment and peer assessment.
Recommended Resource
Making Grades Matter
Take the next steps in your standards-based grading journey. Our expert practitioners will share field-tested, research-backed practices and processes to help you make the shift to this powerful approach to grading.
- Explore the three big ideas of standards-based grading.
- Learn how to organize your gradebook by standards.
- Develop a meaningful purpose for homework.
- Create a reassessment policy for your class or school.
- Utilize a customized action plan to make grading matter in your classroom or school.
- Collaborate with experts to overcome common obstacles and challenges to grading reform.
Recommended Resource
Making Grades Fair, Meaningful, and Equitable
Develop your action plan for leading lasting grading reform. In this full day of professional learning, you will establish clarity on the purpose of grading and gain research-backed strategies for shifting to more effective practices.
- Question traditional grading and reporting practices and seek a more accurate way to gather, share, and use this important data.
- Understand the qualities that exist in successful grading reform initiatives versus the qualities of those that fail.
- Examine guidelines for implementing effective standards-based grading policies and practices at all grade levels.
Recommended Resources
Modernizing Assessment
The effort to harmonize academic standards and transdisciplinary goals (21st century skills, durable skills, competencies, etc.) is complicated by challenges to assessment design, feedback, and grading that align all learning goals. In this session, we will explore the nature of assessment design that leverages all learning goals, the nature of feedback, and a “grading” structure that elevates the transdisciplinary alongside the disciplinary.
- Develop and explore design principles and samples that provide meaningful opportunities for students to demonstrate all types of learning goals together.
- Engage in framing the nature of rich feedback that goes beyond grades to provide support for ongoing learning and student ownership.
- Explore an assessment framework and metrics that help to elevate all learning goals within and across disciplines and provide authentic data points from multiple sources to support teaching and learning.
Recommended Resources
The Authentic Standards-Based Environment
Engage in a complete, sensible approach to embedding standards throughout your classrooms. Implement logical and easy-to-understand practices to become truly standards-based.
- Explore an approach to break standards into components.
- Learn to share the importance of standards and learning targets with students.
- Use the components of the standard to report and analyze data on assessments.
Recommended Resources
Your Goal
Deepening Your Skills
Two‑to‑Four‑Day Services
Designing Quality Assessments
Discover how to design assessments that reflect student learning in meaningful ways.
- Explore the characteristics of quality assessments, and design tools to enhance assessment literacy.
- Learn how to design or revise current assessments to more effectively guide instruction, involve students, and communicate learning.
Targeting Assessment Design, Feedback, and Grading on Modern Learning
Backward design is an established practice that is getting renewed attention in today’s challenging educational landscape. Instead of simply asking students questions about what we teach, we identify a learning goal and design a mechanism that works backward to transfer that knowledge to a broader set of goals. Targeting Assessment Design, Feedback, and Grading on Modern Learning takes a modern approach to backward design that incorporates personalized learning with project-based and competency-based learning to revitalize your entire learning environment.
- Explore “look fors” and “look ats” for all learning goals.
- Design assessment experiences to support authentic evidence of deep learning.
- Learn how to identify and interpret learning goals demonstrated by evidence that may be unique to each student.
- Learn how to provide feedback and qualitatively interpret evidence using consistent metrics tailored for different types of learning goals.
- Learn how to remain “guaranteed and viable” while tracking personalized demonstrations of learning and competencies.
Recommended Resources
Creating and Embedding a Standards-Based Environment
Want to embed standards in everyday practices? During this three-day workshop, participants gain a deep understanding of academic standards, discover how to make clear and meaningful connections to learning targets for students, and directly connect student assessments to the expectations of the standards. This service equips educators with a useful system, effective tools, and classroom-ready plans for implementation.
- Unpack standards and gain a deep understanding of their components and expectations using an easy-to-implement format that is teacher- and student-friendly.
- Create learning targets directly connected to each component of the standards, making learning expectations clear to students.
- Develop standards-based assessments by connecting the expectations of the standards directly to new or existing assessments.
Recommended Resources
Your Goal
Sustaining Your Skills
Multi‑Day Services
Embedded Coaching
Provide differentiated professional development to your staff with job-embedded coaching. A coach with firsthand assessment experience will help individual educators as well as teams reflect on their current assessment practices and procedures and then take the necessary steps to make targeted improvements that result in increased student achievement.
Customized Services
Share your vision of assessment with us, and we’ll design a learning experience tailor-made to your challenges and goals. Our assessment experts are available for both on-site and virtual training, ensuring both teams and individuals get the support they need in the learning format that works best for them.
