Our foundation workshop, Principles and Practical Tools for Improving Classroom Assessment, presents an introduction to the general principles of effective assessment and a collection of classroom-ready tools for putting these principles into practice. Participants will learn how to use tools to engage students in the assessment process, address the Common Core State Standards, and advance learning as well as evaluate it.

If you prefer to target specific principles and challenges within the larger field of assessment, we also offer the following more topic-specific workshops:

Assessment: It’s Not Just for Teachers Anymore!

This session stresses the importance of making students more active players in the assessment process and introduces practical tools that teachers can use to accomplish this critical goal.

Assessment and the Common Core: Tools for Addressing and Assessing Core Skills and Understandings

This session presents a selection of tools that teachers can use to develop and assess 21st century skills, with a special focus on the critical reading, writing, and thinking skills highlighted in the Common Core State Standards.

Assessment for Learning: Moving from Grading to Aiding

This session highlights the power of formative assessment to improve teaching and learning. The focus is on tools that aid student learning by clarifying goals and expectations, making feedback more effective, developing students’ self-assessment skills, and turning tests into learning opportunities.

Promoting Success for All Students: Using Differentiation to Advance Instruction and Assessment

This session highlights tools for assessing and addressing students’ unique interests, talents, and abilities—and for designing differentiated assessment tasks that allow all students to shine.

Enhancing Teacher Effectiveness: A Tools-Based Approach

This session provides an overview of The Thoughtful Classroom’s Teacher Effectiveness Framework and an introduction to the five instructional “episodes” that form the core of any effective lesson or unit. It also identifies specific tools that can be used to improve instruction, address assessment concerns, and target teacher growth in each of these five episodes.

Integrating Instructional Design and Assessment Design:
The Five Episodes of Effective Instruction and the Assessment Tools to Go with Them

This session highlights the critical relationship between instruction and assessment. Participants will learn how the tools in the Tools for Thoughtful Assessment text have been organized in support of this important relationship, and how they can use these tools to design more effective lessons and units.

NOTE: Customized workshops and professional development packages that include classroom modeling and coaching are also available; please contact us at 800-962-4432 for additional information.