Model the Learning

I've been speaking with many secondary school teachers recently about how we might track observations and conversations in the math classroom, for the purpose of assigning a level of understanding and formally contributing to a student's overall achievement in a course.  When it comes to keeping track of marks, many teachers feel uncomfortable with evaluating what they see and hear in the classroom, much more so than evaluating what they see on paper. We feel, perhaps because observations are not as tactile as a handed-in worksheet, that an evaluation of what we see in class is more subjective, and may be called into question more than an evaluation of a product. As teachers, we are often much more comfortable using products to evaluate student understanding.  We trust our professional judgment with products (without even questioning it) much more than with observations. But in reality, this process is not that different than when we create and evaluate paper prod...

One of my goals this year is to work with math teachers to better track observations and conversations in their classrooms, to better triangulate their assessments. I find this is a big jump for many who have been teaching for a while - we are very comfortable with marks on pencil-and-paper tasks, but we're unsure how to assess and track what we see and hear on an ongoing basis.  Just this past week, though, we've been playing with new ways of collecting data that I'm pretty excited about! (To try and wrap my head around this last year,  I asked kindergarten and primary teachers how they best track what they see , and got lots of great ideas!)  At one of our schools, we are implementing new strategies for improving numeracy skills. How can we track this?  We created a paper checklist that can be used by teachers or observers in the moment to track when and how students are demonstrating good numeracy skills: Our "good numeracy skills" checklist, base...