balanced assessment approach for your classroom

To establish a balanced assessment for your classroom you must align your curriculum and pacing through your professional learning community to be sure the focus will be on learning. In doing this I must provide clear instructions and targets to motivate students in a way that we are working together to improve learning. This is by compiling a variety of assessments and using the data, from these assessments, to continue to guide planning and instruction for differentiation and flexibility in our teaching units.

By using common planning (PLC) we are able to deconstruct the standards and create learning targets. We create these targets to help all of our students become successful. Once we have created the targets we develop a plan to assess them. As we have learned from Stiggins, we can assess by: selected response, essay, performance, and personal communication. Using this plan is a way in which we can help our students prepare for the future. We set them up for successes and when they do not succeed we adjust what we have planned and make changes so they will succeed. I use more performance based projects, do to the fact that this is more real world and prepares my students for higher education and the workplace. I feel the process of project based learning is an example of what our students will be faced with at their next levels of learning in college or the workplace.

Along with common planning for creating targets and units we use our PLC’s to create common assessments. We use our assessments to establish the What?, Why?, Who?, When?, and How?. What is the process that provides us with measured outcomes. Why is the purpose of our assessment. Who is the audience we are using. When is the format of our assessment. How is the procedure we will use to reach our goal of all students being successful. All of these processes are used to help us determine our areas of weakness, which will guide our instruction. We also use the data gathered from our