Assessment is the challenging work of getting to know students as writers and using what we learn about them to help us decide what they need us to teach them next. Assessing students well is essential if we're going to be excellent writing teachers. This course provides ready-to-use advice for how to determine what students know and are able to do as writers and how to plan for instruction accordingly.
Based on Carl Anderson's bestselling Assessing Writers, this seminar will show how assessment informs the development of units of study, including decisions about which units to teach and in what order.
Discover how best-practice assessment can result in more effective conferences with students, and better instructional decision-making for both individual students and the whole class.
Course Goals:
- Understand how assessment enables more effective conferences with students and better instructional decision-making.
- Discover the importance of developing your own vision of who you want your students to become as writers
- Learn how to uncover information about the writers in your classroom by observing what students do when they write, listening to how they talk about their writing, and examining students' writing itself
- Become familiar with the predictable, 2-part structure of the writing conference and explore the role of the teacher and the student in the conference
- Find out how assessment informs the development of units of study, including decisions about which units to teach and in what order.
Professional Development
