Tag: Learning Materials & Tools

Strengthening Local Assessment Systems for Personalized, Proficiency-Based Education: Strategies and Tools for Professional Learning

This report describes Vermont’s convenings to support schools, districts, and other education organizations seeking to create high-quality local comprehensive systems of assessments. It can serve as a resource for schools, districts, and states that are working toward improving their own assessment systems. Readers will learn about the rationale and essential components, formative and summative performance assessments, and student-designed performance assessments.

Local comprehensive assessment systems (LCAS) are essential for ensuring equitable learning opportunities for all students. They have the potential to ensure that each and every learner meets high expectations that are set across all content areas. The Vermont Agency of Education held convenings with educational leaders to refine tools and investigate resources that can improve local systems of assessments that support personalized, proficiency-based learning.

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October 26, 2020

How Systems of Assessments Aligned with Competency-Based Education Can Support Equity

Competency-based education systems hold promise for maximizing high-quality teaching and learning for the growth of all students. Such systems, if well designed and implemented, can serve critical equity aims by ensuring that all students are supported in meeting key learning and development targets. Competency-based education systems, however, cannot fulfill these goals unless accompanied by high-quality assessments and assessment systems. School, district, and state leaders must work to develop balanced assessment systems that are coherent with the target competencies and learning progressions, that comprehensively provide a range of evidence for each student and to serve multiple stakeholders, and continuously monitor students’ progress over time. Balanced assessment systems are critical for providing information at multiple levels of the system to monitor, evaluate, and enhance quality for education and equity agendas. This is a necessary paradigm shift.

In this report, we address the following questions:

  • What are the opportunities and barriers in districts and in states to build and sustain systems of assessments that support competency-based education over the short- and long-term?
  • As district and state leaders transform educational models to support competency-based learning, what role could assessment play at each level to advance important equity goals?
  • How might a balanced assessment system support competency-based education, and what are the requirements for such an assessment system?
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January 14, 2020

UnboundEd Enhance Instruction Tools

UnboundEd offers Enhance Instruction tools, a set of free professional learning resources for teachers and leaders that focus on the application of content related to the standards in K-12 math and English Language Arts.

  • The content guide in math aims to clarify what standards-aligned instruction looks like. Each content guide focuses on specific groups of standards and follows a three-part structure.
    • Part 1 makes clear the student skills and understandings described by this group of standards.
    • Part 2 explains how this group of standards is connected to other standards in the same grade.
    • Part 3 explains how this group of standards is connected to other standards in higher grades.
  • The content guide in ELA focuses on fluency and demonstrates how fluency practice can be integrated into ELA and instruction across content areas. It includes four parts.
    • Part 1 defines reading fluency and why it is important for overall reading proficiency.
    • Part 2 provides insight into how fluency can be fostered within thoughtfully structured ELA instruction.
    • Part 3 provides proven and practical activities, framed by the expectations of the standards, that can be integrated into the ELA classrooms.
    • Part 4 provides guidance on how many of these activities can be used to support fluency beyond the ELA classrooms.
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April 4, 2019

modEL Detroit

modEL Detroit, an initiative of StandardsWorks, is supporting Detroit Public Schools in K-8 ELA by providing both planning and delivering resources to support teachers implementing the EL Education curriculum. It has developed Powerpoint slides that accompany each EL Education lesson, providing educators with a distilled and more manageable version of the curriculum. Each deck represents one lesson, and it is divided into teacher preparation support and student-facing materials.

  • Teacher preparation slides cover:
    • Purpose of lesson
    • Learning targets for students
    • Directions for facilitating different parts of the model, such as independent reading and small-group blocks
    • Overview of module and units
    • Suggested lesson pacing for teachers
  • Student-facing materials cover:
    • Learning targets and “I can” statements
    • Student activities
    • Checks for understanding
    • Homework, where applicable
  • Example: Grade 7 Module 1, Unit 1
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April 4, 2019

EQuIP Rubrics

Achieve’s EQuIP (Educators Evaluating the Quality of Instructional Products) is an initiative designed to identify high-quality materials aligned to the Common Core State Standards or Next Generation Science Standards. This includes a suite of tools for evaluating instructional materials.

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April 1, 2019

Mosa Mack

Online science content, including animated mysteries, hands-on labs, and engineering resources.

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January 23, 2018
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