When you know what standardized assessment washback is, you can see ways that it creeps into our everyday pedagogies and narrows what kind of learning we aim to support. Even if your students have to take a standardized test at the end of the year, this doesn’t have to wash back into your instruction all year long!

Feedback is teaching—an opportunity to foster student growth. Whether we are looking to prevent mistakes from becoming ingrained or to build on skills students already have, feedback provides the learner an opportunity to grow in their awareness of learning standards.

I want you to be able to rely on the skills we practice. But more than that, I want you to be able to make purposeful, savvy decisions about why you are writing in the way that you’re writing. This skill, more than any other, is what will serve you well in the future.

In my nitpicking, I spent far too much time bogged down in reiterating past teaching. In my marginal notes and technology-enhanced comments, I was giving a low-quality version of the lesson I’d given weeks earlier. I needed to notch up my nitpicking.

Everything in Mike McAteer’s class begins with the end in mind. But instead of focusing on the endpoint of a summative assessment, he asks the question: What do I want to read in my students’ reflections?

Aaron Blackwelder interviews Starr Sackstein, author of the book Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, and her latest book Assessing with Respect: Everyday Practices That Meet Students' Social and Emotional Needs.

A week ago, we reached out to our community about their questions about labor-based grading as developed by Professor Asao B. Inoue of Arizona State University. In this post, he answers our questions!

Writers understand that writing requires revision, tinkering, and mistakes. Lots and lots of it. Most student writers, however, don’t welcome failure and mistakes so easily. Why?

Join Aaron Blackwelder as he interviews Dr. Sarah Beck, Associate Professor of English Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU Steinhardt and author of the book A Think-Aloud Approach to Writing Assessment.

Education professor Paul Thomas shares why grades, tests, and rubrics detract significantly from effective teaching and actually create the problems many teachers seem to be inordinately worried about.

Aaron Blackwelder interviews Paul Thomas, Professor of Education at Furman University, Greenville SC about how grades and grading create inequities for both students and teachers.

Students need teachers to be supportive coaches, sending the message that “you’ve got this” when they run into difficulty. Sarah Beck explains why dialogic writing assessment is uniquely suited to our present challenges.