Assessing with Clarity

Deeper Learning Pathway: Assessment

You can use the Register button to sign up for any of the upcoming live virtual sessions listed below. If the session has already occurred the recording and resources are provided.

Monthly Learning: Assessing with Clarity

  • Intended Audience: Leaders of SRSN Districts and State and Regional Organizations, Principals, Instructional Coaches, Teachers

  • Description: Clarity provides the most essential first step when moving to competency-based learning, and when it is in place for students, teachers and leaders, it opens the door to a myriad of powerful learning practices to come alive, elevating agency for all. Without clarity, it is impossible to shift. Therefore, the practices related to clarity become “Evergreen” in that they are like an evergreen tree, always green, always living, always growing. Join this session to explore:

    • How educators can collaboratively Gain Clarity by developing competencies, learning intentions and success criteria.

    • Sharing Clarity with students empowers them to take greater ownership of learning and explain what success looks like.

    • Assessing and Feedback with Clarity that engage students in making their learning visible on a regular basis, elevating progress over performance and establishing a need for feedback and revision of work.

    • How students can develop and evaluate a body of evidence that reflects their learning and is aligned to the learning intentions and success criteria in order to Prove their Learning.

MO Framework CBL Elements to be discussed:

  • 1. Students are empowered daily to make important decisions about their learning experiences, how they will create and apply knowledge, and how they will demonstrate their learning.

  • 2. Assessment is a meaningful, positive, and empowering learning experience for students that yields timely, relevant, and actionable evidence.

  • 3.Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.

  • 4.Students progress based on evidence of mastery, not seat time.

  • 5. Students learn actively using different pathways and varied pacing.

  • 6. Strategies to ensure equity for all students are embedded in the culture, structure, and pedagogy of schools and education systems.

  • 7. Rigorous, common expectations for learning (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) are explicit, transparent, measurable, and transferable.

  • 8. Students engage in Real World Learning experiences that support high school, college, career and workplace

This session does not require registration since it is the Monthly Learning session. Check back after April 10th for the recording.

Session 1

  • Intended Audience: Leaders of SRSN Districts and State and Regional Organizations, Principals, Instructional Coaches, Teachers

  • Description: Based on the learning from the previous session, this learning experience will focus on Gaining and Sharing Clarity. We will work to deepen our understanding of how to:

    • Develop competencies in a variety of subjects, as well as pair them with learning intentions and success

    • Use models of success from other classrooms to determine ways to share clarity with students in order to make the expectations clear and elevate the quality of student work.

Session 2

  • Intended Audience: Leaders of SRSN Districts and State and Regional Organizations, Principals, Instructional Coaches, Teachers

  • Description: Based on the learning from the previous session, this learning experience will focus on Assessing and Feedback as well as proving learning through a body of evidence. We will work to deepen our understanding of how to:

    • Promote progress and the idea of getting students on a winning streak by making learning visible through regular opportunities to respond.

    • Establish a culture of feedback and empower students to be partners in the feedback process.

    • Shift from grading every assignment to students determining their “best evidence” to prove their learning.

Coaching Session

  • Intended Audience: Leaders of SRSN Districts and State and Regional Organizations, Principals, Instructional Coaches, Teachers

  • Description: This session in the series provides an opportunity for leaders to share their questions and needs for support in order to personalize the concepts shared in sessions 1, 2 & 3.

Guest Expert

Kara Vandas

Kara Vandas
Core Collaborative
Author Consultant

Kara Vandas is an educator with an enduring passion for empowering learners. She began her career in education at an alternative school for youth at-risk. Kara spent several more years in the classroom in public education as a middle and high school educator and then transitioned to coaching and professional learning positions that allowed her to support teachers and leaders K-12. Her current role as an author and consultant takes her around the world to partner with schools and school districts.

Kara is a co-author of several books, including Learner Agency: A Field Guide for Taking Flight, Amplify Learner Voice through Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Assessment, and the best- selling Clarity for Learning: 5 Essential Practices that Empower Students and Teachers. She holds

a Master’s degree of Education in Curriculum and Instruction from Regis University, and presents nationally and internationally at conferences, with a focus on learner agency and efficacy. Kara and her family live in Castle Rock, Colorado, where they enjoy the outdoors and spending time with family and friends.

Keep Learning

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