Description: Do you and your department colleagues need help standardizing your teaching practices? Are you trying to align more with the Common Core writing standards, but you aren't sure how to do so? Are you in the process of developing a department-wide or school-wide assessment at your school site? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you.
This year, the English Department administered and scored our first-ever common writing assessment at JLS Middle School. In order to prepare our students and ourselves for the Common Core, we purposely modeled our prompts and rubric after the Smarter Balanced performance tasks. We will share our process and findings with you, so that you can implement a similar school-wide or department-wide assessment at your own school site.
Take-Aways: Teachers will be able to view our JLS writing prompts, but they will NOT be able to remove them from the room. They will take away the knowledge of how to lead a calibration session for their own departments, and they will have an understanding of the steps we took to develop this assessment. They will also have human resources (us!) to contact if they need help.
Please Bring: A laptop and an idea for what kind of department-wide or school-wide assessment you may want to create in the future.
