New Assessment Training

Classroom Collaboration

NWREL's Assessment Program is rolling out a new training institute designed to improve student achievement by integrating instruction and assessment. The two-day training for teachers and trainers—Aligning Assessment and Instruction With Standards: Effective Course Design—will be launched October 10–11, in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Participants will be introduced to a six-stage teaching-learning cycle on how to design and deliver the learning units of a course using a standards-based approach. They will practice using worksheets to quickly and easily document their unit planning. Sample worksheets show how the process works for a unit on expository writing, but the cycle and materials are appropriate for teachers of all subject areas and grade levels.

Micki Garrison, principal of Fullerton Elementary School in Roseburg, Oregon, attended a preconference institute by NWREL staff members Gary Nave and Peter Bellamy at the Laboratory's annual conference in Portland last February. She was so impressed she asked several of her teachers to attend a follow-up presentation at the conference. Now, the school is contracting with NWREL to provide three one-day trainings to staff and to provide distance coaching to participating teachers. "This training and its worksheets are just what our teachers need when designing their learning units," Garrison said. "It provides them the process for a strong focus on student learning and differentiation of activities to meet the needs of all students."

The training and technical assistance are an outgrowth of a new manual Nave and Bellamy developed, Improving Student Learning Through Integrated Assessment and Instruction. (See NWREL's Product Catalog online.) The training guides teachers through the teaching-learning cycle—a "backward design" process where unit learning targets are defined first, assessments that align to those learning targets are then selected, and finally, an instructional plan is written to prepare students to be successful in meeting the learning targets.

Nave's goal was to develop a trainers' manual on classroom assessment that schools and districts could use in their professional development activities for teachers. He says, "I wanted to establish a larger context with this training to emphasize that assessment is not something you think about separate from instruction—the two can and should be integrated in order for students to meet standards." He sought out Bellamy to collaborate on the project, based on his 28 years in K–12 classrooms before moving to NWREL as a trainer and product developer for the NWREL 6+1 Trait® Writing model. The two developers infused integral concepts such as curriculum mapping and differentiated instruction into the teaching-learning cycle, then designed a training in which teachers work in small learning teams to implement practices into their classrooms, and share their results with one another.

For more information about on-site training or technical assistance, contact Gary Nave at naveg@nwrel.org; (800) 547-6339, ext. 573.