The Continuing Educator

For our final episode on student agency, we thought it was time to help our students set some better goals. So, we brought in Chase Nordengren, senior research scientist at NWEA and author of the forthcoming book,  Step Into Student Goal Setting (Corwin, Jan 2022). He's joined by 3rd grade teacher and education innovator Amanda Thornton to discuss how goal setting, with clear learning intenti...

How do we as educators ensure that the empowering intent of assessment remains front and center, while helping students built self-efficacy skills in tandem with content skills?  In this episode, we present the five principles of assessment empowerment—learner context, learning environments and relationships, appropriate purpose, responsive learning cycles, communication—and offer listeners strate...

General education teachers aren’t often provided the training they need to effectively reach children with disabilities in their classroom, but there are simple things they can do to gain more expertise at working with these students. In this episode, we discuss information why and how teaching programs fail to prepare gen ed teachers for working with students with disabilities, break down a few c...

Our education system had been failing our emergent bilingual students since long before the pandemic. How can teachers better serve the emergent bilingual students coming back to the classroom and build their agency as they become proficient?  In this discussion, we cover how to recognize the assets emergent bilingual students bring with them, how to get back into the groove of academic language,...

In this conversation, we venture into the domain specific ways we, as educators, can empower students within our classrooms. How is building student agency in ELA different than in mathematics or science? How can we leverage our curriculum, content-specific learning progressions and practices to build in students a robust belief in their abilities to master academic content and apply their learnin...

At the heart of student agency is engaging students directly in their learning in ways that provide them choice points, skill in navigating formative learning cycles, and increasing levels of expertise to assess, as Royce Sadler famously coined, “Where Am I Now?,” “Where Am I Going?”, and “How Will I Get There?”  This session examines elements of student ‘voice and choice’ as critical enabling ele...

Welcome to season 2 of The Continuing Educator! Teachers have tremendously complex jobs and a constantly shifting ecosystem of expectations, yet despite shifts across so many other areas of educational practice, building student agency remains a key desired classroom outcome that educators generally recognize as an area of need. This conversation will give teacher voice to the importance of studen...

Shifting to grading for learning can have a powerful impact on your students, and whether you’re just beginning or you’re digging deeper into practices, your persistence will pay off! All students deserve to receive clear, meaningful, growth-focused measures of their learning and, with an aligned purpose you’ll be ready to deliver on this goal. The strategies and ideas shared by the experts in thi...

Since the advent of online gradebooks, we’ve put the tools in students’ and parents’ hands to regularly view their learning progress. But what happens when those systems work against our grading practices focused on learning, as is often the case? Designing reporting methods that uphold the clear communication around best, most recent evidence and also distinguish between achievement and behavior...

Grading for learning requires reconsideration of several practices deeply entrenched in tradition, and one of those is the opportunity for students to reassess, or redo a learning activity. If we truly believe our goal as educators is for every student to learn, not to sort, rank or exclude anyone from that opportunity, it’s time to recognize why reassessments should be the norm, not the exception...

Traditional grading practices typically incorporate non-learning measures such as behavior and effort into an average. Yet by mixing achievement and behavior, we miscommunicate on both accounts. Students and parents still need information on both, but the critical step is to separate reporting, and Dr. Matt Townsley and NWEA User Experience Designer Chris Thoms will share with us both why this is...

To successfully create the conditions where grading for learning practices may thrive, consider first the importance of ensuring student-centered assessment processes. Hear from experts on how the practices of formative assessment are crucial to cultivating a growth-mindset in a safe, respectful classroom environment. By engaging students as co-pilots in the assessment and feedback cycle rather th...

Let's begin our journey towards better grading practices! Grades have remained a fundamental component of our education system for over a century. Yet despite shifts across so many other areas of educational practice, grading practices have seen little, if any, change to match the demands of modern pedagogy. The pandemic revealed stark flaws in traditional grading protocols and simultaneously...