5.9.17 Three Tips for Avoiding State Assessment Surprises My MAP® story began long before joining NWEA, when I was a district administrator in Massillon City Schools, Ohio. As is still the case, all third-grade students needed a proficient reading... Read more
4.25.17 MAP Scores…and the Likelihood of Free College Tuition College and career readiness has been a recent drive of K-12 education, aiming to prepare students to enter post-secondary education without remediation. Students generally take the ACTⓇ or... Read more
4.11.17 Resources for Bringing Mathematical Practices Into Your Classroom The focus in math classrooms today is meant to be on more than simply leading students to find the right answer. The CCSS Mathematical Practice standards, as well as other process standards, are... Read more
4.4.17 Practice Makes Perfect: Using Practice Standards to Increase Classroom Engagement Are my students able to add and subtract within 100? Can they read a histogram or multiply mixed numbers? These are the types of standards-based questions that we often ask ourselves as teachers. In... Read more
3.17.17 U.S. Educators Are on the Right Track (Even When Compared to Finland) During Morning Meeting, I asked my 5th graders to use an adjective to describe their summer. I chose “inspiring.” As the 2016 Virginia Teacher of the Year, I had an inspiring summer – the kind... Read more
3.14.17 Moving Aside the Assessment Fog The idea of “assessment fog” made me smile. John McCarthy titled his Edutopia blog post with it – 3 Guidelines to Eliminating Assessment Fog. When driving, fog may cause tension,... Read more
3.7.17 I Took the MAP Test and Here’s What Happened As a young student, I hated standardized tests, or any multiple-choice tests for that matter! In my mind, I could usually justify why several answers would be correct, so to select only one... Read more
2.21.17 MAP Wins – New Reports Help Boost Differentiated Instruction We were pleased to recently learn that MAP® received the 2016 Award of Excellence from Tech & Learning Magazine. For 34 years, Tech & Learning Magazine has recognized the best new and... Read more
2.16.17 Three Phases of Leading District Change with Formative Instructional Practices Formative assessment is a timely topic. In education conversations today, we often hear about “balanced” or “coherent” assessment systems. Formative instructional practices (aka,... Read more
2.14.17 Sweet Words: A Compliment Activity for Valentine’s Day In high school, we had “Data Match”... a school fundraiser that filled the hallways with chatter in the first two weeks of February. My friends and I eagerly filled out personality surveys and... Read more
2.3.17 Formative Instructional Practice: What Leaders Can Do to Help Teachers Succeed When we think about formative instructional practice, we typically have the teacher in mind. What is the teacher doing differently to engage students and collect evidence of learning? Yet... Read more
1.26.17 Four Formative Instructional Practices that Drive Student Growth When I first started working with teachers on integrating formative instructional practices into their daily classroom practice, I noticed that many wanted to start with students self assessing... Read more