Through repeated practice, you can create a rigorous driving question that is open-ended, complex, and at the same time kid-friendly. A driving question is not “Google-able” but may contain many “on-the-surface” questions.

If the project is for an outside audience, the purpose may become more complex, because that audience’s lens and needs are unique and challenging. If you pick an audience outside of the classroom and a purpose that is rigorous and challenging, then the project will require some critical thinking.

Don’t forget that when you demand critical-thinking skills, then you must scaffold these thinking skills with lessons, modeling, and so forth

What do you think the purpose of grading is? Is it to communicate students' academic achievement to students and parents? Is it to motivate students to put forth their best effort? Some combination of both? How might that belief affect your grading practices?

If educators' goal is for students to learn, does it matter if it takes some students a little longer than others?

What's your current policy on offering redos and retakes? How did you arrive at this policy? Reflecting on the ideas Wormeli and Dueck present, how might you change your policy? If you don't offer retakes, what steps might you take to introduce them in your classes? If you do, what new ideas do you have for making the practice more effective?

The first task in grading reform is to reach consensus on purpose and foundational issues.

Are grades about what students earn or are they about what students learn?

First and foremost, what is the purpose of grades, what message do we want them to communicate, and who is our audience? 

Summaries and Reflections

Visual Representations of Information S

When you use formative assessments, you must keep track of the data that you collect.

A group of faculty members, students and administrators at Dalton last year devised what Ms. Waller called a “five-week assessment rotation,” in which major tests and papers are spread out over five weeks, after puzzling over why students had some weeks that were reasonable and others packed with exams and due dates.

We realize the pressures on them, and to the degree that we’re complicit, we need to own that.”

How effectively do children’s after-school assignments advance learning?

one-third of parents polled rated the quality of their children’s homework assignments as fair or poor, and 4 in 10 said they believed that some or a great deal of homework was busywork.

Here’s how it works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach, students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction throughout the semester.