This book demonstrates how educators can develop effective and efficient assessments. The authors simplify assessment development to give teacher teams the confidence to write and use team-designed common formative assessments that help ensure all students master essential skills and concepts.

Teams that engage in designing, using, and responding to common formative assessments are more knowledgeable about their own standards, more assessment literate, and able to develop more strategies for helping all students learn. In this conversational guide, the authors offer tools, templates, and protocols to incorporate common formative assessments into the practices of a PLC to monitor and enhance student learning

Assessment for Learning is based on a two-year project involving thirty-six teachers in schools in Medway and Oxfordshire. After a brief review of the research background and of the project itself, successive chapters describe the specific practices which teachers found fruitful and the underlying ideas about learning that these developments illustrate. Later chapters discuss the problems that teachers encountered when implementing the new practices in their classroom and give guidance for school management and LEAs about promoting and supporting the changes. --from publisher description

The sequel to Pyramid Response to Intervention advocates that a successful RTI model begins by asking the right questions to create a fundamentally effective learning environment for every student. RTI is not a series of implementation steps, but rather a way of thinking. Understand why bureaucratic, paperwork-heavy, compliance-oriented, test-score-driven approaches fail. Then learn how to create a focused RTI model that works.

Reignite the passion and energy assessment practices bring as tools to guide teaching and learning. Strengthen instructional agility in professional learning communities with collaborative common assessments that collect vital information and consider all levels of the organization. Explore the practical steps teacher teams must take to establish clear, comprehensive assessment systems, and discover how to continually improve results.

Learn everything you need to know to implement an integrated system of assessment and grading. The author details the specific benefits of formative assessment and explains how to design and interpret three different types of formative assessments, how to track student progress, and how to assign meaningful grades. Detailed examples bring each concept to life, and chapter exercises reinforce the content.

For the past forty years, Richard Koch has worked to uncover simple and elegant principles which govern business success. To qualify, a principle must be so overwhelmingly powerful that anyone can reliably apply it to generate extraordinary results. Working with venture capitalist Greg Lockwood and supported by specially commissioned research from OC&C Strategy Consultants, Koch has now found one elemental principle that unites extraordinarily valuable companies: simplifying. Some firms simplify on price - consider budget flights stripped of all extras that still take you from A to B - creating new, huge mass markets for their wares. Others, such as Apple, simplify their proposition, bringing a beautifully easy-to-use product or service to a large premium market. How can your business become a simplifier? With case studies of some of the most famous firms of the last hundred years, from finance to fast food, this enlightening book shows how to analyse any company's potential to simplify, and enrich the world.