Common Principles for Uncommon Schools

Horace Assessment

A Final Performance Across the Disciplines

So you want to understand Latin America’s problems: poverty and illiteracy, overcrowding, earthquakes, and political instability (that’s right, war). Can Latin America overcome these problems? Is the United States helping Latin America all it can? What is behind these problems? One key topic we need to understand is the land itself. We will become three teams of experts exploring three

Horace: Assessment Published: October 12, 1991 By: Kathleen Cushman Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Using Rubrics

A Final Performance Across the Disciplines

Discuss behavior patterns as reflected in the insect world, in animals, in hurnan beings, and in literature. Be sure to include references to your course work over the term in Inquiry and Expression, Literature and the Arts, Social Studies, and Science. This may include Macbeth, the drug prevention and communication workshop, Stephen Crane’s poetry, “A Modest Proposal” and other essays

Horace: Assessment Published: October 12, 1990 By: Kathleen Cushman Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Using Rubrics

A Final Performance in History and English

Your final exhibition to demonstrate mastery of the material of these two courses for the first semester will be divided into two parts. The first part is a research paper. The second part is the final examination. Together these constitute 25% of your grade for English and 20% of your grade for World History. 1. For the research assignment, write

Horace: Assessment Published: October 12, 1990 By: Kathleen Cushman Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Using Rubrics

An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftmanship with Students

By Ron Berger (Heinemann, 160 pages, $17.50) BUY NOW! reviewed by Laura Flaxman More than ten years ago, when I first saw Ron Berger present a portfolio of his students’ work and explain the process behind these beautiful and impressive artifacts, I was struck by this master teacher’s combination of skill, passion, energy and humility. An Ethic of Excellence: Building

Horace: Assessment Published: December 10, 2004 By: Laura Flaxman Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Personalization, Portfolios, Student-as-worker

Assessing Writing Bilingually and Authentically: International Community School and ALAS

In 2001-2002, its first year of existence, the International Community School (ICS), which serves 300 kindergarten through fifth graders in the predominantly Latino Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, California, felt assessment pressure from several different directions. ICS had to demonstrate that students were learning to write well, and it needed to measure students’ Spanish and English literacy skills in its bilingual

Horace: Assessment Published: June 10, 2003 By: Jill Davidson Topics: Assessment, Using Rubrics

Assessment Terminology: Key Concepts for Shared Understanding

Habits of Mind Habits of mind include such things as knowing where to find more information, asking original questions, reflecting on and learning from experience, understanding how to collaborate, and seeking out multiple points of view. These kinds of habits are at the heart of education, but are not easily demonstrated through testing. High-Stakes Tests High-stakes tests mostly or totally

Horace: Assessment Published: June 10, 2002 By: Topics: Assessment, Planning Backwards

CES Takes a Stand: The Coalition of Essential Schools Opposes High-Stakes Standardized Testing

Take a stand with CES! Commentary on this statement, links to more resources, and an action kit of advocacy tools, including an online petition, sample press releases, Op/Ed, letter to the editor, and methods for communicating with lawmakers can be found on our website. We urge you to sign the petition, alert your colleagues and friends, and join the CES

Closing the Gaps of No Child Left Behind: The Assessment Debate for Essential Schools

Recently, a local reporter asked me if No Child Left Behind did more good than bad. I was sitting at my desk with a reporting folder for our district’s upcoming NCLB audit. We had already spent countless hours putting together data to illustrate our decisions. In fact, we hired a consultant to strategize ways to “make the grade” with the

Horace: Assessment Published: February 5, 2008 By: Lisa Hirsch Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions

College Admissions and the Essential School

When schools change curriculum and assessment practices, everyone worries that students will suffer in the college selection process. But most selective colleges say they’re used to unusual transcripts, and big universities are looking for new ways to work with schools in change. Get any group of college professors talking about what kind of first- year students they long for, and

Horace: Assessment Published: December 11, 1994 By: Kathleen Cushman Topics: Alternative Transcripts, Assessment

Community, Politics, and the Neighborhood

Embedding assessment into classroom instruction entails setting clear objectives for what students will be learning, and then designing both activities that will get them there and ways to tell whether they did. If teachers do this, they can use class discussions and project work as a means of assessing what their students know without using conventional tests. In this 90-minute

Horace: Assessment Published: December 11, 2000 By: Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Planning Backwards, Portfolios

Defining Readiness for College: SUNY’s Expectations

A State University of New York (SUNY) task force recommends that, beginning as early as ninth or tenth grade, students “engage in a continuous authentic assessment experience that is maintained throughout their high school years; and create an assessment product [portfolios, narrative teacher assessments, self-evaluations, checklists of proficiencies, etc.] that could be taken with them to college and used there

Horace: Assessment Published: December 11, 1994 By: Kathleen Cushman Topics: Alternative Transcripts, Assessment

Exhibitions: Demonstrations of Mastery in Essential Schools

What is an exhibition? This issue of Horace features reflection, analysis, critique, description, and arguments from six Essential school educators. Their work provides compelling examples of how diverse schools—elementary and secondary, rural and urban, public, charter, and independent—employ exhibitions for four key purposes: to ensure engagement among students, staff, and the larger community to assess student learning and, therefore, school

Horace: Assessment Published: February 5, 2008 By: Jill Davidson Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions

Exhibitions: Facing Outward, Pointing Inward

by Joseph P. McDonald, originally published in 1992 by the Coalition of Essential Schools The CES Exhibitions Project of the early 1990s produced a range of work that continues to inform the practice of using exhibitions as a “360 degree” method of transforming teaching and learning, community connections, school design, and assessment. Among that work was this paper coupling the

Horace: Assessment Published: February 5, 2008 By: Joe McDonald Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions

Failing Our Kids: Why the Testing Craze Won’t Fix Our Schools

Failing Our Kids collects fifty fact sheets, opinions, and reports from across the United States into one source that disputes the value of one-dimensional testing and affirms personalized assessment. Editors Barbara Miner and Kathy Swope gathered information from Rethinking School publications (go to the web site for much more: www.rethinkingschools.org) and beyond, and the cumulative effect is both empowering (there

Horace: Assessment Published: June 10, 2002 By: Barbara Miner, Jill Davidson, Kathy Swope Topics: Assessment

Frameworks for Making Science Research Accesible for All

Imagine a classroom of constructive chaos: a group of students is busy as they monitor their work. Another team of students is on the other side of the room redesigning their experiment. They seem frustrated, but are motivated to make their third trial work. In another corner, a student is explaining an article to his research partners that can really

Horace: Assessment Published: February 5, 2008 By: Annie Chien Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions

Giving Essential Schools the Seal of Approval

Through the efforts of the Coalition’s Admissions Project, the presidents and chief admissions officers of the colleges below – chosen because most participated in the Eight-Year Study in the l93O’s (see above) – have signed a statement supporting and affirming the work of educational reform under way in schools across America. “Ours is a time which calls for the ambitious

Horace: Assessment Published: November 11, 1994 By: Kathleen Cushman Topics: Alternative Transcripts, Assessment

Graduation Standards Go Public: A Different Way

How can a school ensure that its graduates are meeting community standards? Seniors at Maine’s Yarmouth High School help teachers design a year-long seminar course that explores a series of interdisciplinary topics (like “race, culture, and identity”) from the perspectives of science and humanism. Working alone and in groups, they read and discuss texts and pursue their individual research. At

Horace: Assessment Published: December 11, 2000 By: Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Planning Backwards, Portfolios

High Standards for Essential Learning Demand a Mix of Measures

What’s not on the test? Teachers, students, and parents are drawing new attention to the vital skills and habits that most state tests ignore — and asking for more and richer ways to show what they have learned. A group of New Jersey fourth-graders spreads a map on the floor and calculates with a bar scale how far they must

Horace: Assessment Published: December 11, 2000 By: Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Planning Backwards, Portfolios

Making Sense of The Principles: A Portfolio from Greenfield Center School

When we work on goal setting at Greenfield Center School (GCS), we have a practice of showing what the relationships, interaction, teaching practices, and evidence of learning look and sound like. Making theory more concrete helps us all to envision the work ahead. In 2006, a group of elementary level Essential school educators developed a Statement of Values about our

Horace: Assessment Published: February 22, 2008 By: Laura Baker Topics: Assessment, Portfolios

Middle College High School, Space Science Overview

All of the New York Performance Consortium schools have created overviews for each of their courses. These overviews demonstrate students’ learning goals, the assessments that they will complete, and the New York State Standards for Learning that they will master as a result. Educators across the Consortium have developed scoring rubrics in all areas of the curriculum. These scoring rubrics,

Horace: Assessment Published: June 10, 2002 By: Topics: Assessment, Planning Backwards

More About the Schools Featured in this Issue

Schools Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School 49 Antietam Street Devens, Massachusetts 01434 phone: 978.772.3293 www.parker.org Greenfield Center School 71 Montague City Road Greenfield, Massachusetts 01301 phone: 413.773.1700 www.centerschool.net Leadership High School 400 Mansell Street, Suite 136 San Francisco, California 94134 phone: 415.841.8910 www.leadershiphigh.org Mission Hill School 67 Alleghany Street Boston, Massachusetts 02120 phone: 617.635.6384 www.missionhillschool.org School of the Future

Horace: Assessment Published: February 5, 2008 By: Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions

Never Arrive: Teachers Reflect on A CES Elementary School

What is a Coalition elementary school? In the Chesapeake Coalition of Essential Schools network, each of our schools has made meaning of the ten Common Principles in very different ways. However, because our schools came to us not necessarily through the philosophically noble pursuit of principles, but through the funding opportunity of Comprehensive School Reform, CES journeys within our network

Horace: Assessment Published: February 22, 2008 By: Helen Spiri, Pamela Ayers Topics: Assessment

One Community Action Research Project and the Standards It Met

Eleventh and twelfth grade students in “Academy X,” a leadership and humanities academy at Sir Francis Drake High School in suburban Marin County, California spent nine weeks researching the school facilities crisis that faces not only their own area but the whole state. Working in groups, the students researched the facilities problem by meeting with school officials and state policy-makers

Horace: Assessment Published: December 11, 2000 By: Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Planning Backwards, Portfolios

Pennsylvania Colleges Ask for ‘Habits of Mind’

We are as concerned with how students learn as with what they learn. What we learn – knowledge of facts, processes, and concepts – is critical to success in college. How we learn is equally critical. We attach the highest value to the cultivation of such habits of mind as curiosity; independence, clarity, and incisiveness of thought; tolerance for ambiguity;

Horace: Assessment Published: December 11, 1995 By: Kathleen Cushman Topics: Alternative Transcripts, Assessment

Performance and Exhibitions: The Demonstration of Mastery

What do we want high school students to learn? The most revealing answer can be had by looking at what we expect from them when their time is up. What students know and what they can do, after a course is completed or a high school career ended, is in many ways a reflection of what their schools have expected

Horace: Assessment Published: October 12, 1990 By: Kathleen Cushman Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Using Rubrics
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