Common Principles for Uncommon Schools

Horace Portfolios

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

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

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

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

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

Personalization, High Standards and the Assessment Debates

Educators in the Coalition of Essential Schools share a commitment to the idea that they need to assess students’ progress to help students keep learning and to help teachers keep getting smarter about how to teach. There is also a large degree of consensus among Coalition educators that standardized tests cannot be the most important element in an assessment system-because

Horace: Portfolios Published: June 10, 2002 By: Jill Davidson, Linda Mabry Topics: Assessment, Exhibitions, Planning Backwards, Portfolios

Personalized Curriculum: Sophomore Core Portfolios at Poland Regional High School

Daniel Burgess, a junior at Poland Regional High School in Poland, Maine, doesn’t mince words. “I’m a procrastinator,” he says, “And I will do a lot to get out of assignments that I don’t like.” Last year, Dan approached his Sophomore Core Portfolio with trepidation. But Dan eventually realized that the Portfolio was a unique opportunity, a chance to focus

Horace: Portfolios Published: March 10, 2003 By: Jill Davidson Topics: Assessment, Portfolios

Portfolios Plus: A Critical Guide to Alternative Assessment

Coalition teachers require multidimensional exhibitions of skills and understanding to know that students have met our standards.Coalition students need opportunities to demonstrate their learning over the course of months and years. Setting up such assessments demands time, deep connections and professional competence. We know that standardized tests provide only a limited opportunity for students to demonstrate what they know. Linda

Horace: Portfolios Published: June 10, 2002 By: Jill Davidson, Linda Mabry Topics: Assessment, Portfolios

Southern Maine Partnership’s Local Comprehensive Assessment System, Draft 3.0

To help schools involved with Maine’s Learner-Centered Accountability Project, staff from the Southern Maine Partnership (S.M.P.) and participating schools have created a comprehensive assessment system model. S.M.P. schools are in the process of integrating this model into their assessment systems. Level I assessments are the multitude of assessments typically used in classrooms: vocabulary quizzes, study guides and other demonstrations of

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

Tech Tips for School People

Multi-line central school phone systems can foul up attempts to telecommunicate. A good solution is to install a few dedicated single lines exactly where you need them to use your modems. No matter how fast computers are, people still take time to learn new things. Allow for plenty of extra time to get teachers and students up to speed, and

Technology in the Essential School: Making Change in the Information Age

No matter how powerful, high tech alone can’t make schools better. But if schools will first define the issues facing them, technology can prove a key strategy in achieving their goals. Ninth-grade history students in Tucson, Anzona take on the roles of citizens of the ancient Greek city-states competing for survival-huddled in teams as Macintosh computers calculate the economic and

The Digital Portfolio

The concept for the Digital Portfolio was developed by David Niguidula with the support of the IBM Corporation, as a computer-based tool for what the Exhibitions Project at the Coalition has termed “planning backwards.” A first implementation was developed by Richard Bourgon at the Coalition of Essential Schools. Primary development of the current prototype was done by Michelle Riconscente of

The Power of Portfolios: What Children Can Teach Us About Learning and Assessment

Elizabeth Herbert provides a nuanced analysis of how creating student portfolios affects students, teachers, parents and a school community. The Power of Portfolios presents Herbert’s learning about portfolios-inspired by Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences work-as a portfolio itself, distillations of lessons learned and questions raised in seventeen years as principal of the kindergarten through fourth grade Crow Island School in Winnetka,

Horace: Portfolios Published: June 10, 2002 By: Jill Davidson, Linda Mabry Topics: Assessment, Portfolios

The Senior Project: Demonstrating Academics Alongside Life Skills

Schools around the country have turned to Senior Projects as a way to synthesize and demonstrate a student’s intellectual as well as life skills. Typically, such projects arise out of students’ individual passions or interests and are mentored by an outside expert in the field. At Henry M. Jackson High School outside Seattle, students spend an entire year pulling together

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

Valid and Reliable? Test Your Own Task

Teachers who like to use activities or projects to bring instruction to life may also assume that such activities make valid and reliable assessments of what a student understands. Not necessarily, warns Grant Wiggins in his 1998 book, Educative Assessment — but it’s simple to check, using these two questions: 1. Could the student do well at the task for

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

Where to Go for Help: A Resource List for Technology and Learning

General guides to technology Report of the Technology for Restructuring Institute, Toni M. Maddox, ed.; published by Center for Excellence in Education, Indiana University, 201 North Rose Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405. A guide in outline form which identifies key issues in school change (including authentic assessment, learning styles, outcome-based education, student as worker); lists references and resources in each area;

Where to Go for More Resources for Responding to Calls for Accountability

Fairtest: National Center for Fair and Open Testing The advocacy heavyweight for alternatives to high-stakes standardized tests, FairTest offers a resource-rich web site, The FairTest Examiner quarterly print newsletter, and a variety of publications devoted to critiques and alternatives within the testing reform movement. Don’t miss the website’s Assessment Reform Network, which will connect you with local movements supporting fair,

Horace: Portfolios Published: June 10, 2002 By: Topics: Alternative Transcripts, Assessment, Exhibitions, Planning Backwards, Portfolios

Which Assessment Works Best? A Matching Test for Educators

Match the statement at the top with the appropriate method from the list at the bottom. (Some methods may apply to more than one item) 1. I want to figure out how to improve my teaching in my classroom. 2. I want to figure out how to revise my classroom curriculum. 3. I want to figure out how to place

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