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Learner-Centered Assessment

Learner-Centered Assessment

How do your students learn more about themselves as learners?

Strengthen clarity for every learner through co-constructed learning progressions

Involve students in every aspect of the ‘assessment for learning’ experience

Design and execute equitable grading practices that reflect learners’ progress and mastery of academic, social, and emotional competencies

Amplify learner voices through culturally responsive and sustaining formative assessment

What are your goals for Learner-Centered Assessment?

A simple, doable approach to develop clarity and share it with students.

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Ensure assessment advances intellectual, social, emotional, cultural, and political agency.

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Create a culture where mistakes are embraced rather than avoided.

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Develop grading practices that communicate exactly what and how students are learning.

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Ensure that students are involved in every aspect of the assessment process.

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Quality, Customized Professional Learning That Works

Our professional learning pathways all have the same goal, to advance learner ownership, efficacy, and agency. We partner with your system to assess your needs and co-construct an action plan anchored in implementation science. We are ready to help and support you at any stage of your learning journey.

Our Approach

Our Learning Progression

Foundational Learning

Build a shared language of learning anchored in co-constructed goals and success criteria aligned to your mission and vision.

Job-Embedded Coaching

Empower educators using the gradual release of responsibility to model, coach, monitor, and analyze progress towards shared goals.

Sustainable Systems

Advance teacher agency to ensure risk-taking, innovation, and collective efficacy through quality implementation.

Clarity for Learning and Impact

Are both teachers and students clear about what must be learned, why students are learning it, and how they can be successful? Are students able to determine their next steps in learning through quality feedback and assessment? Clarity for Learning, by best selling author and assessment expert, Kara Vandas, offers a simple and doable approach to developing clarity and sharing it with students.

Clarity for Learning and Impact

This professional learning series offers five powerful practices that include:

  • Gaining clarity as educators
  • Sharing clarity and advancing student agency
  • Assessing with clarity
  • Feedback with clarity
  • Collaborating with clarity: Impact Teams
Let's Plan This
Clarity for Learning: Five Essential Practices that Empower Students and Teachers

Kara Vandas and John Almarode

Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Assessment

How do you create conditions for self-empowerment so students can drive their own learning while contributing positively to the growth of others? Culturally responsive and sustaining assessment (CRSA) advances learners’ intellectual, social, emotional, cultural, and political agency by involving learners in every aspect of their learning process. Our CRSA assessment framework puts learners on winning streaks by honoring learners’ cultural identities and providing opportunities for learners to build on their assets so they reach their full potential.

Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Assessment
  • Engage families and connect to home language and culture
  • Build culture of belonging through inclusive questioning
  • Invite students to prove their own learning
  • Amplify learner voice through self-peer assessment
  • Advance metacognitive practices
  • Maximize learner expertise through deliberate practice
Let's Plan This
Amplify Learner Voice Through Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Assessment

Paul J. Bloomberg, Ed.D., Kara Vandas, Ingrid Twyman, Vivett Dukes, Rachel Carrillo Fairchild, Connie Hamilton and Isaac Wells

Mistake Literacy

Why is it that sometimes students learn from mistakes while other times they stagnate or even regress? Make the shift from a culture of perfection to one in which mistakes are embraced rather than avoided. The Mistake Literacy Framework, designed by international educator Zak Cohen, is a learning framework designed to equip students with the skills and dispositions to recognize, react to, and repair their mistakes as an essential component of their learning.

Optimize Student Learning from Mistakes
  • Explore the power of mistake literacy
  • Apply research to optimize learning from mistakes
  • Ensure students’ learning from mistakes
  • Differentiate key instructional shifts to any learning context
  • Cultivate a climate in which mistakes are visible, desirable, and beneficial
Let's Plan This

Competency-Based Grading for Equity

How does your system ensure equitable grading practices? Competency or target-based grading maximizes learning, increases equity and achievement, and provides honest and accurate communication and feedback to students and families regarding academic, social, and emotional capacity.

Competency Based Grading for Equity
  • Prioritize academic-social-emotional learning targets
  • Refine or replace subjective grading practices
  • Design aligned assessment tasks to personalize learning
  • Increase the accuracy and effectiveness of feedback
  • Communicate expectations with students, families, and caregivers
Let's Do This
Grading for Impact: Raising Student Achievement through a Target-Based Assessment and Learning System

Tom Hierck and Garth Larson

Designing a Balanced Assessment Framework

How is your system reducing assessment fatigue? Balanced assessment requires the triangulation of multiple sources of evidence so learners can articulate where they are going, where they are at, and what their next learning steps are. Balanced assessment is vital to support multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS).

Designing a Balanced Assessment Framework
  • Reduce assessment fatigue
  • Balance current assessment practice (diagnostic, interim, formative, summative, etc)
  • Align formative and summative assessment
  • Design and execute student-led CFAs
  • Maximize authentic performance assessment
Let's Do This
Amplify Learner Voice Through Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Assessment

Paul J. Bloomberg, Ed.D., Kara Vandas, Ingrid Twyman, Vivett Dukes, Rachel Carrillo Fairchild, Connie Hamilton and Isaac Wells

Resources

Let's Connect

Complete the form below and we’ll be in touch to create a solution that addresses your needs and achieves your goals in learning spaces.

Prefer to talk on the phone? No problem! You can give us a call at: 619-432-2673

This form is on the "Let's Connect" Section on the Homepage

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