Elementary Updates
January 2017
Elementary Math Assessments
- Ensure that the common assessment can be completed in one class session.
- Ensure that the assessment is targeting key standards in the unit and has meaningful questions/tasks to measure proficiency in these standards.
- Ensure that the assessments have a balance of question types.
- Ensure that scoring is related to the level of proficiency in relationship to key standards.
Many thanks go out to everyone for your efforts in working to help make these assessments better indicators of students' learning!
Upcoming Math PD Opportunities
All 4th and 5th grade teachers will be participating in a professional development session on engaging students with and evaluating students responses to challenging problems. These sessions are designed to help us look at some of the challenging problems our students have completed in assessments and classwork and ways we can better coach them to apply different skills to approach challenging problems and ways we can learn about student strengths and needs from their responses to these problems. Your Instructional Supervisors have more information about the date and time you will be attending this session. Additionally, please look at some of the different elementary math offerings we have in the Winter-Spring Professional Learning Catalog. One to highlight are the sessions on rethinking the ways we are designing our math lessons. These sessions were born from many conversations about trying to marry a workshop approach with the structure of Math in Focus.