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Annual Conference on Standards and Assessment
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April 14-16, 2010
Caesars Palace
3570 Las Vegas Boulevard South
Las Vegas, NV
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Kay Burke |
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Anne Davies |
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Thomas Guskey |
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Tammy Heflebower |
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Chris Jakicic |
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Robert J. Marzano |
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Jay McTighe |
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Timothy Waters |
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Teachers have precious little time to spend with each student in the classroom. Accurate assessments done throughout the instructional cycle are the best tools you have to respond quickly to the diverse needs of each student. When aligned with standards, assessments are critical for measuring achievement toward essential learning outcomes.
This conference offers a range of assessment strategies and the time to explore, network, and discover the tools that will work best for you. It also frames essential 21st century skills within the context of curriculum, assessment, and instruction.
Learn how to design standards-based assessments that will tell you immediately whether your students are hitting their learning targets. Become skilled at balancing formative and summative assessments. Start thinking collaboratively to design common assessments. Understand the importance of student involvement in assessment design and examine different ways you can promote this in your classroom. Discover how to quickly create interventions by making formative assessments a part of your RTI process. Explore new ways of grading that are defensible and clearly reflect student learning. Learn how assessments can inform your efforts to build academic vocabulary and background knowledge among ELLs and culturally diverse learners.
This event will help you find direction and return home with practical ideas for making your assessments timely, precise, and instrumental to maximizing your instructional time.
You will gain research-based knowledge on:
- Monitoring literacy development
- Building common assessments
- Creating student-friendly learning targets aligned to standards
- Ensuring classroom assessment informs instruction
- Matching assessments to learning targets
- Using assessments in the RTI process
- Creating schoolwide grading and reporting policies
- Getting to essential outcomes
- Including assessment in the instructional process
- Designing assessments that measure achievement of standards
- Creating a balanced assessment system
- Organizing effective lessons into cohesive units
- Making grades reflect learning
- Communicating student learning to parents effectively
- Involving students in assessment
- Using rubrics to make sense of assessment
- Restructuring the classroom to teach 21st-century skills
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Caesars Palace - Sold Out
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Keynote Presentations
Kay Burke
The Common Assessment Cycle: From Formative to Summative
A balanced cycle of collaboratively created formative and summative assessment ensures students get the instruction they need to meet or exceed standards. Learn how teacher teams target key standards and create common standards-based assessments to drive instruction. Build skills to work as part of a professional learning team to create formative performance tasks, checklists, and rubrics that provide meaningful feedback to students. Dr. Burke then explains how to share and implement differentiated learning strategies for students who need additional interventions. Finally, she shows how to convert the formative assessments to summative evaluations to prove students can meet or exceed standards.
Anne Davies
Leading the Way to Quality Classroom Assessment
Dr. Davies focuses on the importance of assessment for learning to support all student and adult learners. Drawing ideas from two books she coauthored, Leading the Way to Making Classroom Assessment Work and Transforming Barriers to Assessment for Learning, she reviews quality classroom assessment. A variety of video clips illustrate what leaders need to be watching for and doing themselves if assessment for learning is going to be successfully implemented in classrooms, schools, and systems.
Thomas Guskey
Grading and Reporting Student Learning
Dr. Guskey outlines a variety of ways to report student learning progress to parents and the community, including report cards, standards-based reporting, alternative formats for parent conferences, newsletters, and phone calls. Learn how to design new reporting structures that better communicate and involve parents in student learning. Dr. Guskey also details the policies and practices that should be avoided due to their negative consequences for students, teachers, and schools.
Robert J. Marzano
Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading
Learn how to implement an integrated system of assessment and grading that will enhance both teaching and learning. Dr. Marzano provides specific information on the benefits of formative assessment and explains how to design and interpret three different types. He also illustrates the necessary changes in instruction that must accompany a rigorous formatively based approach to assessment. Finally, he explains and exemplifies new approaches to grading that better support formative assessment.
Jay McTighe
Developing an Understanding-Based Curriculum
In Schooling by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay propose that a robust, understanding-based curriculum includes 10 key components. Jay examines these components in theory and shares practical examples of them in use. Explore such questions as: To what extent do we have a coherent curriculum from the learners’ perspective? How does backward design apply to curriculum mapping? Why should content standards and accountability test scores be considered a means to an end and not the end in themselves?
Timothy Waters
From High Anxiety to High Reliability: District Leadership That Works
In high-reliability systems there is no margin for error. Air traffic control, nuclear power generation, and NASA shuttle control are examples of systems in which any failure is catastrophic. What would our schools look like if we treated every student failure as a catastrophic event? How would we ensure, with a high degree of reliability, that every student who enters our system leaves it with a full range of post-secondary and life opportunities? Tim Waters explores research-based leadership practices that, when skillfully implemented, increase the reliability of school districts.
Breakout Sessions
Kay Burke
Performance Tasks for Authentic Learning
To prepare students for success in the 21st century, teachers need to create authentic performance tasks that require students to apply their knowledge and skills to solve relevant problems related to their own lives, the workplace, and the world. Learn how to organize teacher teams to create standards-based performance tasks that integrate subject areas and motivate students to think critically and creatively and demonstrate their understanding of important concepts correlated to state standards.
Checklists and Rubrics: The Heart and Soul of Standards-Based Teaching
Rubrics are our friends, but checklists are our best friends! By beginning with the end in mind, teachers work in teams to embed the language and concepts of their state standards in checklists that guide students through a multistep performance. By chunking the steps sequentially, teachers provide the scaffolding students need to succeed. Rubrics developed from checklists provide quality indicators that show students how to meet and exceed standards. Learn how to create and implement these powerful assessment tools to drive standards-based teaching and learning.
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Breakout Sessions (continued)
Anne Davies
"We’re Nomads": Wrong Turns and Course Corrections on the Journey to Quality Classroom Assessment
Dr. Davies focuses on the frequent wrong turns made when involving students in classroom assessment and the implications these mistakes have for students, teachers, and leaders. Video clips illustrate ways to engage students in co-constructing criteria, peer and self-assessment, and showing proof of learning.
Tammy Heflebower
Teaching and Assessing 21st Century Skills
This practical session provides strategies to engage students through the integration of 21st-century skills: critical and creative thinking, problem solving, information literacy, collaboration, self-direction, and invention. Participants will consider ways to imbed these skills within existing content and to monitor and assess student progress in these areas of responsible citizenry.
A Vision of Success: Leading the Design of High-Quality Classroom-Based Assessments
Teachers make important evaluations about student achievement regularly. How do you know if such decisions are based on sound assessment results? Dr. Heflebower shares a process for assuring that assessments meet quality criteria. Meeting the criteria would assure the technical quality of the assessments and validate the use for student performance reporting. Gain ideas about how to review and revise existing assessments for quality and learn formats for engaging other staff in this essential work.
Digging Into Data Analysis: Process for Classrooms, Teams, Sites, and Districts
Learn how to make data-informed decisions. In this session, Dr. Heflebower guides you through a multiple-step process of using various data types to examine information in meaningful ways. This process can be replicated at the school and district levels. Teams will return to their school systems with the ability to understand various types of data available; establish a baseline of student performance; identify subgroups that need specific interventions; and develop or refine data-informed school-improvement goals and strategies.
Chris Jakicic
Too Much to Teach!
Avoid what Dr. Robert J. Marzano calls “curriculum chaos.” Instead, consider how teachers might work together to create essential learnings or “power standards” so that all students in their particular course or grade level are guaranteed the same curriculum.
Teacher-Designed Assessments That Ensure Student Learning
Myths and truths abound about what makes good selected response items, performance assessments, and rubrics. Learn strategies for writing good assessments that will translate into better information about student learning. This breakout session will help you understand how to match your learning target to the assessment and develop a test plan to assure you are assessing the right targets. You will also become familiar with how you can write better selected response and performance items.
Examining the Role of Students in Assessment
Teachers who involve their students in the assessment process find that they are more motivated and more successful as a result. This session explores the use of descriptive feedback and other highly effective strategies teachers have developed to include students in the assessment process. Understand why students should be involved in the assessment process and also explore the research supporting feedback and learn how to use descriptive feedback to make a difference for your students.
Jay McTighe
Assessing Understanding: Designing Cornerstone Assessment Tasks
Learn practical, proven tools and templates for designing cornerstone assessment tasks and companion scoring rubrics. Jay also links cornerstone assessments and professional learning communities in this thought-provoking session.
Timothy Waters
From Managing Conflict to Leading Change
In the words of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, “When the pace of change outside of an organization exceeds the pace of change inside of an organization, the end of the organization is in sight.” If Welch’s statement is anywhere close to accurate, then the most important competency for education leaders at every system level may be leading both first- and second-order change. Dr. Waters presents an overview of change theory, characteristics of first and second-order change, helpful tools, and useful insights for leaders who prefer leading change to managing conflict.
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| Wednesday, April 14 |
| 7:00-8:00a.m. |
Registration & Breakfast |
| 8:00-9:45a.m. |
Keynote Presentation |
| 9:45-10:00a.m. |
Break |
| 10:00-11:30a.m. |
Breakout Sessions |
| 11:30a.m.-1:00p.m. |
Lunch (on your own) |
| 1:00-2:30p.m. |
Keynote Presentation |
| 2:30-2:45p.m. |
Break |
| 2:45-4:15p.m. |
Breakout Sessions |
| Thursday, April 15 |
| 7:00-8:00a.m. |
Breakfast |
| 8:00-9:45a.m. |
Keynote Presentation |
| 9:45-10:00a.m. |
Break |
| 10:00-11:30a.m. |
Breakout Sessions |
| 11:30a.m.-1:00p.m. |
Lunch (on your own) |
| 1:00-2:30p.m. |
Keynote Presentation |
| 2:30-2:45p.m. |
Break |
| 2:45-4:15p.m. |
Breakout Sessions |
| Friday, April 16 |
| 7:00-8:00a.m. |
Breakfast |
| 8:00-9:45a.m. |
Keynote Presentation |
| 9:45-10:00a.m. |
Break |
| 10:00-11:30a.m. |
Keynote Presentation |
Agenda is subject to change without notice. |
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You will receive a certificate of participation after the event. Please check with your state Department of Education for CEU information. You may also register for graduate credit through Grand Canyon University.
Download Request for University Credit and Official Transcript(s) Instructions/Form
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By Phone: |
Call Solution Tree at 800.733.6786
812.336.7700 |
We welcome and recommend substitutions for those who cannot attend. Substitutions may be made at any time prior to the event. If you send a substitute, please provide his or her name and send your request to registration@solution-tree.com. All cancellations must be in writing and sent to registration@solution-tree.com or Solution Tree, 555 North Morton Street, Bloomington, IN 47404. Cancellations more than 90 days prior require a $75 processing fee. Cancellations between 10 and 90 days require half of the registration fee. There are no refunds for cancellations less than 10 days prior. |
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By Fax: |
812.336.7790 |
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By Mail: |
Solution Tree
555 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404
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