(photo by What Makes a Great Teacher)

The Atlantic published an article discussing the 20 years and 7,300 teachers worth of data collected by Teach for America.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

 Its a great article and for this blog post I want to focus on what it says about assessment.  When we've discussed assessment on Sugar's Its an Education Project mailing list there was a tendancy to think of it in terms of the high stakes, once a year or less frequent, standardized tests. The results of these tests take months return and they are not all that useful for teachers to use to modify their teaching.

This exerpt from the Atlantic is the other end of the spectrum on Assessment.

Mr. Taylor begins to walk around the class, reading problems aloud. “How many 5’s are in 45?” The kids have to do the math in their heads. All of them write their answers on their cards and thrust them up in the air. With a quick scan, Mr. Taylor can see if every child has written the right answer. Then he says, “What’s the answer?” And all the kids call out, “Nine!” When they get an answer right, they whisper-shout “Yes!” and pump their fists. If some kids get it wrong, they have not embarrassed themselves by individually raising their hand and announcing their mistake. But Mr. Taylor knows he needs to give them more attention 

Later..

Mr. Taylor calls on students to help solve the problem. But he does this using the “equity sticks”—a can of clothespins, each of which has a student’s name on it. That way, he ensures a random sample. The shy ones don’t get lost. 

Later..

  Before they leave, all the kids fill out an “exit slip,” which is usually in the form of a problem—one more chance for Mr. Taylor to see how they, and he, are doing. 

Mr. Taylor, the article's example of a teacher that moves his students ahead more then 1 grade level, is constantly assessing all the individuals in his class' understading of the material.  Like a good engineer, he collects data continuously.

This is something we need to remeber and support in Sugar activities.  When designing Sugar activities we can ask the questions, how can we providng real time, easy to access data to the teacher on who is understanding the material.