Home Remodeling in Education…

By Nikki Roorda

Spring is in the air, and with that a sense of renewal.  In my house, renewal has come in the form of a home remodeling project.  My “DIYer” husband has begun a remodeling project to make our master bathroom larger by taking some of the space from our twin daughters’ bathroom.  As we have been working through the remodeling process, I have been thinking a lot about the connections between our remodeling project to my work in supporting districts with their assessment practices and movement towards standards-based teaching and learning practices.  Believe it or not, there are a lot of connections…

At the start of our remodeling project, we needed to do research and have conversations to see what we liked in different types of bathrooms.  We spent a lot of time discussing our desired state (in education we call these learning targets).  Our family had to define what the learning target meant in family-friendly language (or in the case of the classroom, student-friendly language).  Then we began the journey of examining the pre-requisite projects that would have to be in place in order to meet our desired outcome.  In classrooms, we call this deconstructing the standards. After these processes are in place, we then begin showing examples and non-examples of the learning target (oops!  I meant bathroom), and provide formative assessments with effective feedback in order to make sure my DIYer understood how he was doing in comparison with our intended outcome.

At the two sessions that I am presenting at ATI’s Summer Conference, I will be working with session participants to help them uncover their current state of reality when it comes to assessment practices and how important discussions about assessment and grading in their district can lead them to their desired state!

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