I still remember the times I felt tricked by a quiz or test when I was growing up. The test I took to get my driving permit was particularly memorable, and not in a good way. I thought I did all the …

You don’t know what you don’t know. Isn’t that the truth! When I first began teaching, I knew how to make large, challenging learning goals (such as content standards) and purposes clear for …

One of my all-time favorite teachers and mentors is Mrs. Strain. She was my art teacher all four years of high school, mostly because she left an indelible impression on me freshman year. There are …

“What do those tests determine about my being?!” My oldest child is currently a junior in high school, which means she has large assessments coming up. Think the year-end state summative and …

For most researchers I know, there is an unrelenting drive to figure stuff out, to find the new piece of data that will describe or explain something in a new way. I get that feeling. Call me odd, …

Four years ago, Georgia’s Floyd County Schools District took on a new challenge: rolling out MAP® Growth™ for the first time. For this mostly rural district serving 9,000 kids in the northwest …

What does it mean to communicate with learners and their families? When I first started teaching, I thought it just meant providing information; in retrospect, I can see that I was talking at them. I …