iNACOL’s annual conference is the industry’s leading event shaping the future of K-12 education. Experts, practitioners, educators, policymakers and researchers gather and work to transform education.
The iNACOL Symposium will be held on October 28-31, 2019 at the Palm Springs Convention Center in Palm Springs, California. iNACOL’s annual conference is the industry’s leading event shaping the future of K-12 education. Experts, practitioners, educators, policymakers and researchers gather…
“To create a learner driven environment, we must move from compliance to autonomy. Each member of the team needs to assess where they are, where they are going, and humbly accept feedback to GROW.” This week, my friend and colleague, Nichole Velasquez and I left Boise, Idaho for Nashville, Tennessee. The reason…to put ourselves in […]
Assessment is integral to the process of teaching and learning. Teachers should be constantly checking for their students’ understanding in formal and informal ways. They are checking for understanding with formative assessment, tracking progress with interim assessment, and checking mastery of standards with summative assessment. And yet, “assessment” today in the United States is often […]
In practice, we at Big Picture Learning work directly with communities and schools across the country (and really, around the world) who wish to implement a more student-centered learning design – one which is grounded in real-world learning and has the learner’s interests, talents and passions at the heart of their experience. But beyond that, […]
To present, the idea of accountability in American education has been synonymous with end-of-year, statewide, summative tests that are tied to high stakes outcomes for teachers and schools. No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) intent was to increase equity. The strategy NCLB employed was to require states to test all students in grades 3 through 8 […]
State and local education systems need to focus on supporting an accountability system that continuously improves to meet the needs of a changing society, economy and student populations. We need to ensure that accountability systems are “fit for purpose” and support student-centered, competency-based learning. How could we know in real time whether students are making […]
Moving to a future state of an equitable K-12 education system requires that we consider and perhaps rethink what students need to know and be able to do to achieve success. It also requires that we set a vision and foundation for achieving success throughout the state education system. Here we dig into the second […]
Several states are asking us: What alternatives are there to grading schools in state accountability systems? We recognize that states want a way to help communicate their work on education quality, effectiveness and accountability. The real question is this: How can states better determine school effectiveness, report on school progress and give data-driven feedback and […]
In personalized, competency-based education, schools should have far better data to support student learning, provide greater transparency and analyze and continuously improve on their practice through data and reporting with multiple measures. Likewise, states can consider how to present multiple measures of student learning and school quality with advanced data visualization to provide families with […]
The previous blog, Why Next Generation Accountability for Continuous Improvement is Important, explored the need to redesign accountability systems to support all learners based on reciprocal accountability and continuous improvement. This blog will focus on how states can begin to design next generation accountability systems. As policymakers think long term about accountability redesign, an important […]
State and local education systems need to focus on supporting an accountability system that continuously improves to meet the needs of a changing society, economy and student populations. Policymakers, school leaders, teachers, parents and communities want systems that are transparent and aligned to improving teaching and learning over time. Next generation accountability systems can serve […]