Set yourself up for success by auditing your curriculum assessments while they’re still fresh!
We did it!!
We have made it through yet another year of teaching, and we think we did pretty well this year.
How are you feeling?
Now that the planning is done and all the lessons and skills have been introduced to students, it is time to start the end-of-the-year to-do list.
You know the one. That to-do list where you review your plans and assessments from this last year or semester, audit them and then decide what needs to go.
It is like our own little Marie Kondo cleaning regimen.
Does this lesson serve its purpose? Yes.
Does it bring me joy? Nope.
Then “Thank you for doing what you did, but you gotta go!”
Okay, so maybe it’s not just like that, but it may be.
To be completely honest, many of the items on our end-of-year to-do list can probably wait until next fall, but some of them really can’t.
One task you need to complete sooner rather than later is an Assessment Audit because auditing your curriculum assessments while they’re fresh can be a good way to figure out how efficient your planning was last year and what kinds of things you need to reconsider for next year.
As you begin auditing your assessments, consider these questions.
- What standards/skills was this assessment supposed to assess?
- What standards/skills did this assessment actually assess?
- Are there any standards that can be blocked into this assessment? (Learn more about how we plan assessments and block standards in this blog post.)
- If the assessment failed to adequately assess a specific standard, where did it go wrong?
- Is there a way to set up the assessment to do the job it was supposed to do?
- If that standard/skill is not assessed here, is there another assessment that can take its place?
Make a list of all of your assessments, and then put these questions on a sheet and answer each one honestly. You can even create a quick Google form with the questions so that your answers are all nicely laid out in a spreadsheet when you’re all done.
No matter how you do it, these questions need to be asked and answered for you to really know if the assessments you had students complete this year were really all that and a bag of chips or if they were simply a bag that was supposed to hold chips but was actually messy… how is that for a metaphor.
Cleaning your room and checking the viability of your markers is one thing, but cleaning up your assessments and lessons and making your teaching more purposeful and efficient is invaluable as you plan for the next school year.
Have a wonderful end of the year!
Happy auditing!
