It’s time to start the project for this unit, and also the final unit for the class. It is a weird wrinkle teaching here. Our only big assessment is usually the first substantive assessment. Our school has had to race through a number of classes in order to cover the material and our projects are involved so we also need to start them as early as possible. We have a rough problem in terms of content coverage.

Does our scant amount of time for content coverage mean we also have a problem with assessment? It feels at times that the only assessing we do is formative. What can you really assess after only 2 weeks in a meaningful way? It’s a difficult question. But it also means we aren’t giving much to students about assessments either. This means the students don’t have a lot of clear signals that they are being learning. Maybe having a successful assessment early would be good for morale.

As an experiment, maybe next cycle wet could do assessments every 2 weeks, or even every week, or even every day! Make sure kids know they are learning something, and hopefully they could be a good motivational tool. In fact, if they are smoothly integrated, it may keep the class from getting slowed down as well.