Critical Thinking and Formative Assessments: Increasing the Rigor in Your Classroom

Develop your students' critical thinking skills and prepare them to perform competitively in the classroom, on state tests, and beyond. In this book, Moore and Stanley show you how to effectively instruct your students to think on higher levels, and how to assess their progress. As states implement the Common Core State Standards, teachers have been called upon to provide higher levels of rigor in their classrooms. Moore and Stanley demonstrate critical thinking as a key approach to accomplishing this goal. They explore the benefits of critical thinking and provide the tools you need to develop and monitor critical thinking skills in the classroom. Topics include:

• The Difference Between Higher-Level and Lower-Level Thinking
• Writing Higher-Level Thinking Questions
• Assessing Critical Thinking Strategies to Develop Higher-Level Thinking Skills

Betsy Moore is a veteran teacher who retired from Reynoldsburg City Schools after 30 years of service and is currently the Executive Director of Teacher 2 Teacher (www.teacher2teacher.info), a national educational consulting company based in Ohio. Betsy began her career as a special education teacher, eventually moving on to the regular education classroom. While in the regular classroom she worked on many cutting-edge strategies including student-led conferences and short-cycle assessments. From 2000–2007 Betsy worked in the Literacy Curriculum Alignment Project (LCAP), training over 1500 teachers in more than 60 schools. She co-authored the book Short-Cycle Assessment: Improving Student Achievement through Formative Assessment which details the process developed in the LCAP work. In her role with Teacher 2 Teacher, Betsy provides quality professional development in the areas of differentiated instruction, short-cycle assessment development, and developing critical thinking skills and rigor to name a few. Betsy lives with her husband Dave, a retired high school assistant principal, in Columbus, Ohio. She has two grown children, Amy, who lives in Hilliard, Ohio, and Bryan, who lives in Temecula, California. Also living in Temecula is Betsy’s first grandchild, a granddaugher, Aria Nicole.,
Todd Stanley began teaching in 1997. A National Board Certified Teacher, he started out in the traditional classroom, teaching junior high students for two years, but quickly was given different growth experiences as a teacher. He taught on a gifted-accelerated team for three years, compacting three years of curriculum into two years of classroom time. He then taught at the Christopher Program, a project-based, integrated curriculum that serviced juniors and seniors, providing many outside learning experiences for students. During this time he also trained teachers from all around the state of Ohio for the Literacy Curriculum Alignment Project (LCAP), helping teachers to align the