Facilitator's Guide to Using Assessments to Teach for Understanding: A Casebook for Educators

This guide is a companion volume to Using Assessments to Teach for Understanding: A Casebook for Educators, which presents 15 vivid cases designed to help teachers grapple with the challenges of using multiple assessments to improve teaching and learning. The Facilitator's Guide to Using Assessments to Teach for Understanding: A Casebook for Educators provides analysis, discussion questions, and teacher notes to help you use the cases in teacher education classes and in professional development workshops. This much-needed resource provides authentic voices and experiences from elementary, middle school, dual language, and special education classrooms, and spans different content areas across the curriculum.

The Facilitator’s Guide features:

• Guidelines for constructing a case-based professional development curriculum.
• Suggestions on how to read the cases and how to identify teaching and learning issues.
• Teaching notes for each case that examine key issues and sometimes add information not provided by the case’s author.
• A list of the rules and roles involved in leading a meaningful discussion.
• Advice for plotting out your discussion that includes analysis, evaluation, alternative solutions, and principles of practice.
• Strategies for creating a nonjudgmental climate that encourages learning in each member of the group.

Judith H. Shulman is director of the Institute for Case Development at WestEd. Andrea Whittaker is an Assistant Professor of Education at San José State University in the Division of Teacher Education. Michele Lew was the project manager for the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.