Blogroll: Assessing Thinking Skills

A recent workshop about assessing thinking skills is generating quite a buzz on our blogroll. Our friends over at Elementary, My Dear, or Far from It wrote about it in a recent post.

While learning about the "groundbreaking progress report," the author thought back to a former student who would have benefited from this assessment:

"We talked a little on Saturday about students who would be successful in the patterns of thinking but not in the traditional content areas. I immediately thought of a student of mine from 5 years ago. He had a learning disability and was almost completely unable to decode text. As a result, he was convinced he was stupid. However, when I read a book aloud his comments and questions were the most insightful in our class. I'm not sure if it was his learning disability or his lack of confidence that made school so difficult for him, but I am sure that he deserved better. I think if he had been able to see his strengths on a progress report like this one it would have made a world of difference for him."

That's an interesting thought, EMDFFI, and one to hang onto as your colleagues start using this method of assessment. Will it foster thinking and learning in all students?

The comments are worth a read, too. One reader is looking for to the conversations this assessment will inevitably start between educators, students, and parents:

"It is so exciting that you are using the Patterns of Thinking in this progress report. This is so smart. Even if the actual progress report doesn't work out exactly as you hope, the talk around it has got to be amazing and making huge impacts on assessment and parent communication."

In case you're just joining us, here is our post about the assessment workshop and the original News article.