Celebrate Juneteenth with Lessons and Resources
As the school year comes to a close, it’s important to take time to recognize Juneteenth — a nationally celebrated holiday that commemorates African American freedom on June 19, 1865. The holiday also serves as a significant reminder that the work surrounding equity and inclusion is a continual effort to lift up diverse voices. We’ve…
Tools for Teachers Lessons Help Celebrate Female Voices
Tools for Teachers provides ELA lessons that focus on research/inquiry (claim 4), and analyzing information/sources (target 3). The topics are interesting too–think dangerous ocean animals and exploring why it rains (a question every kid asks at some point!).
Tools for Teachers Instructional Resources Support STEM Learning
Tools for Teachers provides ELA lessons that focus on research/inquiry (claim 4), and analyzing information/sources (target 3). The topics are interesting too–think dangerous ocean animals and exploring why it rains (a question every kid asks at some point!).
Smarter Balanced Year in Review 2020
Supporting Teaching and Learning During an Unprecedented Year What a year! Looking back at 2020 comes with mixed emotions, but the truth is, Smarter Balanced made big strides in supporting educators at a time when they needed it most. Classroom teaching became remote learning and teachers had to quickly adjust to this new reality. Together with students…
Learn to Score Student Writing the SmART Way!
New Smarter Annotated Response Tool (SmART) Now Available Smarter Balanced worked with educators to create the Smarter Annotated Response Tool (SmART), a dynamic tool that supports educators in understanding how student writing is scored on Smarter Balanced assessments. Educators can use SmART to explore how different student responses are scored across the grade levels and writing…
Ten Smarter Tools for Ten Years
Smarter Balanced Celebrates a Decade of Supporting Educators Building web-based applications to support teaching has been part of Smarter Balanced’s mission from the beginning. We heard loud and clear that high-quality assessment requires equally high-quality support in the classroom to ensure student learning goals are aligned with state academic standards. The challenging work of teaching…
Celebrating 10 Years of Collaboration
Smarter Balanced Honors Consortium Members and Educators for their Dedication to Developing High-Quality Measurement Tools and Instructional Supports Thank you, educators! As we celebrate Smarter Balanced’s 10th anniversary, we honor your work and the collaboration of hundreds of educators to build a fair, accurate system to measure what our students know and can do. And…
Remote Learning and the Formative Assessment Process
Strategies You Can Use During Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning The nature of remote learning is that there is more student autonomy—it is likely that students will participate with more independence when they are not located in the same space and/or instructional time as their teachers. Distance learning relies on the formative assessment process for success because…
We Are All In This Together (Remotely)
A Shout-Out to Smarter Balanced Performance Tasks Jamie Elliott-Delaney, Guest Blogger5th Grade TeacherAppoquinimink School DistrictMiddletown, Delaware Although I am a fifth grade teacher at heart, I have extreme love for any teacher who teaches grades K-5. The dedication, extreme multitasking, wearing of “several hats” daily, and the pure ability to be flexible in any given situation…
Making Sense of Test-taking by Touch
Smarter Balanced Braille Accommodations Give Visually Impaired Students the Opportunity to Demonstrate What They Know and Can Do, Equitably Braille is a nearly 200 year old, haptic (touch-based) system for reading and writing that has given millions of people with vision impairment the ability to more effectively access education and contribute to the literary canon….