Principle 9

Ongoing formative assessment of students, which is informal, often daily assessment of how students are progressing under current instructional practices

Informal assessments are methods of seeing how students are doing and what they need to work on. These assessments inform instruction. Teachers need to know whether or not their students are progressing in order to meet their learning needs. If formative assessments are done daily, teachers will keep track of students' needs and enhance instructions to meet them. Teachers want to see all of their students succeed. By keeping track of their dialy performance, teachers will be able to modify instructions to make better performance possible.

Conley's Ch. 3

Teachers who focus on textbooks gamble with their students' performance in ways that matter for state funding for schools, students' academic progress, and even graduation. (p. 63-64)

Students learn more effectively if the content they are learning is connected in specific ways. (p. 67)

If a teacher cannot get all of the "Big Ideas" taught before state tests, how does he/she decide which topics are more valuable?

Does NCLB means that all students in a class should be held to the same expectations, or that students with special educational needs in that class be held to high expectations for the level at which they are performing?