Teaching Today publishes innovative teaching tips on a weekly basis. Written with the busy teacher in mind, each tip is concise, practical and easy to implement in the classroom right away. Topics covered in Teaching Today are classroom management, career development, high stakes testing, instruction and planning, parental involvement, reading in the content areas, using technology in the classroom, and portfolio development. Teaching Today also offers free weekly downloads that correspond to the tips. Our free downloads make implementing the teaching tips even easier. Teaching Today provides educational resources for teachers looking for everyday solutions to the challenges of the classroom.
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Teaching Today - This Week's Tips Teaching Today - This Week's Tips

This Week's Topic

Assessment—Part 1
Evaluating student learning is somehting that all instructors do. At one time, evaluation meant a written test of students’ recall of the course material. Today, more than written tests are required to evaluate student performance. This week’s Teaching Tips focus on different methods of assessment.

This Week's Tips

Using Rubrics to Assess Student Work (Monday)
Rubrics are an assessment tool with a set of qualifications for the quality of a student’s learning process or end result of a task. The four or five qualifications include a continuum from excellent to poor or not acceptable. Rubrics can be used for individual evaluation within groups, group assessment, or as a self-assessment tool. See this week’s Download Depot for an example and remember this tip: If a rubric is used as a self-assessment tool, provide a performance task assessment list in the rubric.

Download your free Sample Assessment Rubric today!

Journaling as an Assessment Tool (Tuesday)
Journaling is an effective assessment tool for a variety of different subjects. Students keep an ongoing journal of thoughts, ideas, descriptions, lists, goals, progress, and impressions about lessons and the course material. When using journaling as an assessment tool, remember these tips: Periodically have students turn in their journals for your evaluation. Be more concerned with content than structure. Finally, note that journaling is a good tool for self-evaluation.

Assessing Student Work with Role Playing (Wednesday)
Role playing is an effective assessment tool for courses ranging from business and law, to humanities and history, to physical science and computer science. Students act out different roles in history, case studies in law, or different functions of a computer. Use the following guidelines to set up role-playing activities: Assign each student a different character. Students are to stay in character and to act and speak as their characters would.

More Role-playing Tips for Instructors (Thursday)
Here are more tips for using role playing as an assessment tool: Have students respond to each other as their characters would. Have students not actively involved in the role-playing activity take notes for a class discussion held after the completion of the activity. Follow the role-playing activity with a whole-class discussion on the issues raised during the activity.

Using Performance Assessments (Friday)
Performance assessments require students to perform. Similar to role-playing activities, performance is scenario based. Students must write or demonstrate responses to real-life situations. Students might write a scenario about a current work situation, and then work with a team to act out and find a solution to the situation. Students must demonstrate learned skills and apply ideas from the course material. Note: An assessment rubric is an excellent way to evaluate these types of activities.



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