Chapters International

Overview:

How well are you communicating about your students as learners? When did you last review and revise your policies and practices?

This institute will provide the opportunity for school teams to review how and why they communicate student learning to parents, students, teachers, and external individuals and institutions. Participants will consider whether what they believe aligns with what they do in grading and reporting and determine whether revisions are needed in their practices and procedures. For some the institute will affirm their current approaches, for some it may suggest the need for fine-tuning, and for some it may challenge their current methods and suggest the need for significant revisions.

THIS SESSION WILL PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES TO REVIEW THE FOLLOWING AND MORE:

The purpose(s) of grading and reporting;
The base for grading and reporting (subjects and / or learning goals);
Performance standards (points / % / levels);
Honoring the learning process (formative / summative and more recent);
Ingredients in grades and how you report behaviors;
The determination of grades (calculation or professional judgment);
How you handle hot button issues (late and missing work, academic dishonesty).

KEN O’CONNOR

Ken O’Connor is an independent consultant who specializes in issues relating to communicating student achievement, specifically grading and reporting. He is a strong advocate for standards-based teaching, grading and reporting.

A graduate of the University of Melbourne (B.A. Hon) and the University of Toronto (M. Ed), he has been a staff development presenter and facilitator in 47 states in the USA, 10 provinces and two territories in Canada, and in 34 countries outside North America. He also serves on the Academic Advisory Board for Power School and consults with Power School on aligning the relevant parts of their product with best practices in assessment, grading and reporting.

His twenty-three year teaching career included experience as a geography teacher and department head at 6 schools in Toronto and Melbourne (Grades 7-12) starting in 1967.

Ken was a Curriculum Coordinator responsible for Student Assessment and Evaluation and Geography for the Scarborough Board of Education (and then the Toronto District School Board) from March 1990 to June 1999. He also worked (half time) as a consultant on Secondary Assessment at the Ontario Ministry of Education from November 1998 to December 1999.

He is the author of How to Grade for Learning: Linking Grades to Standards, Fourth Edition. Corwin, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2018, The School Leaders Guide to Grading, Solution Tree, Bloomington, IN, 2013, A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades. Second Edition, Pearson, Boston, MA, 2011, and Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades: A Repair Kit, Pearson, Toronto, 2012. Articles written by Ken have appeared in the NASSP Bulletin, Educational Leadership and School Administrator.

Venue:
American School of the Hague

9:00 am to 4:00 pm
Registration at 8:30 am
on the 14th September 2019