I heart assessments

I.

♥.

Assessment.

Creation.

Somehow I got onto the Literacy committee this year. Who knows how it happened. But it did.

So guess what we got to do today? Write the benchmark for our third instructional period.

My inital thought: Wait, why are we doing this? The standards didn't change. I'm pretty sure that my kids TOOK a benchmark last year.

Lo and behold, we realigned our pacing guides and standards moved. Now, with math, this was easy. We moved standards, we moved questions.

THAT SHIT DOES NOT SO MUCH WORK FOR READING. We cannot move questions without moving passages. We cannot repeat passages. We must use the passages and eeeek in the questions somehow.

Needless to say, writing questions for the reading benchmark is MUCH more difficult.

But, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it is also MUCH more rewarding. My brain was in overdrive all day and I actually feel accomplished.

Breaking apart those reading standards is so much more challenging. And increasing rigor across grade levels? Holy. Crap.

I feel great about the assessments, though. (We added/changed about 26 questions to ours today.) Writing questions that assess how author's choice of setting influences the mood of a piece of literature made me SO happy today.

This situation just confirms that I need to work with this stuff daily.