Ron Berger Quotes

If you’re going to do something, I believe, you should do it well. You should sweat over it and make sure it’s strong and accurate and beautiful and you should be proud of it

Anytime you make the work public, set the bar high, and are transparent about the steps to make a high-quality product, kids will deliver.

Student-engaged assessment involves students in underst anding and in vesting in their own growth. It changes the primary role of assessment from evaluating and ranking students to motivating them to learn. It empowers students with the understanding of where they need to go as learners and how to get there. It builds the independence, critical thinking skills, perseverance, and self-reflective understanding students need for college and careers and that is required by the Common Core State Standards. And, because student-engaged assess ment practices demand reflection, collaboration, and responsibility, they shepherd students toward becoming positive citizens and human beings.

Standards-based grading is grounded in several key principles: grades must accurately describe a student’s progress and current level of achievement; habits of scholarship should be assessed and reported separately; grades are for communication, not motivation or punishment; grades must be specific enough in what they measure that it is clear what students need to work on to improve; and student engagement is key to the grading process.

The apathy, disconnection, or lack of self-esteem that causes students to disengage in school—to stop caring—is not inherent. It is learned behavior.

Motivation is in fact the most important result of student-engaged assessment—unless students find reason and inspiration to care about learning and have hope that they can improve, excellence and high achievement will remain the domain of a select group.

It is more than a framework for evaluation. It is a framework for motivation and a framework for achievement.

What sort of things might constitute an agenda for further professional improvement? Beyond the sharing of the good, bad and the ugly in conversations in staff meetings and at professional development sessions, new vistas are opened up when we read about considered practice. Books such as Ron Berger’s Ethic of Excellence, Graham Nuthall’s The Hidden Lives of Learners, Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby’s Making Every Lesson Count, David Didau’s The Secret of Literacy, Gordon Stobart’s The Expert Learner, Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School, Shirley Clarke’s Outstanding Formative Assessment and Dylan Wiliam’s Embedded Formative Assessment. For starters. Then there are the educational blogs which provide quick insights into new thinking.

When a student completes her schooling and enters adult life, for the rest of her life she will be judged not by test scores, but rather two things: The quality of her work and the quality of her character.