Mid-coast Regional Assessment Workshop

Jefferson, Friday, October 29th

This past Friday in Jefferson another regional assessment workshop was held, this time for the mid-coast arts teachers. It proved to be a wonderful opportunity for 22 arts educators to re-connect and for many it was the first time meeting. The all-day event was arranged by the Director of the Midcoast Regional Professional Development Center Christine Anderson-Morehouse, in the beautiful new Jefferson, K-8 school. A HUGE thank you to Christine for making the arrangements! 

I was glad to have the chance to be with arts educators engaged in learning more about arts education assessment plus I saw two of my previous students. One is the principal at Jefferson School, the other principal at the South Bristol School.

The all-day workshop started with the history and an overview on Maine’s assessment initiative.  Teacher leaders Shannon Campbell, art teacher from Stonington-Deer Isle Elementary School and Allysa Andersen, music teacher from Camden-Rockport Middle School facilitated assessment sessions in their disciplines. Open Educational Resource (OER) and art teacher from Camden-Rockport Middle School shared the many resources identified by the OER arts team last year.

Some comments from participants included what they learned:

• Assessment Strategies
• All the technology info thats helpful in quick bursts to assist what we already are teaching
• I learned about many resources. I’m excited to look into them more.
• I learned how other teachers are approaching assessment
• Varied assessment forms and formats
• I learned that much of what we do as music teachers IS assessment
• Good ideas that work well!
• Online free resources

We know that one day is valuable but that it will take many more to make changes that will impact student learning positively. Participants left with many questions and some are included below.

• How do I streamline figure out what the priorities are?
• Should there be a statewide standard rubric form?
• Will this type of workshop be repeated at a higher level with the opportunity for us to bring rubrics to critique them and make them better?
• Could we have more discussions on standards based assessments?
• How to implement comprehensive assessment on a schedule where I meet over 300 students once a week for 40 minutes with only 5 minutes between classes, and 2 prep periods a week.

Participants left asking to meet another time during the school year to further develop ideas and to learn more!

Some of the work created in Shannon's session

Allysa's session