In Learning Targets, Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart contend that improving student learning and achievement happens in the immediacy of an individual lesson--what they call ""today's lesson""-or it doesn't happen at all. The key to making today's lesson meaningful? Learning targets. Written from students' point of view, a learning target describes a lesson-sized chunk of information and skills that students will come to know deeply. Each lesson's learning target connects to the next lesson's target, enabling students to master a coherent series of challenges that ultimately lead to important curricular standards. Drawing from the authors' extensive research and professional learning partnerships with classrooms, schools, and school districts, this practical book: Situates learning targets in a theory of action that students, teachers, principals, and central-office administrators can use to unify their efforts to raise student achievement and create a culture of evidence-based, results-oriented practice. Provides strategies for designing learning targets that promote higher-order thinking and foster student goal setting, self-assessment, and self-regulation. Explains how to design a strong performance of understanding, an activity that produces evidence of students' progress toward the learning target. Shows how to use learning targets to guide summative assessment and grading. Learning Targets also includes reproducible planning forms, a classroom walk-through guide, a lesson-planning process guide, and guides to teacher and student self-assessment.What students are actually doing during today's lesson is both the source of and the yardstick for school improvement efforts. By applying the insights in this book to your own work, you can improve your teaching expertise and dramatically empower all students as stakeholders in their own learning.

Formative assessment is one of the best ways to increase student learning and enhance teacher quality. But effective formative assessment is not part of most classrooms, largely because teachers misunderstand what it is and don't have the necessary skills to implement it.In the updated 2nd edition of this practical guide for school leaders, authors Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart define formative assessment as an active, continual process in which teachers and students work together-every day, every minute-to gather evidence of learning, always keeping in mind three guiding questions: Where am I going? Where am I now? What strategy or strategies can help me get to where I need to go? Chapters focus on the six interrelated elements of formative assessment: (1) shared learning targets and criteria for success, (2) feedback that feeds learning forward, (3) student self-assessment and peer assessment, (4) student goal setting, (5) strategic teacher questioning, and (6) student engagement in asking effective questions. Using specific examples based on their extensive work with teachers, the authors provide: Strategic talking points and conversation starters to address common misconceptions about formative assessment. Practical classroom strategies to share with teachers that cultivate students as self-regulated, assessment-capable learners. Ways to model the elements of formative assessment in conversations with teachers about their professional learning. ""What if"" scenarios and advice for how to deal with them. Questions for reflection to gauge understanding and progress. As Moss and Brookhart emphasize, the goal is not to ""do"" formative assessment, but to embrace a major cultural change that moves away from teacher-led instruction to a partnership of intentional inquiry between student and teacher, with better teaching and learning as the outcome.