Authentic Assessment: What You Can Do in 5 minutes, 5 days, 5 months, 5 years . . .

The School of the Future (SOF) is a unique place. Its dedication to teaching through real-world tasks, checking on student progress often, and adjusting lessons based on a wide variety of assessments is delivering big dividends with increased student engagement and performance. And although these accomplishments did not occur overnight, we believe that other schools can see similar progress, even if they start small and build slowly.

Below are some creative tips for teachers, administrators, and other educators to help your school begin this journey. After you read the tips, we encourage you to use the comment field below to offer suggestions and to start a dialogue with educators from SOF about this topic and their work.

In 5 minutes, you can determine what students are thinking and achieve any one, perhaps two, of the following:

In 5 days, you can determine what students know and prove it:

In 5 weeks, you can assess if students are making progress toward mastery of the subject matter.

In 5 months, you can reflect and refine your curriculum with guidance from an administrator or curriculum coach.

In 5 years, you can complete the realignment of your vertical curricula.

Editor's note: Special thanks to School of the Future teachers Whitney Lukens, Michael Zitolo, and Adam Kinory and directors Stacy Goldstein (middle school) and John Fanning (high school) for their input in developing this list.

What do you think of Schools that Work?
Tweet your answer to @edutopia or post your comment below.