Shifting toward an essential skills framework for assessment

Increasingly, states, districts, and schools are looking toward adopting alternative forms of assessments to measure what students know and what they can do. Making systemwide changes in education regarding what skills to assess and how to assess them is a big change and takes planning, strategy, and the time and space to be able to fail and start again. The Thomas A. Edison Career & Technical Education High School in Queens, New York, has been experimenting with alternative forms of assessments for several years. Their journey toward implementing a new model for teaching skills and assessing student learning shows how schools can begin with a small team of change-minded teachers before attempting to scale new models schoolwide.