Many people are looking for alternatives to the industrial-style learning so ingrained in American education, with desks in neat rows facing the board and rote memorization of multiplication tables. Richard Newman is one of those people, and his approach incorporates individual, self-driven learning through gamification.
Richard is a veteran of the tech industry currently serving as CEO of Rezzly Education Technologies, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. The premise behind the Rezzly way of learning is quest-based learning. While you hear a lot of talk in the gamification world about badges and points, Rezzly takes a much deeper and more holistic approach. They want students to choose how they learn tasks, and for them to gain a much deeper knowledge of subjects by immersion, which includes failing and trying again.
The Rezzly way also encourages discarding traditional grade books. As Richard puts it in this interview, “When you talk about grading students, you talk about what would be a perfect score, and then you subtract from it for the things they get wrong. When you’re walking through mastery learning, it’s just the opposite. You’re really adding as you build up your capabilities to get to the point where you’ve demonstrated what it was that you set out to learn.”
Rezzly is catching on, online communities are forming, and students and teachers alike are posting videos online of their experiences. Maybe gamification really is the future of education.
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A description of a strong teacher evaluation system is never complete without discussion on inter-rater reliability. Inter-rater reliability remains essential to the employee evaluation process to eliminate biases and sustain transparency, consistency, and impartiality (Tillema, as cited in 
It is within all of us to want to do well. While this statement is subjective, we must remember that the desire to improve, especially among those in-service professions such as teaching, is fundamental.
At the core of the success of the district is a professional development and coaching culture that the district promotes and fosters, a culture that has been embraced by educators and administrators alike. I recently sat down with Charlotte Plouse, Caitlin Bank and Ashley Boughton, to discuss this district-wide coaching initiative that has transformed the workplace over the last four years. 
Lake Washington School District
According to a report from the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS), the average student completes 112 mandatory standardized assessments between grades Pre-K to 12. This averages out to 20 to 25 hours of standardized testing each year, which is 
When educators are adding new tests to support new practices, they are hesitant to “prune” the current assessments they are using. The addition of something new without the removal of something that exists and educators’ willingness to constantly try something different without giving existing programs time to show results contributes to the problem. Inertia and familiarity also promotes over-testing. Many assessments are administered annually simply due to the fact that it is something that’s always been done. What may have been mandatory a couple of years ago due to a grant requirement, for instance, may now be optional. 
Assessment audits help districts rationalize the assessments administered to students. By doing so, they also help to establish consistent testing across schools and reduce duplicative assessments so that educators gain back valuable instructional time. 
Taking these steps provides districts with a streamlined assessment strategy that allows them to actually do 
Series Synopsis: Due to continuous digital bombardment and the emergence of the new digital landscape, today’s youth process information, interact, and communicate in fundamentally different ways than any previous generation before them. Meanwhile, many of us, having grown up in a relatively low-tech, stable, and predictable world, are constantly struggling with the speed of change, technological innovation, and the freedom to access the overwhelming sea of information online – all defining characteristics of the digital world of both today and the swiftly-approaching future. 
Many educators express great concern about their students’ lack of ability to learn the way students did in the past. I especially hear this from teachers who have been in the classroom for a long period of time. Many complain their traditional teaching methods are just not as effective with students in classrooms today as they once were. All of this is creating a groundswell of controversy about current teaching methods and the ability of the digital generations to learn. 
Two books make a case for just how different today’s always-on generations really are. There is 
And what type of digital world is it? Every minute of the day, YouTube users watch 4.1 million videos, email users send 156 million messages, Google receives over 3.5 million search queries, 900,00 Facebook users log in, Tinder users swipe almost 1 million times, Twitter users tweet 452,000 times, Instagram users post over 46,000 new photos, Spotify users listen to 40,000 hours of music, Apple and Google users download 342,000 apps, and Pinterest users pin 3,472 images. 
Digital culture is the new normal – not just locally, regionally or nationally, but worldwide. And this new world of digital immersion has affected virtually every aspect of our lives, from our thought processes and work habits to our capacity for linear thinking, to how we feel about ourselves, our friends and even distant strangers.
It has been this way throughout the history of grading. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s (mostly), grading changed from mostly norm-referenced (“grading on the curve,” or comparing students with each other) to mostly criterion-referenced (grading based on achievement of learning goals). At the time, the term “absolute standards” was used, the term “criterion-referenced” didn’t become common until the 1960s. The point to be made here is that this change happened because of a change in how educators thought, not because someone popularized some new methods.
Why, over two decades hence, is standards-based grading still struggling and, to be frank, done so poorly in some places? The problem is that standards-based grading proponents have been busy trying to reform grading rather than trying to change the way graders think. Grading reform that comes as strategies to implement—for example, decide on standards, revise report cards, revamp the gradebook, and so on—doesn’t deal with the fact that in grading, as in many other areas, what educators do reflects what they think. 
The change in thinking that needs to occur to make grading more standards-based is this. Educators must believe that grades should be based on the quality of a student’s work in relation to the intended learning goal, 
Or for another example—one I just saw in a class again this week—some teachers give points on tests or reports for things they often call “required elements,” things like putting one’s name, date, period number, and so on, on the paper, or having a title page, or using 12-point font, or whatever. Think about that. If a report is worth 50 points, and a third of those points are about name and date and font and such, what does the resulting score mean for any given student?
Susan M. Brookhart