Taking a Creative Approach to Test Prep

Deirdra Grode, the 2008 ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award winner, shares insight, tips, and classroom strategies in the new, monthly "In the Classroom" column in Education Update. Over the course of the year, Grode, a 7th and 8th grade social studies and language arts teacher, will address a wide range of topics including teacher leadership, formative assessment, and classroom management. This month, Grode looks at ways to take a creative approach to test prep.

"Test prep can provide an opening for teaching a wide range of topics and integrating new activities into classroom lessons," says Grode. "The possibilities for merging test preparation with the current curriculum are endless when you start thinking creatively." Bored with traditional prep methods, Grode began embedding test preparation into the curriculum by modeling questions from state tests using chapters from the textbook, novels, song lyrics, Nobel laureate bios, and other texts.

What type of creative test-prep activities do you do with your classes?

Deirdra Grode is a 7th and 8th grade social studies and language arts teacher at Hoboken Charter School in Hoboken, N.J. She is also the 2008 ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award winner. Her monthly column appears in Education Update newsletter.

Comments

[William Spaulding]

Connecticut 10th grade students take a Reading for Information test. I have successfully used the format of the test for a variety of subject material topics and current events issues. I use this format on a regular basis facilitating student-student sharing of model responses and by explicitly "unpacking" the question format. By spring time students are very comfortable with the format that is used on this "high stakes" test and realize that they experienced "stealth learning" -- learning about the test that occurred without their being aware of it!

Bill Spaulding
Connecticut
mr.wspaulding@gmail.com

[Jannine Perkins]

I am a retired school principal, and I have been working with schools, mainly in CA, for the past 5 years doing just what Deirdra was talking about. I have developed several standards' tools/maps that allow teachers to easily modify the way that they use textbooks so that they insure that they are focussing on the state's standards. This is much better than just relying on end-of-year test preparation because teachers spend the year teaching the standards - as they state specifies them.