Lesson Plans

Literacy

Enhance Literacy, Comprehension & Civic Action

Literacy for Democracy

Build Inquiry, Critical Research and Analysis

Asking Research Questions

Standards-Based Testing

Connect with Local Offices and the Internet

Community Health and Content Standards

Explore Your Community

Social Capital

Service Learning and Civics

Assessing for Learning

Community Health and Content Standards

School Violence and Local Government

Critical Social and Civic Capital

Social Capital

Assessing for Learning

Practice Thinking and Writing Skills

Improving Student Work

KAT Talk, Spring 1999

Note About the Centerfold Lesson: KAT Log

KAT encourages a variety of authentic assessments that serve learning. Chapter VIII of the KAT Manual offers a number of potential human and rubrics relevant to KAT's projects.

Educators who have attended KAT workshops know how our public policy scenarios can be used as both pre-tests and post-tests, or as introductory springboards and then again as project wrap-ups. Part of the idea here is to determine up front, using a consistent gauge, what skills need to be emphasized, and then to return at the end of the project to assess how well we've accomplished that mission.

In this issue KAT Talk, we present on reproducible lesson pages, additional assessment tools to help guide learning in KAT classrooms and to help determine, at the end of a project, how well we have succeeded.

The first lesson can be seen as a framework around which students can organize their log books. These questions are suggestions to help guide KAT research, and suggest to students some important steps in the process. Some questions encourage student participation in formulating their research, yet still clearly lead them to find out some specific things.

The criteria are thus clear at the outset, about what students need to find out. The log serves as a study guide to help them understand what they need to do and for what information they will need to be accountable. The log is a work in progress, and then can serve as the basis for a final assessment tool.

Similarly, the second lesson serves as both a study guide to propel the KAT project and as an assessment tool. It leads the class to use multiple disciplines in the KAT research. It arouses consciousness among students about the skills they're applying, and how academic standards are useful in authentic community work. It is also a format by which teachers can organize and assess student acconplshments in each relevant subject area.

KAT encourages teachers to partner with students in learning, and to use thoughtful assessments as tools to foward this collaboration.

Centerfold Lesson 1

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