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We want our students to participate in authentic learning activities that contribute to their future choices and their potential to participate in the world. To create authentic and coherent learning opportunities for diverse classrooms, teachers benefit from working together to plan lessons and units of study. In using their combined knowledge and expertise, they can better engage and support diverse learners to simultaneously learn key concepts and develop learning strategies. Teachers focus on aligning formative assessment (assessment for learning), instruction, learning sequences, and summative assessment (assessment of learning).

Extended time for developing students’ capacities as scientists and mathematicians requires teachers to build purposeful and authentic activities into their units of study. Cross-curricular teams are needed in order to make thinking skills a priority across classrooms. Targeting a few thinking skills based on formative assessment information allows students and teachers to focus on developing and integrating them into content learning. Deep content learning is possible when these strategies are used.

They do not give marks when assessing for learning; they give descriptive feedback. The more immediate and appropriate the feedback, the more likely the student will use it. Michael Smith and Jeff Wilhelm (2002, 2006) suggest that we think of the feedback students receive when they play a video game. The players receive exactly what they need to know in order to progress. Teachers want to give their students feedback that is immediate (while students are still engaged in the work of learning), timely (when they need it and can use it), and personal (what they need, not what someone else might need).