How to Use the Toolkit-Some Suggestions

Again, we want to emphasize that this Assessment Education Toolkit is designed to be flexible, allowing you to use any combination of what we provide along with other resources-depending on audience, purpose, time available, and other factors. While we give suggestions for possible ways to combine tools, there are many other ways they can be used together or with other presentations you've developed.

Consider Your Audience (s)
If you have a consistent group of parents who attend school events and/or parent meetings, you may want to poll them about what would be the topics of most interest to them. You could also consult with them about convenient times and places to hold educational sessions on these topics. Or, as we did in developing the Toolkit, you could send home a brief survey to help gauge their interest. In general, audience considerations are crucial for you in determining the focus, depth, length, and format of your presentations. A powerpoint outline with your own concise comments interspersed is likely to be more suitable for a brief presentation to a school board concerning assessment issues; one or more of the two-hour sessions would make sense for more in-depth parent education. Because testing and assessment are "hot button" issues, there is a range of audiences and venues; your local conditions and contacts with schools and communities need to inform all your educational efforts. For more on recruitment, please see Reaching All Parents.

Coordinate with School Staff
Consultation with and providing information to school staff-teachers, administrators, aides, custodians-is another element of success. A good way to ensure that your presentation of these materials at a school fits in with and/or stimulates larger initiatives involving parent involvement is to schedule a time at a faculty meeting to solicit their input and to share some of the details of what you will be presenting with the principal and teachers at your school. The principal and the teachers can better support what you are doing when they know more about it.

Select the Tools
Read over our main messages about assessment and/or scan through the Overview of Tools chart and decide which selection of assessment topics you might like to address with your group. Then follow the links to the specific presentations and the resources related to that topic. You'll find a variety of interactive sessions of various lengths, as well as handouts that help to give more detailed information about assessment and ways parents and caregivers can help support their child's learning.

If you are planning to present a series of workshops for parents, please see the Sample Sessions page to view three pre-designed two-hour sessions for parents. This series begins with information about classroom assessment, moves on to understanding standards and alignment, and then focuses on issues related to standardized testing.

Session Timing
Each of the three sessions is designed to be about two hours long. Since an important part of each session involves discussion, it's difficult to determine an ideal time frame. While a session could easily be extended, it is our hope that a well-managed two hours will be adequate to meet the goals of each session. At the same time, the participatory nature of some of the session components will mean that you will need to strike a balance between keeping things on track and encouraging participation and free discussion. Parents will appreciate when their time is used well.

Adapt the tools
Adapt the tools for your context. We expect that most users of these materials would want to customize their presentations to make connections to the specific assessment issues in their schools. Many presenters have had selected handouts translated for non-English speakers or have put together detailed information about the specific assessments/tests that are used at their sites.