thoughts about Nick's post on evaluation

The danger of evaluation of curriculum is that the evaluators become further and further removed from the actual classroom climate and the students who are impacted by the curriculum. They need to be constantly in touch with real teachers and real classroom situations in order to design practical, useful assessment tools. I believe there is a place for both formal and informal, formative and summative evaluation. As educators, we must weigh our assessment tools carefully to ensure that we are testing for all of the right reasons. We must begin with the end in mind to decide where we want our students to go, how to get there, and then, how did far did they get towards achieving those goals. While we are doing this, we have to constantly evaluate (formatively assess) our curriculum materials and teaching strategies to ensure that we are delivering the best program we can.