Services

Services

The mission of Envision Learning Partners is to help schools and districts engage every student in America in a high-quality system of performance assessment. When challenged with work that is rigorous and real-world, and given opportunities to revise and reflect along the way, students are liberated to realize their potential.

Portfolio-Defense

“Portfolio-defense” is a concept that combines two powerful practices: portfolio assessment and defense of learning. It’s a performance assessment that challenges learners to make and support claims about targeted skills by 1) curating samples of their work into a portfolio and 2) defending their claims in an evaluated presentation.

Portfolios are an effective and flexible form of assessment because they can wrap themselves around any kind of evidence, and they enroll the learner in the curation of that evidence. Defenses of learning naturally function as rites of passage, making them powerfully motivating and intensely meaningful for young people.

ELP helps schools and districts all over the country to design and implement portfolio-defense systems, customized to their context. Within one school year, we facilitate a process that has your students preparing portfolios and defending their learning.

Graduate Profile Design

Learning communities all over the country are moving beyond mission statements and adopting a graduate or learner profile, announcing what all students will know and be able to do when they graduate from the institution.

At its best, a graduate profile fuses high expectations, real-world relevance, and attention to the whole child into a set of learning outcomes that is focused, modern, and measurable. It is an essential element of a performance assessment system.

Whether your learning community is refining an existing profile or starting from scratch, ELP can facilitate a process that ensures that your graduate profile is equitable, actionable, and galvanizing for students, families, and teachers.

Leadership Coaching & Systems Change

Building a performance assessment system is more than a shift in practices; it is a shift in culture and belief. It requires leadership that is inclusive, adaptive, and innovative.

ELP is a team of former school and teacher leaders who have successfully built and sustained performance assessment systems. We know how to coach the leaders of your learning community in both the technical and the adaptive aspects of systems change that leads to more equitable outcomes and processes.

Working both alongside you and behind the scenes, we can help you lead your learning community away from assessment for sorting, and toward assessment for learning. Contact us to learn more.

High Quality Performance Assessment

Envision Learning Partners are field-leading experts in performance assessment—the art and science of evaluating students’ learning through demonstrations of skill—and we partner with schools and districts to help them design and implement high-quality performance assessments for their students.

Our approach is rooted in the principles of High-Quality Performance Assessment (HQPA), the culmination of two decades of research, practice, and partnership between Envision Schools and the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE).

Through ELP coaching and professional development, the teachers in your system can

design and implement curriculum-embedded, high-quality performance tasks
assess student learning on standards that can only be measured through performance
develop effective and equitable assessment tools (such as rubrics)
calibrate with colleagues on the quality of student work
ensure that project-based learning is rigorous and aligned to desired outcomes
make assessment a lever for equity

Massive Open Online Course

Check out our partner, UL-SCALE's wide range of massive online open courses (MOOC) focused on teaching educators how to design performance tasks and better understand language in their classrooms. Please contact us if you are interested in supporting future iterations of these courses.

Get In Touch

For information about any of the services listed above – or other services related to performance assessment – use the form below to contact our team or visit our website www.envisionlearning.org.