IMPACT PL Toolkit

The IMPACT PL model is structured around three instructionally-embedded performance assessments (IEAs) that are spread across the academic year.

Through planning meetings before teachers’ implementation of each assessment and reflection meetings after, the PL provides opportunities for teachers to recognize students’ assets and use Ambitious Science Teaching (AST; Windschitl et al., 2018) principles to work on – and with – students’ thinking.

This model is composed of the following components which can be flexibly adapted to fit varied contexts and priorities:

Instructionally-Embedded Performance Assessments

IMPACT Assessment tasks foreground student choice, agency, and multimodal evidence of learning while seamlessly blending instruction and assessment. Teachers use observational rubrics to watch and listen for how students are using the ideas being elicited, and they orchestrate opportunities for students to work on their ideas to advance their thinking throughout the task. See several 8th-grade tasks, with implementation guides and rubrics, below:

Educative Implementation Guides

The implementation guides support teachers with using the assessment tasks and provide suggestions for using AST principles to engage students in examining and working on their ideas. The guides also include rubrics to help teachers interpret students’ ideas along a progression of sophistication and offer ideas for next steps to work with students’ ideas to advance their thinking.

Use the links above to see the guide for each 8th grade task.

Artifacts of teacher practice

Participants use video clips from other teachers’ implementation of the task to develop their practice around eliciting and working with students’ assets. After they implement each task, participants also bring video clips from their own classrooms to analyze and reflect on together.

Prompts to focus collaborative analyses

Cognitive science and learning science principles underpin prompts and structures used to engage teams of teachers in analyzing and making sense of artifacts and video clips.

Sample IMPACT Analytic Structures

Repurposed AST Principles for Working with Students’ Assets

Adapted Ambitious Science Teaching (AST; Windschitl et al., 2018) principles can support teachers’ implementation and work with student thinking during assessments. Check out three principles that can serve as an assessment for learning toolbox here:

AST Toolbox