Leading engaging workshops for educators to implement Smarter-Balanced performance tasks as part of high-quality classroom instruction, WestEd workshops provide opportunities for participants to learn about Smarter-Balanced assessments and how they align with the college- and career-ready standards.
How We Help
Our BEAL workshops give you the opportunity to work directly with performance tasks and rubrics from Smarter-Balanced assessments that include authentic student responses for scoring and discussion. Facilitated small-group learning formats offer tailored opportunities to explore performance tasks in English language arts/literacy and mathematics for elementary and secondary grades.
We offer BEAL professional learning in three workshop formats to suit your needs including in-person, virtual, and hybrid workshops as well as an asynchronous online course. WestEd can also offer customized workshops to address the standards and assessments in states that use other state summative assessments.
Workshop participants who will be training others will receive full presenter materials including PowerPoint slides, handout books, and detailed facilitators’ guides.
Service Delivery
- Online and onsite
Who Will Benefit
- Teachers
- School and district administrators
[BEAL] has made me a stronger, more effective teacher. [Because of BEAL], I understand the importance of performance assessment tasks in measuring student strengths and weaknesses [and how they can] … help drive instruction toward students’ needs.
— Virginia Day,
Reading Specialist, Amherst Middle School, New Hampshire
Featured Experts
Jessica Arnold
Connecting Research With Practice
The BEAL project supports educators in developing a deeper understanding of the role of performance assessment in ensuring students’ college- and career-readiness.
Results from educators who were surveyed before and after they participated in BEAL’s professional learning opportunity show increases in how well the educators felt they understood the Smarter-Balanced assessment and how well equipped they felt to prepare their students to meet the demands of the Common Core standards.
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