Learning Opportunities

Katie White is an author, coach and consultant who spends her days working to transform the educational experience for teacher and students. She has a passion for helping others develop a personalized understanding of the connections between curriculum, assessment, and instruction and creative approaches for reaching and teaching every single learner in every single classroom. 

Katie has served the role of classroom teacher (K-12), online high school teacher, instructional coach, vice principal, principal, and central office leader. She facilitates adult learning worldwide and feels priveleged to grow through her interactions with so many gifted educators and leaders. 

Katie has worked as a contracted writer and assessment, instruction, creativity, leadership, and intervention expert for various groups, including the Saskatchewan Professional Deveopment Unit (authoring their provincial assessment accreditation training) as well as the LEOG Company (as a creativity and assessment specialist). 

Katie has authored or co-authored five books (including the well-known Softening the Edges) and is currently working on her sixth. She has also contributed to several books published by other authors, has blogged several sites, including All Things Assessment, and her voice can be heard on many podcasts. 

Damian Cooper is an independent education consultant who specializes in helping schools and school districts across Canada, the United States, and internationally, to improve their instructional and assessment skills. In his varied career, Damian has been a secondary English, Special Education, and Drama teacher, a department head, a librarian, and a school consultant. He has specialized in student assessment for more than thirty years. Damian served as assessment consultant to the School Division of Nelson Education. Prior to that, he was Co-ordinator of Assessment and Evaluation for the Halton District School Board in Burlington, Ontario.

Damian is a co-founder and Past President of The Canadian Assessment for Learning Network (CAfLN). Damian’s international reputation rests on his wide-ranging experience as an educator, his deep understanding of assessment, and his no-nonsense, common sense approach to what works in schools.

Damian’s publications Talk About Assessment: Strategies and Tools to Improve Learning (2007), Talk About Assessment: High School Strategies and Tools (2010), and Redefining Fair: How to Plan, Assess, and Grade for Excellence in Mixed-Ability Classrooms (2011), are all bestsellers. Damian’s latest book, Rebooting Assessment: A Practical Guide for Balancing Conversations, Performances, and Products (2022), published by Solution Tree, won the Gold Medal from the Independent Book Publishers of America as the best education publication of 2022.

Justin’s career in education has spanned almost 3 decades. He has been an elementary classroom teacher, teacher learning coordinator, president of a local teacher’s union, and president of CAfLN. Currently, he is the Past-President and Treasurer for CAfLN and a District Vice-Principal (Teaching and Learning -Elementary) in his home school district in B.C.

Ken O’Connor is an independent consultant who specializes in issues relating to communicating student learning, specifically grading and reporting. He is a strong advocate for standards-based curriculum, teaching, assessment, grading and reporting.

A graduate of the University of Melbourne (B.A. Hon) and the University of Toronto (M. Ed), he has been a staff development presenter and facilitator in 37 countries outside North America, 47 states in the USA, and 10 provinces and two territories in Canada.

His thirty-three year educator career included experience as a geography teacher and department head at 6 schools in Toronto and Melbourne (Grades 7-12), and as a Curriculum Coordinator for the Scarborough Board of Education and the Toronto District School Board.

He is the author of A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades. Third Edition, First Educational Resources, Oshkosh, WI, 2022, and How to Grade for Learning: Linking Grades to Standards, Fourth Edition. Corwin, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2018.

Website: oconnorgrading.com

Lorna M. Earl, PhD. is a retired researcher, academic, consultant and educator and a co-founder of CAfLN.

Saad Chahine, PhD. is an Associate Professor of Measurement and Assessment, Queen’s University