Jay McTighe

Jay McTighe has a wealth of experience developed during a rich and varied career in education. He served as director of the Maryland Assessment Consortium, a state collaboration of school districts working together to develop and share formative performance assessments. Prior to this position, McTighe was involved with school improvement projects at Maryland State Department of Education. He is well known for work with “thinking skills,” having coordinated state wide efforts to develop instructional strategies, curriculum models, and assessment procedures for improving the quality of student thinking. McTighe also directed the development of the Instructional Framework, a multimedia database on teaching. In addition to his work at the state level, McTighe has experience at the district level in Prince George's County, Maryland, as a classroom teacher, resource specialist, and program coordinator. He also served as director of the Maryland Summer Centre for Gifted and Talented Students, a state wide residential enrichment program held at St. Mary's College.

McTighe has published articles in a number of leading journals and books, including Educational Leadership, Developing Minds, Thinking Skills: Concepts and Techniques, and The Developer. He has co-authored three books on assessment: Assessing Learning in the Classroom, Assessing Outcomes: Performance Assessment Using the Dimensions of Learning Model, and Evaluation Tools to Improve as Well as Evaluate Student Performance. He is co-author, with Grant Wiggins, of the best-selling Understanding by Design series and the newly released Connecting Content and Kids: Integrating Differentiation and Understanding by Design, co-authored with Carol Ann Tomlinson.

McTighe has an extensive background in staff development and is a regular speaker at national, state, and district conferences and workshops. He is also a featured presenter in four videotape programs, Performance Assessment in the Classroom, Developing Performance Assessments, Understanding, and Using Backward Design.

McTighe earned an undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary and a master's degree from the University of Maryland, and has completed post-graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University. He was selected to participate in the Educational Policy Fellowship Program through the Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington, D.C. McTighe served as a member of the National Assessment Forum, a coalition of education and civil rights organisations advocating reforms in national, state, and local assessment policies and practices. He served a three-year term on the ASCD Publications Committee, serving as committee chair from 1994 to 1995.