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 best sellers. Damian and his colleagues launched an online professional learning course for educators in 2017 called VOCAL: Validating Observation and Conversation when Assessing Learning. In November 2021, Solution Tree will publish Rebooting Assessment: A Practical Guide for Balancing Conversations, Performances, and Products which is based on the VOCAL material.
