Читать книгу Collaborative Common Assessments - Cassandra Erkens - Страница 11

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Doing Extraordinary Things

Collaboration is a social imperative. Without it, people can’t get extraordinary things done in organizations.

—Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner

Many variations of common assessments abound in schools and teams. Sadly, many of those variations are both instructionally deficient and “collaboration lite,” with little hope of ever helping accomplish anything extraordinary. In other words, the assessment and its ensuing results are viewed as an obtrusive event that generates data but no meaningful information and that is often orchestrated—from beginning to end—with little involvement or ownership on behalf of teachers and their learners, the key stakeholders. In addition, the data are sometimes provided with a prepared digital analysis that may come too late in the learning process to alter outcomes in meaningful ways. By contrast, schools where the work of collaborative common assessments makes the greatest difference house conversations that are instructionally enlightening and teams that are collaboratively dependent.

Collaborative common assessments provide a powerful mode of inquiry-based professional development that seeks to improve student achievement and professional practice. For teams to develop the shared knowledge and skills of assessment literacy and instructional agility, they must work together to ask the right questions, explore their own results, and create solutions to complex challenges. If the process is to make a significant difference, teaching teams—and their learners—must remain integral to the design and delivery of the assessment as well as the interpretation of and subsequent responses to the results.

Collaborative Common Assessments Defined

Many experts’ definitions of common assessment address the same basic ideas: they are given in the same time frame by a team of teachers who share the same students or standards and the results of those assessments are used to make instructional decisions; hence, there is general agreement that common formative assessments work best as they allow for making adjustments to support continued learning (Ainsworth & Viegut, 2006; Bailey & Jakicic, 2012; Reeves, 2005, 2006). Much of the writing about common assessments aligns with the work of the Professional Learning Community at Work™ architects Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, and Robert Eaker (2008), who have made it their mission to impact student learning in positive ways, from providing direct instruction for individual learners with specific needs to monitoring for program improvements that must be made at the team and sometimes the school level. Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Thomas Many (2006) define common assessments to be:

an assessment typically created collaboratively by a team of teachers responsible for the same grade level or course. Common formative assessments are frequently administered throughout the year to identify (1) individual students who need additional time and support for learning, (2) the teaching strategies most effective in helping students acquire the intended knowledge and skills, (3) program concerns—areas in which students generally are having difficulty achieving the intended standard, and (4) improvement goals for individual teachers and the team. (p. 214)

While teams frequently employ common formative assessments to recognize both students needing support and effective teaching strategies, program concerns and improvement goals are just as important to address.

Education experts concur on what common assessments are, who is involved, and what must be done with the findings (Ainsworth & Viegut, 2006; Bailey & Jakicic, 2012; DuFour et al., 2008; Reeves, 2005, 2006). Heavy emphasis is placed on formative common assessments. The guiding premise that all learners can learn and will be successful naturally dictates that opportunities to learn are never done. However, there is a point at which common summative assessments are necessary to certify mastery for students, especially when priority standards have been identified for that very purpose: to ensure mastery for all learners in the agreed-upon essential areas. In addition, common assessments must be designed, delivered, and analyzed in the context of a larger, balanced assessment system. They must be truly collaborative in nature—from start to finish, from teachers to learners.

While the premise behind common assessments begs for collaboration, the practice of common assessments in the field has created variations of collaboration. Therefore, it is important to start clarifying the work of common assessments with the addition of collaboration in the title. A collaborative common assessment is any assessment, formative or summative, that is either team created or team endorsed in advance of instruction and then administered in close proximity by all instructors so they can collaboratively examine the results, plan instructionally agile responses, analyze errors, and explore areas for program improvement. Collaborative common assessments require teachers’ involvement in the entire process from accurate design to effective use of classroom assessment information.

Collaborative common assessments entail a process far more committed to teamwork, instruction, and results than the simplistic, popular notion of providing teams with benchmark assessments and then engaging them in looking at the results together. Collaborative common assessments put educators in the driver’s seat and provide teachers with the necessary opportunity to assess according to their learners’ needs. The process needs to remain as close to the classroom reality for teachers and their learners as possible.

The Collaborative Common Assessment Process

Common assessments do not require lockstep teaching. Effective assessment practices should never involve rigid adherence to pacing guides, the unthinking application of predeveloped curriculum and assessments, or a blanket approach to instruction. Rather, the work requires an ongoing commitment by teams to create, plan, monitor, diagnose, and respond appropriately throughout the entire process. Beginning at the star, figure 1.1 (page 8) outlines the process teams use when employing the work of collaborative common assessments. In figure 1.1, circles of arrows are used to show the iterative process, direction, and connections in and among the key components. Any shape with parallel sides (rectangle or diamond) highlights the places where teams must function with the degree of parallelism, making team agreements that they adhere to with fidelity from classroom to classroom. This means there will be meetings throughout the process to create plans, check in on progress, respond to findings, and adjust with new plans as needed. The two triangles illustrate the parts of the process in which teachers are providing instruction in their individual classrooms. The triangle—also recognized as the delta, a universal symbol for dynamic change—is used to acknowledge and emphasize the reality that what happens in individual classrooms is unique and ever-changing.

Figure 1.1: The collaborative common assessment process.

The collaborative common assessment process includes four critical phases: (1) preparation, (2) design, (3) delivery, and (4) data. Teams must engage in collaborative conversations that involve critical thinking, problem solving, and creative design during each phase. No phase is more important than another phase, and the success of the team in each phase will be contingent upon the quality of the work and the team members’ relentless adherence to the commitments they made to abide by that work in each of the previous phases. Ready-made tools or resources can provide launching pads for planning and discussion purposes in each of the phases, but those tools or resources can seldom be used wholesale, unless the team reviews them and verifies in advance that the tools will align with standards and support team decision making throughout the process.

The Preparation Phase

Working together as a team may be the first challenge in creating, reviewing, and adjusting common assessments collaboratively, but a few critical steps in this phase help educators begin the process with a strong foundation of teamwork as shown in figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: The preparation phase for collaborative common assessments.

In the preparation phase, teams will first establish norms. With these protocols in place to guide their work together, teams then begin to chart the course of the assessments they plan to develop. Collaboratively, teams prioritize and unpack standards, explore available data, establish SMART goals, and then create a map of the learning targets and assessments they need to deliver to address the findings and decisions they have made along the way. From here, teams are ready to begin the work of designing the assessments themselves.

The Design Phase

Collaborative common assessments have the greatest impact on student learning and the best opportunity to support teams in managing their work when the summative assessment is designed before the instruction begins. Figure 1.3 illustrates the components that teams address during the design phase.

Figure 1.3: The collaborative common assessment design phase.

The design phase begins with identifying the targets of the assessments. As a first step, teams identify the learning targets found in their course or grade-level standards. Identifying and understanding the learning targets is imperative to a team’s ability to create an accurate assessment. The targets will dictate the method of assessment required. In selecting and unpacking the standard, the team members have agreed that the standard is so important that their learners will need to master it; therefore, the team will need a common summative assessment to collectively certify that all of the learners have been successful.

Once the standards have been unpacked and the targets are clear, teams proceed to design formative and summative assessments and determine which will be common. In this step, teams begin to map out an assessment plan that serves as a guide to help them make strategic decisions. Every unit of instruction should include a balanced assessment system, meaning there will be one or more summative assessments along with some formative assessments to help frame the pathway to success for learners and their teachers. Not all assessments on an assessment map will be common.

Once a pathway has been delineated, teams need to make decisions about the timing and frequency of their common assessments. Teams who use common formative assessments throughout units of instruction typically find learners require fewer opportunities to re-engage in the learning after the summative assessment because they monitored learners’ success all along. So, teams will want to identify a few common formative assessments in their unit of instruction.

The most important part of this step involves actually writing the summative assessment. It is critical that the entire team participates in its development and all individuals clearly understand the expectations for the summative assessment in advance of launching their classroom instruction. All teachers must understand the targets and what quality will look like through the summative assessment in order to be successful in any of the following aspects.

• They are certain the assessment accurately measures the standards and targets.

• They are confident they will generate quality evidence to certify mastery for their learners.

• They are clear regarding their formative pathway to success.

• They can deliver laser-like instruction to support learning regarding the standards.

• They will be able to interpret their results with consistency and accuracy.

Once the summative assessment is created, teams can be very focused and specific in their development and use of formative assessments. Without the summative assessments in place, however, common formative assessments become loose pebbles on a pathway that leads nowhere.

The Delivery Phase

With the assessment road map in hand, teachers enter the next step in their classrooms and begin instruction and ongoing assessment. Although what happens from room to room is never exactly the same, as so many different variables play out while teaching, assessment is an integral component of instruction in all classrooms (Chappuis, Stiggins, Chappuis, & Arter, 2012; Hattie, 2009, 2012; Wiliam, 2011). Master teachers adjust instruction minute by minute as they progress through their lessons. Figure 1.4 highlights the components of the delivery phase of the process.

Figure 1.4: The collaborative common assessment delivery phase.

Note the smaller iterative cycle between the triangle highlighting instruction and the assessment rectangle in figure 1.4, which indicates that the individual teacher is monitoring and responding to the results on a more frequent basis, just as the larger team is on a less frequent basis.

The assessments included in the monitoring assessment rectangle range from very informal questions and classroom discussions, to more formal formative assessment checks, to preplanned common formative assessment checkpoints. In essence, the classroom assessments include almost everything the teacher does to determine where the learners are relative to where they need to be. Teams make individual and sometimes collective re-engagement or intervention decisions during the instructional process to ensure their learners are as ready for the summative assessment as possible. Teachers and learners alike should walk into the summative assessment experience already knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt how they will perform. If the formative assessment process is handled well, summative assessments simply become celebrations of all that has been learned during the delivery phase.

The Data Phase

Collaborative common assessments are the engine of a learning team because they provide the data and evidence that inform practice and ultimately lead to a team’s and individual teacher’s instructional agility in his or her classroom. Whether the collaborative assessment was formative or summative, teams must tally and review common assessment results and revise curriculum, instruction, and assessments as needed in the data phase. When teachers collaboratively and thoughtfully engage in the data phase, teachers can respond more appropriately to the individual needs of their learners than they may have on their own.

An added benefit to collaborative common assessments over individual classroom assessments is that teachers can generate program data during this phase. Classroom assessments by themselves do not offer great program improvement data because of the unlimited and unforeseen number of variables that may have contributed to the results, whereas common assessments limit some of the variables and provide comparative data. Data in isolation can only form experiences and frame opinions, but data in comparison create information. Figure 1.5 isolates the parts of the collaborative common assessment process that engage teachers in the data phase.

Figure 1.5: The collaborative common assessment data phase.

As teams tally, review, and explore the artifacts and results of their data, they search for key themes, repeating patterns, anomalies, or any other insightful components that will help them revise curriculum, instruction, and assessments as needed to make program improvements. At this juncture, teams use protocols, data templates, and student work to analyze data, conduct error analysis, and make strategic decisions about what comes next in their work.

The Re-Engagement Process

The design, delivery, and data phases are essential components of the collaborative common assessment process. The re-engagement process, however, is not guaranteed. In fact, if the collaborative common assessment process works as designed, few, if any, learners will require additional instruction. Ideally, there will be no need to re-engage learners in the learning following the initial instruction and summative assessments.

The work of responding with targeted re-engagement strategies is pictured in figure 1.6 as the smaller circle, which is a mirror image of the main circle comprising the design, delivery, and data phases.

Figure 1.6: The collaborative common assessment re-engagement cycle.

The re-engagement circle is smaller in size to represent the idea that fewer and fewer learners should require additional support, especially if the team worked collaboratively during the formative stages. The process is identical. Once teachers identify struggling learners, they must identify the targets that will require additional time and support, design the next assessments, create focused, alternate, and sometimes corrective instructional strategies and tools to address specific gaps in understanding, and reassess frequently to ensure mastery. The number of times that teams must repeat the re-engagement cycle varies. So much depends on the context: the rigor of the expectations, the background knowledge and skill of the learner, and the degree to which the mastery is imperative for the learner’s next steps.

Collaborative School Improvement

Healthy organizations are learning organizations; they tenaciously pursue their own internal brutal truths in an effort to attack problems and improve systems (Catmull & Wallace, 2014; DuFour et al., 2008; Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006; Senge, 2006). When speaking of Pixar Animation Studios as a high-functioning and creative learning organization, cofounder Ed Catmull and author Amy Wallace (2014) note:

What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it. (p. x)

Collaborative common assessments provide the data that help teachers, teaching teams, and even entire schools examine brutal truths so as to respond in creative and inspiring ways.

Moreover, collaborative common assessments provide the vehicle for implementing new initiatives. What is treasured is monitored, and what is monitored is implemented. When teams engage in the work of collaborative common assessments with regard to a new initiative or a new set of standards, they advance its implementation through monitoring outputs. To use collaborative common assessments successfully in the service of implementing new initiatives, teams must frontload their work with the right content, rather than spend endless energies on inputs that may or may not lead to accurate and sufficient outputs.

Educators rightly complain that the field is frenetic with testing for the sole purpose of monitoring progress or lack thereof. In fairness, high-stakes testing evolved in a vacuum of missing information. Education may be overtested, but it remains completely underassessed. As researcher, author, and recognized leader Douglas Reeves (2007) notes, “For too long, the siren song of ‘close the door and let me teach’ has led to a chasm between classroom practice and educational leadership” (p. 8). There are no industrywide standards that create consistent parameters or uniformly harness the power of classroom assessments to provide instructionally diagnostic information and meaningful achievement data.

The work of creating and employing collaborative common assessments cannot be about generating another set of high-stakes assessments that move closer and closer to the classroom. Instead, educators of all walks and roles must work together to redirect assessment to its “fundamental purpose: the improvement of student achievement, teaching practice, and leadership decision making” (Reeves, 2007, p. 1).

Collaborative common assessments should be based in the classroom, where the heart of learning and daily instructional decision making sits. They must generate accurate, helpful information that is immediately and collectively analyzed for the purposes of responding to results in meaningful, targeted, and agile ways. Essentially, collaborative common assessments serve as the engine to the work teams do to improve learning for learners and teachers alike. Team members must share in the design, delivery, and data analysis to maximize their professional learning and truly master their individual and collective craft knowledge.