Developing Common Assessments How do they enhance student learning?

1. Developing Common AssessmentsHow do they enhancestudent learning? Professional Development January1 4, 2010

3. Warm Up

4. Self Assessment • Fill in “Self Assessment” as honestly as possible. No one else will see your results, so please be brutally honest. • Using the marker placed on your table, circle your score. • Place your score sheet in the collection basket marked with your department name. • Volunteers will mark the scores for each dept and divide by the number of folks in the dept.

5. How did you do?

6. Anyone too busy to reflect on one’s practice is also too busy to improve. Anyone too busy to reflect on one’s practice is also too busy to improve. Robert Garmston Robert Garmston

7. Shared Knowledge • Collaborative teams always attempt to answer critical questions by building shared knowledge. • If people make decisions based upon access to the same pool of information, they increase the likelihood that they will arrive at the same conclusion.

8. The Focus of Collaboration Collaborative cultures, which by definition have close relationships, are indeed powerful, but unless they are focusing on the right things they may end up being powerfully wrong. • Michael Fullan

9. Getting Started – Creating a Collaborative Culture • What makes an effective meeting?/Team Protocols • Team norms • Method of Consensus • Vision • Agenda with assigned minutes per topic • Time keeper • Critical Questions for Teams • SMART Goal • Interventions • Product orientation

10. Essential Question: • How can we create common assessments to monitor and promote student learning? • -- High quality assessments are collaboratively developed and collectively used to monitor, measure, and promote high levels of students achievement. • Reflect on your Self Assessment Score and decide if a collaborative effort would create better learning by your students.

11. Common Assessments • Definition 1~ Any assessment given by 2 or more instructors with the intention of collaboratively examining the results for • shared learning, • instructional planning for individual students, and/or • curriculum, instruction, and/or assessment modifications. • Definition 2~ • Created collaboratively by teams of teachers • Frequent • Formative • Connected to the essential outcomes • Given to all students enrolled in the same class, course, or grade level • Identify and discuss similarities and differences.

12. Why Common Assessments? Take one idea from the list and describe why that idea is on this list? • Efficiency • Fairness • Effective Monitoring • Informed practice • Assessment literacy • Raised expectations • Team capacity • Collective Response • Modified from R. DuFour keynote address at PLC Institutes

13. Summative / Formative Assessment Assessment of Learning (Summative Assessment): How much have students learned as of a particular point in time? Assessment for Learning (Formative Assessment): How can we use assessments to help students learn more?

14. Dr. Tom ManyOverview of Assessments

15. We will be focusing on Common Assessments which tend to be by unit • Value of Common Assessments • Focused instruction • Common core curriculum • Focused, common learning • Better tests • Identification of curricular areas needing attention • Provision of objective indicators of effectiveness for teachers • Promotes collaboration

16. Why Common Assessments • • Efficiency - by sharing the load teachers save time • • Fairness - promotes common goals, similar pacing, and • consistent standards for assessing student proficiency • • Effective monitoring - provides timely evidence of • whether the guaranteed and viable curriculum is being • taught and learned • • Informs individual teacher practice - provides teachers • with a basis of comparison regarding the achievement of • their students so they can see strengths and weaknesses of • their teaching • • Team capacity - collaborative teacher teams are able to • identify and address problem areas in their program • • Collective Response - helps teams and the school create • timely, systematic interventions for students

17. Study S.D. Gains Bloom (1984) 1.0 to 2.0 * Black and Wiliam (1998) .5 to 1.0** Meisels, et al. (2003) .7 to 1.5 Rodriguez (2004) .5 to 1.8** * Rivals one-on-one tutorial instruction ** Largest gains for low achievers Research on Effects

18. 1.0 Standard Deviation Equals

19. 1.0 Standard Deviation Equals • 35 Percentile Points • 2-4 Grade Equivalents • 100 SAT Score Points • 5 ACT Composite Score Points

21. Keys to Quality Classroom Assessment Accurate Assessment Clear Targets Assess What? What are the learning targets? Are they clear? Are they good? Clear Purposes Why Assess? What’s the purpose? Who will use results? Good Design Assess How? What method? Sampled how? Avoid bias how? Effectively Used Sound Communication Communicate How? How manage information? How report? Student Involvement Students are users, too. Students need to understand learning targets, too. Students can participate in the assessment process, too. Students can track progress and communicate, too.

22. The single most common barrier to sound classroom assessment is the teachers’ lack of vision of appropriate achievement targets within the subjects they are supposed to teach.”Rick Stiggins

23. Rick DuFour, 2002 When teachers (working in collaborative teams) clarify essential outcomes, develop common assessments, and set standards they want all students to achieve by test and by essential outcomes, they are in a position to establish goals that can only be achieved if each member contributes.

24. The Keys to Assessment in PLC • Collaborative teams of teachers analyzing learning data • Translating data into information (i.e. attaching “meaning” to the data) • Targeting specific areas for improvement • Collaboratively engaging in collective inquiry (i.e. seeking out best practices) • Experimenting with “best practice” in classrooms (i.e. action research) • Collaboratively analyzing the results of interventions • Developing a culture where this process is cyclical, internalized, and part of how business is done every day

26. What we know today does not make yesterday wrong, it makes tomorrow better. Carol Commodore