Ensuring Students are “Making the Grade” Through Collaborative Analysis of Student Learning

1. Ensuring Students are “Making the Grade” Through Collaborative Analysis of Student Learning

2. Testing Data from 04-05

3. Action Plan • Staff and community members were concerned with the writing scores • PTA meetings were held to address the 58% in writing • Our action plan needed to be changed from reading to writing

4. Professional Development • Continuous improvement team came together to analyze scores, there were red flags in the areas of conventions (CON) & content, organization, and style (COS) • Questions came up as to how we could assess our own teaching and make it consistent within the building

5. School needs • Did we have assumptions about who our students were? • What could we do to assess the individual students in our class and a class as a whole?

6. Our Population • After lengthy discussions, staff came to the realization that our students came from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. They also came from different educational settings.

7. What we did to understand our population better? • Our school purchased copies of A Framework for Understanding Poverty, by Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D. • We completed a book study and discussed how we could support our students using strategies from the Ruby Payne’s book.

8. Assessing the classroom as a whole • Our CIP team came up with a school wide prompt to be given three times a year. Teachers started to score the papers in their grade level teams. First Grade Writing Sample

9. Assessing the classroom as a whole • When grade levels shared anchor papers, it was clear that there was no common rubric. What was a 3 to one teacher was possibly a 4 in another classroom. • Created rubrics using the GLEs • From the rubrics grade levels created checklists that would be easy to use

10. Assessing Individual Students • Our school sent two representatives to be trained in Collaborative Analysis of Student Learning (CASL) instructed by Georgea M. Langer and Amy B. Colton • CASL met the individual classroom needs Sample of CASL from our first grade team

11. Importance of Joint Scoring • The following year, we created a professional development calendar that included time for teams to score their papers together. • The increase in dialogue led us to more consistent scoring, common areas of improvement, and opportunities to collect consistent anchor papers.

12. What we are doing now? • We continue to look at our standardized data. • We make an action plan from the data that will help support our areas of concern. • CASL is completed monthly to help us monitor student progress.

13. Questions? Thank you for attending!