Credibility, authenticity, practicality, and passion—those are the essential characteristics of what you will find in the following pages. I hope that you will enjoy this challenging and rewarding journey.
Introduction
Doing Assessment Right … All the Time
Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all-time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.
—Vince Lombardi
In a culture of over-testing students, it might seem odd to encourage the practice of designing and using common assessments, even if those assessments were designed to be formative in nature. Aren’t such assessments just another level of high-stakes tests getting closer and closer to classroom daily practice with increased frequency? Wouldn’t the use of common assessments, whether formative or summative in nature, only generate additional mounds of accountability data about learners and teachers? Educators already express concerns about being data wealthy but information bankrupt. Teachers state they feel burdened by the quantity of data gathered by or disseminated to any organization beyond their school, and they openly distrust the quality of those data that repeatedly measure that which doesn’t matter and over which they have had little control. Teachers need to be information rich; they need the right information in a timely manner to make informed decisions in their day-by-day and minute-by-minute interactions with learners. They require tools that will help them be instructionally agile, able to quickly adjust instruction to respond to learners’ needs.
When common assessments are not collaborative—when they are not carefully designed and thoughtfully employed by all the members of the teaching team who require the data to inform instruction—the resulting assessments and the system in which they are embedded could serve as yet another set of “gotcha” tests meant to sort and select teachers and students alike. Unfortunately, many common assessment systems are developed by others (internal experts, external experts, committees of teachers, or a few select teachers) and then provided to the staff who are expected to use the assessments without modification. Such practices happen at every level of the educational system. Though the authors of those assessments profess to support learning with their tools, the truth of the matter is that the assessments are employed by the end users as another tool for measuring learning rather than supporting learning.
When common assessment systems are not collaboratively designed, employed, studied, and addressed, the following practices can lead to common assessment systems that merely monitor learning rather than support learning.
• State or district officials use the data to qualify (or alternatively deny) teachers for merit pay.
• Educational leaders within a system gather representative teachers to design end-of-term common assessments to be used as benchmarks.
• District- and building-level administrators require a specific number of assessments and the ensuing data be submitted for accountability purposes, but they themselves do not use the data to support teachers in their own continued learning.
• The test developers rely heavily on pencil-and-paper assessments for common assessment work.
• Teachers employ common assessments solely as a pathway to test preparation for high-stakes end-of-semester or end-of-year testing.
• Teachers select ready-made assessments without an analysis of a match to the learning standards, an adequate sampling of items per standard, and a leveling of the rigor involved in the items, tasks, or performance indicators.
• Teachers generate common data without embedding the practice of collaboratively examining and scoring student work.
• Teachers limit data discussions to the numbers before them and do not consult student work to identify the types of errors made in a given assessment.
• Teachers limit data discussions to aggregate cut scores (such as passing the whole assessment at a predetermined acceptable percentage level such as 80 percent rather than passing each target area of the test).
• Teachers generate assessment data so learners can be identified for intervention work outside of the classroom.
All of these practices are alive and well in schools. As a result, the processes of developing, delivering, and analyzing common assessments can feel mechanistic and sterile at the heart of a teaching and learning process meant to be brimming with passion, hope, and possibility. Data not used to ignite passion, generate shared commitments to strengthen the instructional core, and ultimately address the immediate needs of all learners in caring and responsive ways are simply data that can burden—or, worse, hurt—educators and learners alike. Data used solely to measure, confirm, and sort learners into interventions only serve to move teachers and their learners to the point of great frustration, if not the brink of exhaustion and frenzied decision making that can often be fraught with inaccuracies.
Clearly, assessment practices must change if they are to reignite the passion and energy they bring to inform and guide teaching and learning. Yet change in education requires tremendous attention to detail and systems alignment. In and of itself, the work of change is complex and should never be oversimplified; the work of assessing student learning, specifically, takes great care and attention. Oversimplifying or expediting assessment processes for the sake of adult ease can never be justified. Unfortunately, great harm can happen when the management of the assessment process from any level of the organization oversimplifies its complexity, albeit with the best of intentions. In such cases, assessment practice and processes often become applied in uninformed or unskilled ways. For example, educators may label an assessment as a formative or summative assessment but fail to understand how to use it in ways that support student learning. Neither the label of an assessment as formative or summative nor the intention of the assessment matters; rather, it is how the assessment is ultimately employed by the end users that will matter most. Simply labeling an assessment to be a specific type doesn’t make it so.
To avoid oversimplification and to change assessment practices and protocols successfully, educators must engage others in the new efforts with the following essential components.
• A clear and coherent message on the purposes of the work
• Specific requirements and criteria-based expectations for the work
• Significant skill development coupled with formative measures to ensure mastery of the requirements
Collaborative common assessments and the systems developed to support them require attention and core skills from each level of the organization, from central office to building administration to classroom. Many experts have already written about common assessments. By definition, common can mean same or shared, but those two clarifying terms are not synonymous. When common assessments are employed as same but are not collaborative in nature, they can be tedious and terrifying for the teachers who use them. Many common assessments are employed as same, but they are not shared in a manner that individuals and teams maintain collective ownership of the entire process. Often, teams are given time to work together and are required to engage in common assessments and then share responsibility at the point of data analysis and response. Only when classroom common assessments are shared from the design, through the delivery, and into the results of the process can educators truly collaborate in meaningful ways and maximize their potential as a result.
When common assessments are developed and employed properly, as a collaborative, formative system aimed at improving learning for teachers and learners alike, the gains in teacher efficacy and student achievement can be staggering. This book aims to show readers why and how to make these gains through collaborative assessment design, delivery, and data analysis.