Table 1.2: Assessment Implications of the Eight Cultural Forces
| Force | Assessment Implications |
| Time | Assessment is more about quality than quantity, so while speed and ease are always desirable, effectiveness must be the primary goal. Students need ample time to think, process, and rethink throughout instruction. |
| Opportunities | Teachers must have student thinking in mind when designing quality assessments that consistently provide opportunities for students to display—and even track—their thinking. This means assessment design moves beyond just a single test to more organic, engaging, and authentic performance tasks. |
| Routines and Structures | Assessment routines and structures anchored on clear learning intentions, success criteria, and learning progressions create predictable instructional decisions that allow for scaffolding toward proficiency. |
| Language | The language of assessment can lead students toward a deeper level of thinking. Assessing why (and the interconnectedness of standards) instead of simply what allows for an integrated assessment approach. |
| Modeling | Through instruction and assessment, teachers can make their thinking visible by modeling the potential approaches students can take to grow in their learning and the struggle that often comes with thinking deeply. Modeling this struggle helps students better understand the experience they may have as they think deeply. |
| Interactions and Relationships | Assessment is relationship building. How teachers create assessments and respond to their results reveals the true nature of the student-teacher relationship. Teachers do not accept students’ failure to do the work and persistently provide feedback and scaffolded support to promote student achievement. |
| Physical Environment | Using exemplars gives students potential opportunities to demonstrate their thinking. Teachers guide them to examine the qualities of thinking within the exemplars and advise them to avoid mimicking what they’re seeing, hearing, or touching. |
| Expectations | Setting learning intentions, success criteria, and the progression to proficiency solidifies expectations for success. When teachers put in place these clear expectations for performance at a greater depth of knowledge, they make it clear to students that memorization and recall fall short of the ultimate goal. |
These forces are integral to every teachers’ efforts to be precise yet flexible in all assessment efforts. The eight cultural forces must be considered as teachers implement any instructionally agile maneuver described in the following chapters. Any maneuver may work or not work to create a culture of learning, and it is often these forces that may prevent the maneuver from working well. Chapter 2 discusses how to engineer dialogue and engage in conversations to gather and respond to evidence of learning. Chapter 3 focuses on eliciting evidence through questioning. Observation is key to instructional agility, so chapter 4 explores this means of gathering evidence. Chapter 5 discusses mobilizing students to be instructionally agile on their own. Practicing is central to instructional agility, so chapter 6 illustrates various ways that practice provides opportunities for teachers to be instructionally agile. This includes shaping the role homework plays in instructional agility. Educators often debate the value of homework in supporting learning, so it’s necessary to tackle this important dilemma. Finally, chapter 7 discusses the broader context and how jurisdictions, districts, schools, and teams can be instructionally agile. The elements of these forces are front and center as teachers maximize the opportunity to be agile in response to every student, developing a rich culture of learning.
A Culture of Learning in Action
Instructional agility doesn’t just happen. Teachers must intentionally strive to be agile in response to the evidence of learning that they uncover during the assessment process. Planning for flexibility creates an assessment dichotomy with which teachers must become comfortable; the notion of planning for flexible responses seems odd and yet, it is the essence of instructional agility.
While it may seem like a paradox, instructional agility is anchored in the process of planning with precision, which leads to a response with maximum flexibility. Certainly, teachers cannot know how each student is going to respond to assessment opportunities, but they can anticipate the most typical understandings and misunderstandings students will demonstrate. Most teachers have a clear picture of the most likely results. The greater the precision in planning, the greater the opportunity in responding to meet each student’s needs. It is a front-back relationship—if teachers invest in front-end planning there is a back-end payoff of more effective and intentional instructional responses with higher achievement.
To create an instructionally agile learning environment, teachers can do a lot with design, interpretation, and response. While the remaining chapters in this book examine specific strategies teachers can use to intentionally elicit evidence and allow for maximum response agility, we explore the prerequisites in design, interpretation, and response in the following sections. We do not intend to explore each of the strategies in depth; rather, we explore strategies and prerequisites within the context of creating a culture of learning. It is one thing to have a friendly, engaging environment, but it’s quite another to go a step further to create a real culture that puts learning at the center of the student experience. From an assessment perspective, the following strategies and constructs make the words learning-centered culture a reality in the classroom: assessment design, accurate interpretation, and assessment response.
Assessment Design
Developing a culture of learning is an intentional process that begins with planning assessment outcomes. A true culture of learning makes learning the centerpiece of what students experience every day. This is the basis of the assessment architecture tenet. The following four criteria are crucial to developing a culture of learning.
1. Clear learning intentions
2. Clear success criteria
3. Learning progressions
4. Quality, learning-centered tasks
Clear Learning Intentions
A culture of learning begins by clarifying what students are supposed to learn through instruction. This is different than simply advising students on what they are going to do, since the activities they participate in are more the means than the end. Whether teachers post, communicate orally, or demonstrate learning intentions, it is vital that students are clear on the intended learning so they understand why the teacher is asking them to do particular activities or tasks.
Students often ask their teachers why they have to do, know, or show things, which can be a sign that the learning intentions are not explicit. The question is not whether teachers teach with clear learning intentions in mind; they do. But they often do not clearly articulate those learning intentions to students. Once students