Researchers Ronald Gallimore, Bradley A. Ermeling, William M. Saunders, and Claude Goldenberg (2009) find that teachers can better attribute student success to their teaching, especially in situations where students do not initially learn, when they engage in “(1) focusing on concrete learning goals, (2) tracking progress indicators, and, most critically, (3) getting tangible results in student learning” (p. 542). When collaborative teams look at their data with an eye toward ensuring student learning, they engage in a form of instructional inquiry that draws teachers’ attention to and helps them discover “causal connections between their teaching and student performance” (Gallimore et al., 2009, p. 542). Teachers engaged in the collaborative common assessment process often extend their assessment practices to inquiry-based strategies that help them gather additional information to better understand their learners’ needs. They become, as DuFour et al. (2008) assert, action researchers while they seek the best ways to ensure all students learn at high levels. Empowered, efficacious, and collaborative teacher teams do the work that Hattie (2009) finds best influences student outcomes: they establish challenging student achievement goals, engage in conversations that contest the status quo of achievement, seek current and new ways to address emerging concerns, design and implement strategies intended to enhance achievement, and monitor progress and effectiveness of teaching.
When teams experience success in their current work, including their assessment work, they are more apt to stretch themselves and their goals for students. Success with early assessment experiences provide teams with insight and motivation to challenge the quality of their own assessments. Teams can challenge and stretch their assessments’ quality by asking themselves questions such as, “What will engage the learners in meaningful ways? What will a true representation of learning look like? If the demonstration of learning must be performance oriented, how could we make that happen? What assessment strategies best promote true learning and retention?”
Interestingly, the more excited teachers feel about preparing their learners for the planned assessments, the more exciting they make the assessments for their learners. It becomes self-fulfilling. When teachers strive to design and employ accurate, meaningful, and interesting collaborative common assessments, they are better able to enjoy the assessment process.
Growth in achievement data helps teachers engage individual learners in believing they can do well in their schoolwork. Success breeds success; a positive momentum in collective achievement results fosters a collective belief that the work is doable and all learners can have success. In many cases, the entire class pitches in to encourage mastery on everyone’s behalf; learning becomes collaborative and creates an environment of success and social celebration. When teams use the right data in the right ways, they can empower them.
A Win for Schools and Systems
If collaborative common assessment increases student achievement, involves working smarter rather than harder when ensuring learning happens, and positively impacts teachers’ collective efficacy, then the process must benefit schools too. When schools employ collaborative common assessments with consistency across all buildings and programs within the organization, every grade level and department experiences the same process, and student achievement increases at the building level. Allan R. Odden and Sarah J. Archibald (2009) conducted research at effective schools that have doubled their student achievement. Odden and Archibald (2009) note that teachers at these schools consistently team up at critical junctures and use the common assessment process to isolate and collaboratively respond to what their learners do and do not understand. These teachers intentionally focus their professional dialogue on what matters most: student learning.
The collaborative common assessment process leads to systemic change within a school. It impacts critical systems, like curriculum and assessment, in positive and profound ways. The following sections will show how using collaborative common assessments supports a guaranteed and viable curriculum, assessment literacy, accurate assessment design, and effective data use.
Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum
Discrepancies have long existed between the intended curriculum, the implemented curriculum, and the attained curriculum (DuFour & Marzano, 2011; Marzano, 2003). A curriculum becomes guaranteed when teachers prove that they have delivered the intended curriculum through the results of the attained curriculum. Unfortunately, there are many opportunities for inaccuracy or error in this work.
• The intended curriculum, often articulated through curriculum maps, may not be viable if it gives teachers too many things to teach. In addition, the selected curricular materials the teachers use may not even connect to the standards’ requirements.
• Even though specific pacing guides and agreed-on standards spell out the implemented curriculum, interpretations can still differ from teacher to teacher. Left to their own professional judgment, classroom teachers may choose to emphasize, add, or remove key features in their daily instruction (DuFour & Marzano, 2011).
• The attained curriculum, as measured through evidence of student learning on the assessments, may show either inconsistencies in content (questions asked do not adequately match expectations from the intended curriculum) or insufficiencies in mastery (too many learners do not achieve mastery for each target expectation).
In essence, what teachers assess and how they assess it are as important as what interventions they employ when students do not attain the desired learning. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2007) advise:
The job is not to hope and assume that optimal learning will occur, based on our curriculum and initial teaching. The job is to ensure that learning occurs, and when it doesn’t, to intervene in altering the syllabus and instruction decisively, quickly, and often. (p. 55; emphasis added)
When the educational system accepts all scores that learners receive—including failing scores—without providing interventions that support all learners in reaching proficiency, it is fair to say that the system is not concerned about guaranteeing the curriculum becomes attained.
Teachers face an essentially insurmountable amount of curriculum. In a 2000 keynote address, curriculum design expert Heidi Hayes Jacobs states:
Given the limited time you have with your students, curriculum design has become more and more an issue of deciding what you won’t teach as well as what you will teach. You cannot do it all. As a designer, you must choose the essential. (as cited in Ainsworth, 2003a, p. 12)
But when this is left to individual teachers, schools cannot get to a guaranteed and viable curriculum. According to Richard DuFour and Robert J. Marzano (2011):
If schools are to establish a truly guaranteed and viable curriculum, those who are called upon to deliver it must have both a common understanding of the curriculum and a commitment to teach it. PLCs monitor this clarity and commitment through the second critical question that teachers in a PLC consider, “How will we know if students are learning?” That question is specifically intended to ensure that the guaranteed curriculum is not only being taught to students but, more importantly, is being learned by students. (p. 91)
The collaborative common assessment process requires that collaborative teams come together to determine their priority standards, the learning targets within those standards, the assessments required to measure the intended learning, the pacing of their work, and their re-engagement plans for learners who’ve yet to attain the expectations. Schools that engage teams in the work of collaborative common assessment are far more likely to attain a guaranteed and viable curriculum than those that choose to follow premade curriculum programs (Hattie, 2009).
Assessment Literacy