There is no such thing as a perfect test; all tests will have some margin of error. So typically, before teachers employ a measurement tool (such as a scale, rubric, or scoring guide) or an assessment (such as a test, an essay, or a performance task), the designers must attempt to find, label, and address the potential errors in the measurement tool, the assessment, or the administration process itself, noting that a margin of error could exist in the findings. This practice helps trained test designers review the results for any potential dangers in students’ resulting inferences. By using a similar error-analysis process, classroom teachers—not trained as assessment experts—can identify potential mistakes and misconceptions in their classroom assessments. Error analysis involves examining various students’ responses to an individual task, prompt, or test item and then identifying and classifying the types of errors found. Identifying the learners’ errors is critical to generating instructionally agile responses that guide the learners’ next steps, as the type of error dictates the appropriate instructional response.
Program Improvements
A benefit of engaging in collaborative common assessments involves gathering local program improvement data. When teachers do not create, use, and analyze assessments collaboratively and commonly, they have only isolated data to offer. Such data are filled with more questions than answers: What happened in that classroom? Was it an anomaly? Or, did the instruction, the chosen curricular resources, the pacing, the use of formative assessments, or the student engagement practices cause it? The data from one classroom to the next will have too many variables to provide valid and reliable schoolwide improvement data. When data are common and teams assemble them in comparative ways, however, patterns, themes, and compelling questions emerge. These allow teams to make more informed, strategic decisions and establish inquiry-based efforts to answer complex problems. Using common data, teams may focus their program improvements in the following areas.
• Curriculum alignment and modifications: Teams make certain that they have selected a rigorous curriculum that aligns with the standards. For example, using collaborative common assessment data, team members might discover they need to increase their focus on nonfiction texts, which alters their future curricular choices.
• Instructional strategies and models: Having teams analyze instructional strategies and models or programs does not mean teachers must teach in the exact same ways. It does mean, however, that teachers must isolate the strategies (which they can deliver with their own creative style) that work best with rigorous content, complex processes, or types of challenges that learners may be experiencing.
• Assessment modifications: When assessment results go awry, teams will often engage in improving the assessment before they examine curriculum or instructional implications. But by doing so, teams can accidentally lower the assessment’s rigor to help learners meet the target when the assessment may not have caused the issue. For this reason, teams should explore needed assessment modifications after they explore curriculum alignment and instructional implications. But it is always important that teams examine the assessment itself. Sometimes, weak directions or confusing questions or prompts are the variables that cause common student errors.
The more valid, reliable, and frequent local improvement data become, the more likely teams and schools can manage program improvements in significant and timely ways without relying so heavily on external testing data.
Overall, the collaborative common assessment process requires a far greater commitment to teamwork, instruction, and results than the simplistic, popular notion that teams give benchmark assessments and look at the results together.
Ensuring Safety and Shared Commitments
Without a doubt, learning in a public setting by exposing personal successes and failures is risky business. Because of this, the mere suggestion of common assessments may terrify teachers. Without clarity of purpose and commitments of support from administrators, teachers may fear that a negative motivation underpins the organization’s intent.
In truth, common assessments were always only meant to serve as a promising practice to increase teacher success and student achievement. But if teams, schools, and districts don’t handle the common assessment process with thought and great care, concerns regarding uniformity, competition, compliance, or overtesting could become a reality. Think of the common assessment process like any other tool; for example, a hammer could help build a house, but it could also help tear a house down.
When all levels of the organization—teams, schools, and even districts—manage common assessments in collaborative ways, and when teachers receive clear expectations and participate in generating and endorsing shared commitments, then teachers can feel safe to take intellectual risks and explore what deep learning looks like in their content area and grade level. This, then, makes collaborative common assessments the most promising practice teachers can use to support job-embedded, real-time learning regarding the complex issues they face daily in the classroom.
To support the right work happening, leaders must have transparency. Transparency, however, must exceed simply clarifying purpose, as that rarely removes suspicion of motivation. It’s extremely helpful when leaders engage teachers in generating shared commitments to allow for an ego-free zone. Shared expectations provide clarity of purpose, but truly shared commitments provide teachers with the language and tools to keep each other safe and hold each other mutually responsible for the work at hand. It is only when teams feel safe on the journey that they will launch into the risk taking necessary to learn from their experiences.
Shared commitments establish clear understanding and develop parameters to guide the work at all levels of the organization. Such commitment statements offer the organizational promises necessary to create the culture of safety required for intellectual risk taking among professionals.
The following examples of shared commitment statements highlight the kinds of agreements teams might create in order to guide their future decision making and hold each other mutually accountable to the work of common assessments.
• Team commitments statements:
° We will strive to set preferences aside and come together collaboratively to examine best practices and appropriately adapt in data-based ways to address individual student learning needs. Ultimately, we will increase student achievement.
° We will use the collaborative common assessment process to become more reflective and to improve our core instruction, our assessment practices and tools, and our curricular resources.
° We commit to provide extensions and interventions for all of our learners, ensuring they receive the targeted support required to move them forward. We will continue to work with them to ensure mastery on our prioritized learning expectations.
• School commitment statements:
° We will use collaborative common assessments within our teams and across this school to generate evidence of learning. We will use the evidence to reveal successes, learn about improvements, and create supporting learning structures for our students.
° We will build a system of interventions to target the instructional needs that emerge from common assessments. We will monitor the effectiveness of our intervention system and commit to improve it when and where necessary.
° We will improve and refocus instruction based on emerging evidence from common assessments so we can better prepare our learners to succeed beyond our school walls and ultimately to contribute to a global and competitive society.
• District commitment statements:
° We commit to employ rigorous and relevant benchmark assessments with stakeholder input and to monitor the consistency of opportunity from school to school and classroom to classroom.
° We will empower PLCs to elicit, analyze, and act on evidence of student learning for the purpose of continuous improvement in teaching and learning. A shared ownership of learning is critical to the success of both teachers and students.
° We will work with schools to identify areas of concern so that we can support teachers