Planning Re-Engagement Responses
Designing High-Quality Re-Engagement Responses
Designing Extensions
Designing Extended Practice Opportunities, Error Analysis, and Feedback
Designing Interventions
Employing Best-Practice Responses
Collective Inquiry
Action Research
Effectiveness Tracking
Assessing Learning After Re-Engagement Responses
Conclusion
Team Reflections
Annotated Research Notes Template
Action Research Planning Tool
Establishing a Plan
Framing the Work
Gathering Data
About the Author
Cassandra Erkens is a presenter, facilitator, coach, trainer of trainers, keynote speaker, author, and above all, a teacher. She presents nationally and internationally on assessment, instruction, school improvement, and professional learning communities.
Cassandra serves as one of the architects, along with Tom Schimmer and Nicole Dimich Vagle, of the Solution Tree Assessment Center. Their research-based assessment framework guides educators in deepening their own assessment literacy. The framework serves as the core of all writing and training work Cassandra continues to do.
The author of several books, Cassandra has also authored and coauthored a wide array of published trainings, and she has designed and delivered the training of trainers programs for both the private and public sectors.
As an educator and recognized leader, Cassandra has served as a senior high school English teacher, a director of staff development at the district level, a regional school-improvement facilitator at the state level, and a director of staff and organization development in the private sector.
To learn more about Cassandra’s work, visit http://allthingsassessment.info or follow @cerkens on Twitter.
To book Cassandra Erkens for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
Teamwork. Instruction. Results.
Anyone engaged in the true work of professional learning communities (PLCs) understands that common assessments are the engine of a PLC (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, and Mattos, 2016). Each of the four critical questions of a PLC that a collaborative team must answer is linked to the work of common assessments.
When teams address the first question—What knowledge, skills, and dispositions should every student acquire as a result of this unit, this course, or this grade level?—they are clarifying where they need common assessments. When they answer the second question—How will we know when each student has acquired the essential knowledge and skills?—they are using common assessment data to study the effectiveness of their instructional efforts. Using those common assessment results, teams can then successfully address both questions three and four: How will we respond when some students do not learn? and How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient? Done well, the entire collaborative common assessment process provides educators with the necessary, timely, and relevant information to make informed, real-time instructional maneuvers. Teams that focus on learning must use their common assessment data to determine the effectiveness of their efforts and improve their overall results.
Phases of the Collaborative Common Assessment Process
The book Collaborative Common Assessments: Teamwork. Instruction. Results. (Erkens, 2016) outlines the common assessment process in five different phases, highlighting the need for collaboration in each phase: (1) preparation, (2) design, (3) delivery, (4) data, and (5) re-engagement.
In the preparation phase, team members form the agreements necessary to guide their work (for example, team norms, essential standards, SMART goals, and assessment road maps indicating when and where common assessments will be used). Though much of this foundational work happens before the common assessment process launches, it is never done. Teams are constantly revisiting their norms and essential standards.
In the second phase, the design phase, teachers work together to unpack and repack standards. The conversation is critical to the team’s success in understanding what the standards mean and what student proficiency will ultimately need to look like. Simply reading documents outlining what is expected of each teacher does not guarantee common understanding or interpretation. Once a team has reached key agreements, it can begin designing the summative assessments and then plan backward for formative assessments that will ultimately lead to student success on the summative assessments.
During the delivery phase, phase 3, teachers provide instruction in their individual classrooms and the team of teachers gathers periodically during collaborative time to monitor the progress of the students in their room. During this phase, teachers use common formative assessments (CFAs), as well as some of their own assessments, to identify errors and strategize regarding the instructional interventions they can use to prepare students for the summative assessments.
In phase 4, the data phase, teachers examine the results of their instructional impact during a previous lesson (formative) or a completed unit of study (summative) by mining the data and artifacts they generated from assessments. In this phase, teachers isolate which students need what type of support and for what reasons; then, together they strategize ways they can further the learning for all of their students through interventions or extensions.
In the final phase, the re-engagement phase, teachers activate the plans they made during the data phase. If they used an intervention, teams reassess to ensure the intervention closed the learning gaps so that all students can continue moving forward. If they used an extension, teams celebrate the learning and help students find ways to share the resulting products or processes that deepened their learning.
Use of This Book
Clearly, each phase of the collaborative common assessment process involves many steps and many decisions. Teams need resources and tools to help them be effective and efficient through collaborative preparation, design, delivery, data, and re-engagement. This handbook serves as a companion to Collaborative Common Assessments (Erkens, 2016). It is intended to assist any team—from the classroom level to the central office level—in implementing the collaborative common assessment process. The handbook offers resources in the form of protocols, templates, tools, and even quality criteria for decision making. While no tool is perfect because it cannot address every context in which a team operates, every tool in this book is offered in the hopes that teams will customize and integrate it to support their own context and effort.
A quick visit to AllThingsPLC (www.allthingsplc.info) will provide readers with compelling