Podcast Program #7
Using shared assessments to unpack standards and compare instruction
Summary: This podcast deals with the sometimes daunting task of unpacking state standards of learning and translating them into something that can be measured. Once we can accurately measure the standards in meaningful ways, teachers can begin to use the information to inform the day-to-day instruction of students in the classroom.
Introduction:
Because the tasks required in today's curriculum encode deeper cognitive procedures it is necessary for today's assessments of those tasks to unpack these deeper structures. This is work that requires deep understanding of how people learn to think. Creating these tests of deeper cognitive structure cannot be left to busy teachers alone. They may not have the deep background necessary.
Listen Online (10:43)
Download Podcast MP3 File: Program.mp3 (~9.8 MB)
Podcast Speakers:
| Eliot Asp |
Douglas County, Colorado School District |
| Brad Duggan |
formerly, National Center for Educational Accountability |
Additional Audio: This podcast program includes
three additional audio segments.
Podcast Transcript:
Host
Welcome to the 7th of our podcasts on improving learning through a more objective approach to our work. I'm Ed Janus. Actually
unpacking a set of abstract state standards into something that can be
used in real classrooms is the great chasm that lies between the
promise of standards-based reform and actual student academic growth.
The wheels of education, after all, only hit the road in the day-to-day
and moment-by-moment judgments of teachers. Decisions like: Which
standards-based objectives should my lesson contain? What activities
will help students practice these objectives? How do I define
proficient work? How will I know it when I see it? And, at what point
should I move on? Giving teachers the tools they need to make these
kinds of decisions is fast becoming one of the most important new roles
for assessment.
Not only will they new kinds of assessments give teachers concrete
ways to deploy the otherwise abstract standards in their instruction,
it can also give them tools for objectively comparing their success in
teaching these standards. New forms of assessment will provide a much
needed common language which teachers and instructional leaders will be
able to use to fairly compare the outcomes they've achieved. This new
lingua franca of instruction, perhaps for the first time, will give
educators a way to truly help each other improve. Our two guests
on this podcast are committed to providing students with an adequate
opportunity to learn by developing new ways by which teachers will be
able to teach the best possible curriculum, and help each other do so.
Brad Duggan was the president of the National Center for Educational
Accountability.
We are seeing, are we not, a new philosophy of assessment?
Duggan
Now this starts getting into some issues that is really rather
different, than what we were at 15 years ago. Ah, where every teacher
was told, you have to assess your own class, where they are, you have
to decide do you want to spend the whole year on the first half of the
book or do you want to try to get through the entire book. You have to
decide whether or not you are going to give half the grade to a child,
based upon the completion of homework or whether or not it is all going
to be on test results. And there is a real question of whether or not
we ought to jeopardize children's futures based upon the knowledge of
just one teacher deciding what is chemistry, or what is algebra.
Rather than simply waiting until the end of the year when the state
assessment comes, let's build measures that tell us that the teaching
of mathematics in one fourth grade classroom is the same kind of
mathematics instruction that's occurring in another classroom. And the
way you do that is the way you agree to, what are we trying to teach in
mathematics in the fourth grade?
And then the question then has to be, well, then let's build a
common assessment that all the fourth grade teachers would give at a
certain period of time throughout the year that then allows them to
say, "Did our children learn these skills at the level that all the 4th
grade teachers in mathematics, agreed to?" And then we can start
looking at, well how come these kids in your classroom seem to
understand this concept better than in my classroom. So then, you had a
common way on a Friday afternoon, when the teachers get together to
say, "Well, how did your kids do?"
It also allows then to talk about, well, of those kids that didn't
get these skills, what are we going to do about that now, as a team?
How do we get these kids to learn these skills before we move forward?"
Eliot Asp is assistant superintendent for research and assessment with the Douglas County, Colorado school district.
Asp
Teachers have long used their own judgment to determine whether a
kid has met certain, sometimes learning goals, but certainly met
requirements of the class and they call that a grade. Unfortunately the
grade has lots of stuff in it. Some of it's learning, some of it's
behavior and so on. We couldn't go to grades as a measure of what
students had learned, because they weren't at all reliable or
consistent across teachers, even within the same teacher's classroom.
We wanted to use teacher judgment, because we think teachers really
understand and know what kids know and are able to do in a very deep
way. So we had to structure that teacher judgment, kind of put a box
around it. And so the way we went about doing that was to create this
notion of what we call a body of evidence.
That when I went to look at how well a student was doing on meeting
a particular content standard, for example, that what I would have if I
was a teacher is some pretty concrete information about what's it mean
to meet that standard, and what are some indicators that if a student
was doing these things would show me that a kid is moving toward
meeting that standard.
And then what are some assessments I could use to get at that, and
if possible to try to provide some exemplars or examples of student
work that correspond to being proficient for example.
Do teachers get together and compare results?
What they're doing is compare how they scored different papers. So
that they have a much more consistent notion about what it means to
meet the standard. And what we saw is that they were all over the
place.
The teachers saw this too, and we went through and said, "Okay,
let's ? I want you to bring examples of student work that you think are
proficient on this particular assessment." And people brought those and
we debated them and argued back and forth until we were able to
identify some exemplars of performance to say, "This is way above the
standard. This is right at it. This is getting close. This is really
low."
Duggan
And what this really allows, by bringing order to this,
is it brings a very comfortable place where teachers can sit back and
analyze, does one strategy work more successfully than another? And the
interesting thing that it allows teachers to do when, is you can now
start saying, "Well I'd like to see how you teach that. Can you teach
that on Tuesday? And then I may teach it on Wednesday."
Asp
The most important instructional decisions are made by teachers
every day in a classroom. If they don't have good information, good
assessment information about where a kid is, then those decisions are
based on faulty, on a faulty premise. And so, the more assessments we
can provide and the more examples of student work tied to those
assessments that would provide fodder for people to engage in
professional dialogue around what it means to meet the standards, and
what they do next really, and as they move to, "How in the world do
they teach a kid to do this?" And they start exchanging instructional
strategies.
"Okay, where are my kids weak, where are they strong? What does that
look like?" And then start to adjust their instruction based on that.
And it was amazing, Ed, the next year, the differences were almost
gone. Because they spent time talking about the standards, working with
the assessments, and so on.
Duggan
Common assessments are fundamental to these conversations?
Oh yeah. Yeah, cause there's got to be something that allows
teachers to know how to compare the effectiveness of instructional
strategies, classroom to classroom.
Asp
"Okay, I'm," let's say I'm an elementary teacher, and I'm looking at
the reading and writing standards and the checkpoints for my particular
grade level, what that looks like, what the expectations are. That's
where I've got to get the kids to.
And I know that, I know what the district anchor assessments look
like, I have samples of student work, and I know that I'm going to need
to report out on standards several times during the year.
So what I'm going to do is say, "Okay, when am I going to assess
these kids?" Okay. "When am I going to plan my assessment program to
give me the information on an ongoing basis I need, not only to do
summative judgments about kids, but to really say, "Wow, you know, this
group is not making the kind of progress in this piece of the writing
standard that I'd like. So they're starting to look at the whole year
that way and imbed these things in their curriculum.
Duggan
And so, the principal can now sit there and, and say, "Okay, in your
classroom, you are able to get more results in certain areas than the
other teachers in the 6th grade. Let's have a conversation, let's
schedule time where we can dig a little deeper and figure out what is
happening." Asp
Now what you see, even in individual high schools is teachers coming
together and saying, "Okay, we're going to not only use the district
anchor and talk about it, we're going to identify common assessments
that we'll use at this school, that all of us agree to use in judging
our kids' performance and in forming our instruction. And then we're
going to take one more step. We're going to identify real key pieces of
information that we as ninth grade teachers are going to send to our
tenth grade colleagues about these kids that we have. That was a
breakthrough, I mean a huge breakthrough for us.
Breaking through the isolation that has historically separated
teachers from one another is a very necessary step on the road to
improvement. Today a common language of instruction and success is
beginning to allow teachers and their leaders to finally talk with each
other in very meaningful ways. For Center for Comprehensive School
Reform and Improvement at Learning Point Associates, this is Ed Janus.
Thanks for listening.
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