1. Developing Common Assessments How do they enhance student learning?
Professional Development
January1 4, 2010

3. Warm Up
I’m going to show you a triangle with 25 letters in it. With pencils down, I want you to try to remember the letters that you see in the exact order that you see them. When 10 seconds is up, I’m going to ask you to recreate this triangle with all the letters in the right place.
Ready?

4. Self Assessment
Fill in “Self Assessment” as honestly as possible. No one else will see your results, so please be brutally honest.
Using the marker placed on your table, circle your score.
Place your score sheet in the collection basket marked with your department name.
Volunteers will mark the scores for each dept and divide by the number of folks in the dept.

5. How did you do?

6. Anyone too busy to reflect on one’s practice is also too busy to improve.
Anyone too busy to reflect on one’s practice is also too busy to improve.
Robert Garmston
Robert Garmston

7. Shared Knowledge
Collaborative teams always attempt to answer critical questions by building shared knowledge.
If people make decisions based upon access to the same pool of information, they increase the likelihood that they will arrive at the same conclusion.

8. The Focus of Collaboration
Collaborative cultures, which by definition have close relationships, are indeed powerful, but unless they are focusing on the right things they may end up being powerfully wrong.
Michael Fullan

9. Getting Started – Creating a Collaborative Culture
What makes an effective meeting?/Team Protocols
Team norms
Method of Consensus
Vision
Agenda with assigned minutes per topic
Time keeper
Critical Questions for Teams
SMART Goal
Interventions
Product orientation

10. Essential Question:
How can we create common assessments to monitor and promote student learning?
-- High quality assessments are collaboratively developed and collectively used to monitor, measure, and promote high levels of students achievement.
Reflect on your Self Assessment Score and decide if a collaborative effort would create better learning by your students.

11. Common Assessments Definition 1~ Definition 2~
Any assessment given by 2 or more instructors with the intention of collaboratively examining the results for
shared learning,
instructional planning for individual students, and/or
curriculum, instruction, and/or assessment modifications.
Definition 2~
Created collaboratively by teams of teachers
Frequent
Formative
Connected to the essential outcomes
Given to all students enrolled in the same class, course, or grade level
Identify and discuss similarities and differences.

12. Why Common Assessments?
Take one idea from the list and describe why that idea is on this list?
Efficiency
Fairness
Effective Monitoring
Informed practice
Assessment literacy
Raised expectations
Team capacity
Collective Response
Modified from R. DuFour keynote address at PLC Institutes

13. Summative / Formative Assessment
Assessment of Learning (Summative Assessment):
How much have students learned as of a
particular point in time?
Assessment for Learning (Formative Assessment):
How can we use assessments to help students
learn more?

14. Dr. Tom Many Overview of Assessments

15. We will be focusing on Common Assessments which tend to be by unit
Value of Common Assessments
Focused instruction
Common core curriculum
Focused, common learning
Better tests
Identification of curricular areas needing attention
Provision of objective indicators of effectiveness for teachers
Promotes collaboration

16. Why Common Assessments
• Efficiency - by sharing the load teachers save time
• Fairness - promotes common goals, similar pacing, and
consistent standards for assessing student proficiency
• Effective monitoring - provides timely evidence of
whether the guaranteed and viable curriculum is being
taught and learned
• Informs individual teacher practice - provides teachers
with a basis of comparison regarding the achievement of
their students so they can see strengths and weaknesses of
their teaching
• Team capacity - collaborative teacher teams are able to
identify and address problem areas in their program
• Collective Response - helps teams and the school create
timely, systematic interventions for students

17. Research on Effects S.D. Gains Study 1.0 to 2.0 * Bloom (1984)
* Rivals one-on-one tutorial instruction
.5 to 1.0**
Black and Wiliam (1998)
** Largest gains for low achievers
.7 to 1.5
Meisels, et al. (2003)
.5 to 1.8**
Rodriguez (2004)

18. 1.0 Standard Deviation Equals

19. 1.0 Standard Deviation Equals
35 Percentile Points
2-4 Grade Equivalents
100 SAT Score Points
5 ACT Composite Score Points

21. Keys to Quality Classroom Assessment
Accurate Assessment
Clear Purposes
Why Assess?
What’s the purpose?
Who will use results?
Clear Targets
Assess What?
What are the learning targets?
Are they clear?
Are they good?
Good Design
Assess How?
What method?
Sampled how?
Avoid bias how?
Effectively Used
Sound Communication
Communicate How?
How manage information?
How report?
Keys to Quality Assessment
Provide brief overview of each.
Participants may be seeing “Keys” for the first time… let them know they will be seeing them through out the presentation.
Student Involvement
Students are users, too.
Students need to understand learning targets, too.
Students can participate in the assessment process, too.
Students can track progress and communicate, too.

22. The single most common barrier to sound classroom assessment is the teachers’ lack of vision of appropriate achievement targets within the subjects they are supposed to teach.” Rick Stiggins

23. Rick DuFour, 2002
When teachers (working in collaborative teams) clarify essential outcomes, develop common assessments, and set standards they want all students to achieve by test and by essential outcomes, they are in a position to establish goals that can only be achieved if each member contributes.

24. The Keys to Assessment in PLC
Collaborative teams of teachers analyzing learning data
Translating data into information (i.e. attaching “meaning” to the data)
Targeting specific areas for improvement
Collaboratively engaging in collective inquiry (i.e. seeking out best practices)
Experimenting with “best practice” in classrooms (i.e. action research)
Collaboratively analyzing the results of interventions
Developing a culture where this process is cyclical, internalized, and part of how business is done every day

26. not make yesterday wrong, it makes tomorrow better.
What we know today does
not make yesterday wrong,
it makes tomorrow better.
Carol Commodore