1. CFA Common Formative Assessments * (Brief Summary/60 minutes)
Math Steering Committee – 10/15/10

2. Common Formative Assessments: The Power of Assessments For Learning
Presented by
The Leadership and Learning Center
(866)
Notice the subtitle of the seminar. As distinguished from summative assessments, assessments for learning are formative by name and purpose--to use the results immediately to “inform” instruction.

3. Essential Questions What are common formative assessments?
How do they connect to other powerful instruction and assessment practices?
By the end of the seminar, you will be able to respond to these Essential Questions with your own Big Idea responses.

4. Essential Questions
What are the components of a quality common formative assessment?
What are the benefits of using common formative assessments to both teachers and students?
By the end of the seminar, you will be able to respond to these Essential Questions with your own Big Idea responses.

5. Our Learning Objectives
Understand how common formative assessments are the centerpiece of an integrated standards and assessment system.
Improve our assessment literacy through deeper understanding of the assessment-design process.
This first objective is an essential one for participants to understand. By showing how CFAs connect to other powerful instruction and assessment practices, it will effectively demonstrate to participants why they need to consider intentionally making connections between all the practices they are being asked to implement.
The second objective is also important. This is a professional development seminar. It will provide participants with the opportunity to advance their individual and collective understanding of effective assessment within the context of the standards and accountability focus in schools.

6. Why are CFAs the centerpiece?
1. DATA - driven (academic!) priorities
2. GOALS: that are measurable/tied to an assessment
3. TEAMWORK that produces short-term assessment results
…Anchored by a
GUARANTEED & VIABLE CURRICULUM

7. CFAs are a large part of our Data Team workload
SRBI interventions
(CFA) Collaborative Scoring of student work
(CFA) Using Data to inform our instruction.
Collaborative Lesson Planning

8. Our Learning Objectives
Brief overview of CFAs
Create a first-draft common formative assessment for use in any grade and content area.
This first bullet is a major benefit of the seminar. In addition to advancing participants’ assessment literacy and understanding of how powerful practices connect, the hands-on emphasis indicated here enables participants to gain experiential understanding of the content and process presented. Emphasize that they will not only improve their assessment literacy but that they will leave with a first-draft product ready to use. This makes the process relevant, especially for busy classroom teachers in attendance who are out of their classrooms these two days.
The final bullet is a benefit. Participants will receive a scoring guide, a set of questions, and a checklist of criteria for evaluating the assessment they create and the quality of the items themselves. Often these tools will be even more valuable after the participants have administered the first-draft CFA they will create during the seminar.

9. Compelling Question
What are effective schools doing to achieve dramatic results in student learning?
There is an impressive body of literature available on best practices. The following slides present only a tiny portion of that wealth of information, used here in synopsis form to introduce the “big picture” of the key practices being effectively implemented by schools showing the greatest gains in student achievement.

10. Common Findings in Successful Schools
Formed a Professional Learning Community
Focused on student work (through assessment)
Changed their instructional practice accordingly to get better results
Did all this on a continuing basis
Present this slide orally, noting the four key actions engaged in by successful schools. Each bullet correlates to the CFA-Data Team process. The first bullet is about PLCs or teams of teachers. The second bullet emphasizes the main purpose and function of those teams. The third bullet emphasizes how the team members used the assessment data to change and differentiate instruction. The fourth bullet underscores the fact that these teams of teachers are doing this continually. These are the essential actions of Data Teams using their pre- and post- common formative assessment data to set short-term SMART goals, select the most powerful instructional strategies to meet those goals, and to monitor the effectiveness of those strategies.
M. Fullan, “The Three Stories of Education Reform,” Phi Delta Kappan, April 2000.

11. Professional Learning Communities
Four Essential Questions:
What do all students need to know and be able to do?
How do we teach so that all students will learn?
How will we know if they have learned it?
What will we do if they don’t know or if they come to us already knowing?
Have the audience read these four questions. Let them know that ALL of these represent important challenges, but ask them to select the ONE they think represents the greatest challenge to teachers today. Ask them to raise one hand with the corresponding number of fingers representing their choice as the most challenging and then to look around at the choices of the other participants. Numbers 2 and 4 will most likely be the top two, with number 4 selected by most. Tell them that CFAs and Data Teams (DTs) are the means by which schools can effectively address all four of these essential questions.
R. DuFour and R. Eaker,
Professional Learning Communities At Work, 1998

12. How Do All The Powerful Practices
The Big Picture !
Educators and leaders are more receptive to learning about a new practice during professional development sessions if they can see how that new practice relates to other key practices they either know about or are already actively implementing. This section is deliberately designed to address this learning need. Once people see how everything fits together, and where CFAs fit within that larger structure/blueprint/schematic, then they are much more willing to engage in the work of learning that practice.
How Do All The Powerful Practices
Connect?

13. Putting the Pieces of the Puzzle Together
Standards and Assessment
Effective Teaching Strategies
This first graphic, created by Doug Reeves, shows the interconnections between key instruction, assessment, and accountability practices. He wrote the following description. Use as much of it as needed to assist you in introducing this puzzle graphic.
You know it and I know it – there are too many grade-specific and course-specific standards and not enough time to teach and assess it all. So we have a choice – curriculum by default – talk as fast as we can until we run out of time at the end of the year – or curriculum by design – identify the most essential standards and help our students develop deep understanding and high levels of proficiency in those particular standards. We call them the Priority or Power Standards. In the seminar, “Making Standards Work,” you learn about how to unwrap standards and how to identify Power Standards. You also create standards-based performance assessments that you can immediately use in your classroom. In Effective Teaching Strategies, you learn how to teach, using a synthesis of the best research in the field, linking teaching strategies directly to student achievement. In Data-Driven Decision Making, you learn how to meet the needs of individual students. Finally, we believe that accountability is not just a set of scores in the newspaper. We believe in accountability FOR learning. That means that we know that accountability is not merely a set of scores at the end of the year, but effective accountability is a combination of student results AND teaching and leadership practices. It’s just a fundamental moral principle for us at the Leadership and Learning Center: No child in your school will be any more accountable than the adults are, so when we talk about Accountability for Learning, we believe in tracking not only student scores—effect data—but also what the adults in the system are doing (cause data).
So this puzzle represents what to teach and assess (Standards and Classroom Assessments), how to teach it (Effective Teaching Strategies), how to meet individual student needs (Data-Driven Decision Making), and how you know it is working for you and your students (Accountability for Learning).
Accountability for Learning
Data-Driven Decision Making

14. How Powerful Practices Work Together
Effective Teaching
Strategies
This is a second graphic, now with more detail. It was created by Larry Ainsworth in response to Wayne Township, Indianapolis, IN administrators who asked Larry several years ago, “You’ve taught us all these separate practices. How do they all fit together?” This simple graphic continues to be used all over the country to help answer that question.
1. Identify essential standards. These become the Priority or Power Standards.
2. Analyze state test data; revise selections as needed. (That is the reason for the double-headed arrow. Part of the process of identifying Priority Standards is to reference state test data. Conducting an annual review of the selected Priority Standards in light of the latest state test results helps to keep the Priority Standards current and credible.)
3. “Unwrap” those standards to identify concepts and skills students need to know and be able to do; determine related Big Ideas and Essential Questions.
4. Select effective teaching strategies to meet diverse student learning needs. (The reason these are in the center of the circle is that they inform the entire teaching-learning-assessment process.)
5. Teach those “unwrapped” concepts and skills through performance assessments guided by Essential Questions.
6. Evaluate student work with rubrics or scoring guides to assess proficiency.
7. Give common formative assessments to see improvements within grade, department, school, and district
8. Analyze data, use the results to inform and adjust instruction, and repeat instructional cycle.

15. The Power Of COMMON Assessments
“Schools with the greatest improvements in student achievement consistently used common assessments.”
From Doug Reeves:
“Incremental assessments must be administered on an ongoing basis in order for teachers to monitor end-of-year outcomes and to determine which students are making progress and which students must receive what Tom Guskey calls ‘ corrective instruction’ (rather than re-teaching).”
“Common assessments also let us know if there are students who at the beginning of a year or unit already know and understand certain key concepts and skills. This is a huge issue especially for gifted students or high-achieving students who mastered certain knowledge and understanding from a variety of sources. Differentiated Instruction and Effective Teaching Strategies are not only about low-achieving or slow-to-achieve students but also include implications and solutions for high-achieving students or students who are able to move quickly through material.”
Reeves, Accountability For Learning p (also see p.74):
D.B. Reeves, Accountability In Action, 2004

16. What Are Common Assessments?
“Not standardized tests, but rather teacher-created, teacher-owned assessments that are collaboratively scored and that provide immediate feedback to students and teachers.”
Most teachers using common assessments still report that they are scoring their own students’ assessments individually, not collaboratively. The inference here is that this collaborative scoring (a wonderful professional practice!) is occurring between and among the teachers. But equally effective if not more so is the collaborative scoring of assessments by the teacher and students. In this way, the students can see immediately how they are doing with regard to the standards in focus and then set personal goals for improvement.
In this quotation, emphasize “teacher-created, teacher-owned” and “provide immediate feedback to students and teachers.” Read aloud the following passage from Common Formative Assessments by Ainsworth & Viegut, page 89, to support the use of immediate feedback. The quote by John Hattie is powerful.
“Common formative assessments are designed to give students specific feedback on the clear target to be achieved, along with suggestions on how to reach that target on subsequent assessments. Students need to understand that this feedback will not be graded but that it will be used by their teachers to design specific instruction to help them improve. After a review of almost 8,000 classroom studies focused on determining the impact of feedback on student improvement, John Hattie (1992) declared: “The most powerful single modification that enhances achievement is feedback. The
simplest prescription for improving education must be ‘dollops of feedback’” (p. 9).
D.B. Reeves, CEO,
The Leadership and Learning Center

17. Data Teams: The Mechanism For Measuring Progress
Collect and chart data and results.
Analyze strengths and obstacles.
Set S.M.A.R.T. goal for student improvement.
Select effective teaching strategies.
Determine results indicators.
You will most likely have used the term “Data Teams” and even discussed the particulars of this practice before the appearance of this slide. Briefly discuss each of the five steps, if you have not already done so. In the Resources section there is an example of each of these steps. Emphasize the fact that the DT process is, as the slide title reads, the mechanism or vehicle for USING assessment data to modify, differentiate, or otherwise adjust instruction so that the learning needs of ALL students can more effectively be met.
Data Teams  Process,
The Leadership and Learning Center

18. Nine Effective Teaching Strategies
Similarities and Differences
Summarizing and Note Taking
Effort and Recognition
Homework and Practice
Nonlinguistic Representation
Cooperative Learning
Setting Objectives, Providing Feedback
Generating and Testing Hypotheses
Cues, Questions, Advance Organizers
Discuss the difference between “experience-based” strategies and “research-based” strategies. Both are valuable, but for teachers who have relied upon experience-based strategies and now see the need to incorporate more research-based methods for improving their instruction, these nine categories synthesized by Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock in their landmark book, Classroom Instruction That Works (ASCD, 2001) provide a wonderful resource for doing so.
Mention here that Marzano’s 2007 ASCD-published book, The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction, is in essence the UPDATE of these research-based practices. He has organized the research around the following 10 questions to “represent a logical planning sequence for successful instructional design:”
What will I do to establish and communicate learning goals, track student progress, and celebrate success?
What will I do to help students effectively interact with new knowledge?
What will I do to help students practice and deepen their understanding of new knowledge?
What will I do to help students generate and test hypotheses about new knowledge?
What will I do to engage students?
What will I do to establish or maintain classroom rules and procedures?
What will I do to recognize and acknowledge adherence and lack of adherence to classroom rules and procedures?
What will I do to establish and maintain effective relationships with students?
What will I do to communicate high expectations for all students?
What will I do to develop effective lessons organized into a cohesive unit?
R.J. Marzano, D.J. Pickering, J.E. Pollock,
Classroom Instruction That Works, 2001

19. Two Interdependent Practices Common Formative Assessments
Learning Centered
CFA and Data Teams are indeed two interdependent practices. Without a systematic process for looking at common formative assessment data, the student results may not be utilized as effectively as they could be. Without common formative assessments, Data Teams may indeed be meeting together but without a clear focus as to which assessments they should all be using to monitor student progress of the targeted standards. CFAs and DTs fit together like two sides of a coin!
Common Formative Assessments
Data Teams

20. Powerful Practices Produce Results!
Improvement in student achievement on all assessment measures!
When teams of teachers effectively implement these practices—over time—in an intentionally connected way, they will inevitably see gains in their own students’ learning. The proof will be seen in the student data they themselves record and track.

21. The Two Tools of Assessment
“No single assessment can meet everyone’s information needs…To maximize student success, assessment must be seen as an instructional tool for use while learning is occurring, and as an accountability tool to determine if learning has occurred. Because both purposes are important, they must be in balance.”
The two main points of this NEA quote are that (1) assessment results can be used not just as an accountability measure but also as an instructional tool, and that (2) these two purposes should be in balance, which means alignment. The Big Picture activity that follows will demonstrate how this intentional alignment can occur.
NEA: Balanced Assessment: Key to Accountability
and Improved Student Learning, 2003

22. Alignment of Assessments
Alignment of all assessment measures—classroom, common, district, and state—provides predictive value of how students are likely to do on the next level of assessment in time for teachers to make instructional adjustments!
In this way, assessment is truly informing instruction!
The key term here is “predictive value”. One of the chief benefits of intentionally aligning all assessments—from the classroom to the common to the district to the state—is so that teachers can monitor and diagnose how their students are doing along the way and then be able to respond accordingly by changing their instructional practice.

23. Talk It Over!
What benefits do you see in deliberately aligning powerful instruction and assessment practices to improve student learning?
Record any specific questions you would you like to discuss further.
Be sure you allow people a few minutes to debrief this activity. Follow this with a short break. Encourage people to write any questions for you and place them in the “parking lot” that you provide so that you can respond to them later. Be careful not to let any discussion go on too long at this point because you need to keep moving through the material.

24. Why Do Educators Assess?
“They want to know if, and to what degree, students are making progress toward explicit learning goals.”
“The true purpose of assessment must be, first and foremost, to inform instructional decision making.”
With the Big Picture rationale for using common formative assessments as the centerpiece of an integrated standards-assessment system as our context, we’re now ready to focus in depth on the assessment part of that system. This slide and those that follow establish the ESSENTIAL PURPOSE for assessing, provide key assessment terminology, and improve participants’ assessment literacy—one of the seminar’s learning objectives.
Have participants READ INDEPENDENTLY in their training manuals from page 18 through page 22. (For presenters, that is slide 30 up through slide 41.). Ask them to mark or make notes by any bullets that they would like to discuss once everyone has had a chance to read through the pages.
L. Ainsworth and D. Viegut, Common
Formative Assessments, 2006, p. 21

25. Group Discussion Read independently (p. 18-22)
Make notes Q & A and discussion

26. Great Educators
“…use assessment data to make real-time decisions and to restructure their teaching accordingly.”
D. B. Reeves, Accountability for Learning: How Teachers
and School Leaders Can Take Charge, 2004, p. 71
Doug Reeves has said that if teachers cannot use the assessment results to modify and adjust instruction TOMMOROW, then that assessment cannot be considered “formative.”

27. Assess More Often
A number of short assessments given over time will provide a better indication of a student’s learning than one or two large assessments given in the middle and at the end of the grading period.
This point is critical. Ask participants to read it and then say whether or not they agree with it. Point out that the names represented here are among the most acknowledged assessment experts in the U.S. and that they are all saying the same thing. Participants will almost certainly agree with it. As presenters of this material, we want to continually be reminding participants of the persuasive rationale for doing the work of implementing CFAs in our schools.
Robert Marzano, Richard Stiggins, Paul Black,
Dylan Wiliam, W. James Popham, and Douglas B. Reeves

28. Important Distinctions
Assessment OF Learning
Assessment FOR Learning
Ask the audience if they are familiar with these two terms. Many or most will be. You may want to say after they respond that an easy way to distinguish one from the other is to think of assessments OF learning as “summative” and assessments FOR learning as “formative.”

29. Assessment OF Learning
Summative assessment for unit, quarter, semester, grade level, or course of study
Provides “status report” on degree of student proficiency or mastery relative to targeted standard(s)
This and the following slides summarizing the essential points from Stephanie Bravmann’s article are useful for introducing the key terminology related to both assessments of and for learning. Having participants read these on their own provides them with background knowledge and promotes their assessment literacy.
S. L. Bravmann, “Assessment’s ‘Fab Four’”
Education Week, March 17, 2004, p. 56

30. Assessment FOR Learning
Formative: given before and during the teaching process
Diagnostic: intended to be used as a guide to improve teaching and learning
Answers key questions: Do students possess critical pre-requisite skills and knowledge? Do students already know some of the material that is to be taught?
The word “diagnostic” in the second bullet is important as a key benefit for using assessments for learning.
The third bullet introduces the issue of pre-assessment in order to determine what students know/don’t know and can/can’t do prior to instruction. The point is that without some kind of pre-assessment, teachers often make assumptions about the current levels of understanding of ALL their students and then plan instruction accordingly. In Step 10 of the seminar, the issue of pre-assessment is addressed in more depth.
S. L. Bravmann, “Assessment’s ‘Fab Four’”
Education Week, March 17, 2004, p. 56

31. Conclusion
If we do a good job in our assessments for learning, then the results of our assessment of learning will surely follow!
Again, this can indeed occur if all assessments—classroom, common, district, state—are aligned.

32. What Are Common Formative Assessments?
Assessments for learning administered to all students in grade level or course several times during semester, trimester, or year
Items collaboratively designed by participating teachers
Items represent essential (Priority) standards only
Items aligned to district and state tests
Results analyzed in Data Teams in order to differentiate instruction
This slide provides a quick synopsis of what CFAs are.
L. Ainsworth and D. Viegut, Common Formative Assessments, 2006.

33. Common Formative Assessments
Please read bulleted summary in supporting documents, pp
Let participants know that this document is a good “talking piece” document for them to take back to their schools and share with their colleagues or school administrators. It includes the key points about CFAs—what they are, how you design them effectively, and a few essential benefits for using them.

34. Group Discussion
p , Common Formative Assessments: A Summary

35. Five Key Benefits of Formative Assessments
Clarifying and sharing learning intentions and criteria for success (rubrics and exemplars)
Engineering effective classroom discussions, questions, learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning
Providing feedback that moves learners forward
After participants have read the above pages, debrief quickly providing them with any of the speaker notes information included on those related ppt slides. Then proceed to discuss this slide and the next slide (a continuation) to provide an additional list of key benefits for using formative assessments from a highly reputable source. Emphasize the third bullet about the benefit of using feedback. At this point, read the paragraph with the quote from John Hattie on p. 89 in the Ainsworth-Viegut (pronounced VEE-GOOT) book, Common Formative Assessments: How to Connect Standards-based Instruction and Assessment.
D. Wiliam and M. Thompson, “Integrating Assessment
With Instruction: What Will It Take to Make It Work?,”
The Future of Assessment: Shaping Teaching and
Learning, C. Dwyer, ed., 2007

36. Five Key Benefits of Formative Assessments
Activating students as instructional resources for one another
Activating students as the owners of their own learning
These two bullets emphasize the importance of involving students in their own learning—another key benefit to using CFAs—if teachers will share the results with their students to help them establish personal learning goals.
D. Wiliam and M. Thompson, “Integrating Assessment
With Instruction: What Will It Take to Make It Work?,”
The Future of Assessment: Shaping Teaching and
Learning, C. Dwyer, ed., 2007

37. L. Olson, “’Just-in-Time’ Tests Change What Classrooms Do Next,”
Research Support
“Research suggests that, if done well, genuine ‘assessments for learning’ can produce among the largest achievement gains ever reported for educational interventions.”
Here begins a section of slides providing very prestigious research citations in support of using formative assessment. Note: this supports formative assessment in general, not COMMON formative assessment. But it’s an easy connection for participants to make.
L. Olson, “’Just-in-Time’ Tests Change
What Classrooms Do Next,”
Education Week, May 2, 2007, p. 22.

38. Formative Assessment
“In other words, formative assessment, effectively implemented, can do as much or more to improve student achievement than any of the most powerful instructional interventions (such as) intensive reading instruction, one-on-one tutoring, and the like.”
L. Darling-Hammond and J. Bransford, eds. Preparing
Teachers for a Changing World, 2005, p. 277

39. Research Support
“In reviewing 250 studies from around the world, published between 1987 and 1998, we found that a focus by teachers on assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment of learning, produced a substantial increase in students’ achievement.”
P. Black and D. Wiliam, “Assessment and Classroom
Learning,” Assessment in Education:
Principles, Policy, and Practice,
1998, 5(1), pp

40. Research Support
“Reviews of research in this area by Natriello (1987) and Crooks (1988) were updated by Black and Wiliam (1998) who concluded that regular use of classroom formative assessment would raise student achievement by 0.4 to 0.7 standard deviations—enough to raise the United States to the top five in international rankings.”
D. Wiliam, “Content Then Process:
Teacher Learning Communities in the Service
of Formative Assessment,”
Unpublished Manuscript, 2007

41. Achievement Gains Associated With Number of Assessments Over 15 weeks
Effect Size
Percentile Gain 1
0.34
13.5 5
0.53
20.0 10
0.60
22.5 15
0.66
24.5 20
0.71
26.0 25
0.78
28.5 30
0.82
29.0
This data in presented in this table underscores the FREQUENCY of assessments. To read more about this, see Marzano’s book The Art and Science of Teaching, p. 13. Recommendation—read Marzano’s definition of Effect Size before presenting this slide. Most educators will look at the percentile gain column and the point will be made. But if asked what Effect Size means, you may want to have read or be able to paraphrase Marzano’s definition on pp of his book.
Source: R.L. Bangert-Drowns, J. A. Kulik, and C. C. Kulik (1991);
reported in R. J. Marzano’s, The Art and Science of Teaching, ASCD, 2007

42. Research Support
“Persuasive empirical evidence shows that these (properly formulated formative classroom assessments) work; clearly, teachers should use them to improve both teaching and learning.”
Persuasive empirical evidence—that’s what the research above has provided in the different citations.
W. J. Popham, Emeritus Professor,
UCLA Graduate School of Education,
Education Leadership, 2006, 64(3), pp

43. Assessment of Only Highest Priority Standards
“It is critical that all of the assessed standards be truly significant. From an instructional perspective, it is better for tests to measure a handful of powerful skills accurately than it is for tests to do an inaccurate job of measuring many skills.”
W. J. Popham, Test Better, Teach Better, 2003, p. 143

44. BREAK ???

45. 3 – Part CFA (see template)
1.) Selected Response (multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the blank, etc…)
2.) Constructed Response (open-ended, short answer, etc…)
3.) Essential Questions/Big Ideas