Collaborative Common Assessments. Cassandra Erkens
with new plans as needed. The two triangles illustrate the parts of the process in which teachers are providing instruction in their individual classrooms. The triangle—also recognized as the delta, a universal symbol for dynamic change—is used to acknowledge and emphasize the reality that what happens in individual classrooms is unique and ever-changing.
Figure 1.1: The collaborative common assessment process.
The collaborative common assessment process includes four critical phases: (1) preparation, (2) design, (3) delivery, and (4) data. Teams must engage in collaborative conversations that involve critical thinking, problem solving, and creative design during each phase. No phase is more important than another phase, and the success of the team in each phase will be contingent upon the quality of the work and the team members’ relentless adherence to the commitments they made to abide by that work in each of the previous phases. Ready-made tools or resources can provide launching pads for planning and discussion purposes in each of the phases, but those tools or resources can seldom be used wholesale, unless the team reviews them and verifies in advance that the tools will align with standards and support team decision making throughout the process.
The Preparation Phase
Working together as a team may be the first challenge in creating, reviewing, and adjusting common assessments collaboratively, but a few critical steps in this phase help educators begin the process with a strong foundation of teamwork as shown in figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2: The preparation phase for collaborative common assessments.
In the preparation phase, teams will first establish norms. With these protocols in place to guide their work together, teams then begin to chart the course of the assessments they plan to develop. Collaboratively, teams prioritize and unpack standards, explore available data, establish SMART goals, and then create a map of the learning targets and assessments they need to deliver to address the findings and decisions they have made along the way. From here, teams are ready to begin the work of designing the assessments themselves.
The Design Phase
Collaborative common assessments have the greatest impact on student learning and the best opportunity to support teams in managing their work when the summative assessment is designed before the instruction begins. Figure 1.3 illustrates the components that teams address during the design phase.
Figure 1.3: The collaborative common assessment design phase.
The design phase begins with identifying the targets of the assessments. As a first step, teams identify the learning targets found in their course or grade-level standards. Identifying and understanding the learning targets is imperative to a team’s ability to create an accurate assessment. The targets will dictate the method of assessment required. In selecting and unpacking the standard, the team members have agreed that the standard is so important that their learners will need to master it; therefore, the team will need a common summative assessment to collectively certify that all of the learners have been successful.
Once the standards have been unpacked and the targets are clear, teams proceed to design formative and summative assessments and determine which will be common. In this step, teams begin to map out an assessment plan that serves as a guide to help them make strategic decisions. Every unit of instruction should include a balanced assessment system, meaning there will be one or more summative assessments along with some formative assessments to help frame the pathway to success for learners and their teachers. Not all assessments on an assessment map will be common.
Once a pathway has been delineated, teams need to make decisions about the timing and frequency of their common assessments. Teams who use common formative assessments throughout units of instruction typically find learners require fewer opportunities to re-engage in the learning after the summative assessment because they monitored learners’ success all along. So, teams will want to identify a few common formative assessments in their unit of instruction.
The most important part of this step involves actually writing the summative assessment. It is critical that the entire team participates in its development and all individuals clearly understand the expectations for the summative assessment in advance of launching their classroom instruction. All teachers must understand the targets and what quality will look like through the summative assessment in order to be successful in any of the following aspects.
• They are certain the assessment accurately measures the standards and targets.
• They are confident they will generate quality evidence to certify mastery for their learners.
• They are clear regarding their formative pathway to success.
• They can deliver laser-like instruction to support learning regarding the standards.
• They will be able to interpret their results with consistency and accuracy.
Once the summative assessment is created, teams can be very focused and specific in their development and use of formative assessments. Without the summative assessments in place, however, common formative assessments become loose pebbles on a pathway that leads nowhere.
The Delivery Phase
With the assessment road map in hand, teachers enter the next step in their classrooms and begin instruction and ongoing assessment. Although what happens from room to room is never exactly the same, as so many different variables play out while teaching, assessment is an integral component of instruction in all classrooms (Chappuis, Stiggins, Chappuis, & Arter, 2012; Hattie, 2009, 2012; Wiliam, 2011). Master teachers adjust instruction minute by minute as they progress through their lessons. Figure 1.4 highlights the components of the delivery phase of the process.
Figure 1.4: The collaborative common assessment delivery phase.
Note the smaller iterative cycle between the triangle highlighting instruction and the assessment rectangle in figure 1.4, which indicates that the individual teacher is monitoring and responding to the results on a more frequent basis, just as the larger team is on a less frequent basis.
The assessments included in the monitoring assessment rectangle range from very informal questions and classroom discussions, to more formal formative assessment checks, to preplanned common formative assessment checkpoints. In essence, the classroom assessments include almost everything the teacher does to determine where the learners are relative to where they need to be. Teams make individual and sometimes collective re-engagement or intervention decisions during the instructional process to ensure their learners are as ready for the summative assessment as possible. Teachers and learners alike should walk into the summative assessment experience already knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt how they will perform. If the formative assessment process is handled well, summative assessments simply become celebrations of all that has been learned during the delivery phase.
The Data Phase
Collaborative common assessments are the engine of a learning team because they provide the data and evidence that inform practice and ultimately lead to a team’s and individual teacher’s instructional