Assessing Unstoppable Learning. Tom Hierck
perspective, that are associated with yielding high levels of student achievement.
1. Zoom in: These questions ask you to evaluate your team’s current reality and assess what kind of information you need to move forward toward your goals.
2. Zoom out: These questions ask you to consider why you need the information presented and how it will advance your work.
3. Panoramic: These questions ask you to reflect on how the decisions you make or the conversations you have regarding the content will impact your system and what potential they have to create greater balance and alignment in your building or organization.
You will also encounter these types of questions in the reproducibles we offer throughout this book. These questions are meant to help guide discussion or reflection and, depending on the focus of each specific reproducible, may differ from the questions appearing at the beginning of the chapter. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/assessment to download the free reproducibles in this book.
We have interspersed what we call ponder boxes, indicated with the symbol to the left, throughout the book to encourage readers to think deeply about the content and form their own conclusions and next steps. We encourage you to write notes or sketch drawings of your thoughts and reflections when you encounter these boxes.
Ponder Box
Consider the descriptors for each of the principles listed in table I.1 (page 4). Where are your points of pride? For which of these principles do you have opportunities for improvement? Jot down your initial thoughts in relation to your current practice of these principles of systems thinking.
We recognize that team discussions around each chapter may result in a variety of personal reflections and reactions—affirmations of some practices you and your team have already embedded into your assessment work, aha connections to tweak a practice or two within your system to further enhance what it can do for students, new laundry lists of questions, or an overwhelming sense of confusion on where to go next. No matter where you are on your journey, you are exactly where you need to be in order to take that next step forward. We have designed this book for all audiences, regardless of grade level, curricular area, or role in education. At the end of each chapter, we encourage you to complete reflection or planning activities before you and your teammates read the next chapter. These collaborative learning tasks are designed to inspire reflective thinking so you can more readily access each new piece of content while also fostering rich, productive dialogue within your team.
Before beginning chapter 1, take a moment to reflect on the collaborative nature of your learning organization. Check the boxes in the appropriate column in figure I.1 that represent your current approaches to learning.
Figure I.1: Approaches to learning.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/assessment for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Ponder Box
Jot down or draw your reflection on your current state of isolated or collaborative learning based on your selections in figure I.1. What is the history behind your current reality? How will an awareness of that history help shape your future approaches to learning?
We know that pieces of the current reality you identified are within your control and other pieces are outside your realm. All these pieces matter, however, as we consider the development of sound assessment practices in our schools.
CHAPTER 1
BUILDING TRUST AND HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS TO LEVERAGE ASSESSMENT
What we talk about is less important than how we talkabout it and why we talk about it.
—Angela Freese
It is the beginning of the first quarter at Kennedy Elementary School, and Emily is the veteran on her grade-level team, starting her third year of teaching second grade but her fifth year at Kennedy. Emily is well loved by her students and their families, and she has a true passion for teaching and learning. Her principal has begun to elevate her into leadership roles in the building, and she has recently been appointed chair of the building leadership team. Her energy is infectious, and she is a workhorse. She has the kind of stamina that a marathoner would envy.
Because of some retirements and transfers over the summer, Emily gets a brand-new set of teammates to begin this school year. Her three new colleagues are not new to teaching and bring a variety of experiences. Scott has moved from a neighboring district and has taught for seven years. Jordan has spent the last several years at home raising her children and is eager to get back into a school setting. Susan has just completed her master’s degree and transferred from a fifth-grade teaching position at another school in the district to a second-grade position at Kennedy. Everyone clicks from the beginning, and the team takes opportunities to get to know each other personally as well. The team members agree that this is shaping up to be one of their best years of teaching—simply because they have each other!
At the end of the first quarter, Emily feels as though she and her teammates are cruising along in their first year together. However, as the team prepares for its weekly collaborative team meeting one morning, there is an unfamiliar emotional dynamic in the room. The team has just given an end-of-quarter common assessment in mathematics. The team members worked together to design the assessment—choosing standards, writing the questions, setting the scoring criteria, and agreeing on what mastery would look like. They created a Google sheet to organize all their student data in one place so that they can discuss the data together. They looked forward to celebrating their work and seeing where they can improve as a team. The meeting agenda is set to review the data, highlight patterns and trends, and plan next steps for corrective instruction and enrichment.
Up to this point, the team’s meeting agendas helped lay the foundation for the team to function well together. The team members spent time developing their team norms and commitments, studied their state standards and reviewed the skills and concepts needed for students to show proficiency, developed lessons to teach those standards, and discussed instructional strategies they enjoy using with their students. They have not yet had an opportunity to review student work samples or analyze any collective data.
As the first-quarter team leader, Emily begins the meeting by reviewing the team’s collective commitments and then dives into the agenda. “Thanks to everyone for entering your data into our shared spreadsheet,” Emily begins. “Now we can see how all our students performed by class and as a whole grade level. We can really start to make meaning of how our teaching is impacting student learning!”
Jordan feels anxious about the meeting. She is skeptical of the process, and her data do not show the proficiency levels she hoped for. “I’m not so sure about this, Emily. I mean, why do we have to look at all our students together? Why can’t we just examine our own class data and make adjustments based on what our individual results show?”
“I know it feels strange the first time, Jordan,” says Scott. “We did something similar in my former district. Talking about our students as a whole helps us see our areas of strength as well as think about our next steps. Remember, one of our team norms is that we accept collective responsibility for each of our students. Working together as a team will make each of us stronger in our practice so that each of our students can become stronger.”