Instructional Agility. Cassandra Erkens
highlight the specific maneuvers teachers must employ to be agile. Finally, chapter 7 and the “Instructional Agility Manifesto” offer considerations for the beliefs and structures necessary for teachers to engage in the work of instructional agility. Each chapter begins with an instructionally agile maneuver’s main ideas. These ideas include a brief synopsis of the research associated with the specific strategy. Next, we explain each maneuver at play or in action with more details. The maneuvers we offer apply to all grade levels and disciplines and may require minor adjustments for specific grade levels or content areas. The main ideas discuss the why, while the explanation is the how. From there, each chapter highlights strategies and tools teachers can use to be instructionally agile within that maneuver. Each chapter ends with a conclusion and a pause and ponder section, in which questions guide individual teachers and learning teams to consider potential next steps in implementation.
Assessment Is Teaching
Teaching without assessment is not teaching; it is delivering information or creating random, haphazard activities. It is only through assessment that teachers can discern the discrepancy between a student’s current understanding and the desirable performance level; it is only through assessment that teachers know what comes next for each student. The assessment as verb lens ensures teachers view assessment and instruction not as separate silos, but as two halves of the same whole.
Coaches are always assessing their athletes. Teaching through this lens of assessment is how teachers make real-time maneuvers to navigate instructional plans—whether that’s for the next five minutes or even five days—using observations, student work, and student actions to determine if what they are doing is working. Teaching through assessment requires precision in planning, which allows maximum agility in responding to the needs of all students. We invite you to join us as we dive deeply into exploring the concepts and actions of instructional agility.
CHAPTER 1
ESTABLISHING A CULTURE OF LEARNING
Research in both learning and motivation supports the idea that classroom assessment is not solely the end point. Rather, it is a powerful agent for influencing learning and motivation.
—James H. McMillan
Maintaining a classroom culture that is conducive to learning is paramount to every teacher’s instructional efforts and ultimate success. Culture, a group’s generally unspoken but commonly shared attitudes, beliefs, values, goals, behaviors, rituals, and social norms, can act as a lever or a roadblock to change. In other words, a teacher who intends to apply powerful strategies with instruction and assessment but does not attend to the classroom culture will most likely fail despite those strategies. If, for example, the students in a school have adopted the attitude that learning is not cool, and that culture is pervasive, then a teacher’s effort to employ the best instructional strategy will have minimal impact. On the other hand, a teacher who strives to create the desired culture and then aligns instructional efforts to those shared beliefs will experience rapid change. Culture is that powerful.
When educators develop a school culture focused on learning, they have constant conversations amongst themselves and with their students about what learning looks like. They embrace mistakes and use them to better understand productive failure; they celebrate success when deep learning occurs. When a learning culture focuses on achieving mastery, teachers manage assessment processes differently by doing the following.
■ Offering penalty-free practice opportunities
■ Allowing mistake making and productive failure by offering feedback instead of evaluation
■ Supporting growth over time by repeatedly revisiting key concepts and skills and monitoring later samples of work
■ Providing culminating results that celebrate the most consistent level of achievement at the end of the learning cycle
While the proclamation that school is about learning sounds obvious, educators, parents, and students have not always kept a laser-like focus on the purpose of school. Traditional school culture is centered on accumulating points, climbing the (grade point average) ladder, or simply getting it done (to name just a few contradictory mindsets), all of which contribute to an opaque view of school’s purpose. While most people believe that school is about learning in theory, their actions don’t always match that intention. In some places, the contrast between the intent of school and how school operates sends a mixed message about what truly matters as students arrive at school each day.
Clearly, achievement has many definitions. While academic achievement is the most obvious outcome of the school experience, there is an implicit curriculum that influences the classroom experience, and schools benefit when they pay attention to this reality (Fisher, Frey, & Pumpian, 2012). This implicit curriculum is not the focus of this chapter (or the book), but it is, nonetheless, important to acknowledge that school is not just a clinical exercise in learning. We must also attend to socialization, personal development, and many other nonlearning attributes. Most educators know the school experience is about the whole child, which means assessment is most productive if it is planned and executed through the lens of both the cognitive and affective influences that round out every student’s experience.
The Main Idea
The growth in educators’ collective understanding of the power of assessment—especially formative assessment—has brought learning back to the forefront. Teachers have transformed their practice to establish classroom environments that value students’ full achievement of criteria against established standards, regardless of how low or slow they are when they begin. This shift is not yet ubiquitous; however, the pace is accelerating as more and more teachers establish new classroom routines, habits, and practices. Establishing (or returning to) a culture focused on learning is the biggest idea that sound assessment practices bring to the table, and nothing embodies that culture more than when teachers use assessment information to be instructionally agile. And although both students and teachers can influence a culture of learning, the relationship between them is significant in establishing that culture.
Relationships Help Establish Culture
None of the assessment practices, processes, and strategies we provide in this book mean or accomplish much of anything unless teachers connect with students in meaningful, authentic ways. The adage, students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care has stood the test of time for a reason. Students can spot a fake from miles away—they know when teachers’ efforts to connect are authentic or not. Taking the time and making the effort to connect are non-negotiable. While it might not be possible for teachers to get to know every student on a personal level, it is essential that teachers know students as students. Understanding how students learn, and relentlessly persisting and insisting they do learn, go a long way toward maximizing the impact of instruction, assessment, and feedback.
Relationships put assessment in its proper context and perspective. Who teachers are teaching matters more than what they are teaching, since teachers can’t authentically get to what until they attend to who. By developing a connection to each student, teachers can begin the process of solidifying those relationships essential to maximizing learning. The truth is that assessment is relationship building. Assessment lies at the core of the learning experience for students. So, while initial efforts to establish a connection are important, the connections with students become stronger throughout the assessment process.
How teachers handle the various results of assessment speaks to the authenticity of the student-teacher relationship. The extent of the relationship is revealed during moments when students need extra time, support, or instruction. We cannot separate learning from its social context, which means assessment (and all that goes along with it) will either contribute to or take away from the established relationships between the teacher and each