A Teacher's Journal: My Assessment Nightmare!

Are you ready to be shocked?

I'm willing to openly admit that until I started to work with my learning team at Salem Middle School, I hadn't even really looked at the standards for the subjects that I was expected to teach! Instead, I taught topics that I knew other teachers in my subject area had been teaching---or that were listed in my set of classroom textbooks. Over the course of 11 years, I'd developed a pretty comfortable pattern of instruction based on a strong understanding of what I'd done in previous years and a remarkably weak understanding of the standards set by the state.

And I'm supposedly an "accomplished teacher?!"

That all changed for me when I began working with my professional learning team. You see, one of the only requirements that our first principal had for our teams was one found in DuFour's first book on Professional Learning Communities: We had to develop common assessments that would be delivered in each of our classrooms. That simple requirement forced us to have conversations that we'd never been forced to have before.

Together we began by wrestling with what content was essential to teach---standardizing the implemented curriculum across our hallway (often for the first time) and pushing our team to really think about what it is that students were supposed to be learning. For our group, that led us to look carefully at the state standards for our subjects in ways we'd never done before!

It was almost amazing (Read: Embarrassing) to find out that the lessons and units we'd been teaching for so long didn't directly fit the standards expected by our state. What we found early on was that units we'd spent months delivering were only a small part of the state's intended curriculum while concepts that we breezed over were emphasized.

Take Ancient Greece and Rome, for example. The only thing more certain than death and taxes is that sixth graders love mythology. There's something about dudes with lightening bolts and rivers of fire that captures their imagination in a way that few subjects can. Another truism is that teachers love any subject that kids love---so our unit on Ancient Greece and Rome ran for almost 10 weeks! We made temples, ran mock debates, practiced Socratic seminars, read myths---Heck, I'm pretty sure that I even threw on a toga once or twice.

It was a great unit that the kids enjoyed----and I'm sure they learned tons of essential standards and skills both in language arts and social studies----but spending so much time on Greece and Rome meant we never got to study much of South America before the end of the school year, even though it is a part of our standard course of study. What's more, we over-emphasized the history standards of our social studies curriculum---of which there are 2---and under-emphasized geographical objectives like the movement of people and ideas and the links between economic resources and quality of life---of which there are 41!

These "discoveries"---which many wrongly assume are a fundamental part of the fabric of any teacher's preparation or professional experiences---came only when we started to develop common formative assessments. For the first time in over a decade, my work with students was focused and efficient.

Oh yeah, and I was teaching the intended curriculum set out by the state for sixth graders too!

Common formative assessments also pushed our team into meaningful conversations about what mastery looked like----which, strangely enough---is something that teachers never have to consider while working in isolation. Instead, "mastery" for us is often defined by the standards of individual classroom teachers rather than by an external set of expectations informed by multiple perspectives.

I guess our team really was no different than most schools where teachers work in isolation, though. There has always been an incredible variance between what mastery looks like across the classrooms of any building where I've ever worked. My personal favorite was always the "easy A" teacher that students loved to get because they knew that they could do little while making the honor roll. While those students were satisfied with their scores, they were being fooled into believing that they'd mastered essential skills.

And even though I felt strongly that those teachers were failing students as much as they were fooling them, I never started a conversation about what mastery looked like with anyone. That's kind of a taboo subject in schools steeped in isolation. Teachers rarely question the professional judgment of other teachers----and take great offense when it happens to them! As a result, the best interest of kids is often overlooked.

How's that for scary?

Now, conversations about what mastery looks like happen all the time on my learning team---and while they are challenging and time consuming discussions that we don't always look forward to, they're incredibly important. Essentially, we're "forced" to come up with common definitions of mastery----increasing our own "assessment capacity" and introducing some measure of standardization across our hallway. I am a more reliable judge of student performance now than ever before because I've carefully considered what excellence looks like through the multiple lenses of my peers.

Now don't get me wrong-----our team still struggles to develop assessments that we think are reliable measures of student performance. That is a very real---and very disconcerting---capacity gap that must be addressed before the full benefits of common assessments and professional learning between peers are realized on our team. Like most educators, we've had little training in how to develop assessments that are tied to state standards and that are appropriate for the skills that we are attempting to measure.

We know we're supposed to deconstruct standards---but we don't know how or have the time built into our day to learn. We know that certain skills and behaviors are best measured by performance tasks---but we don't know which ones they are. We know that there are certain processes for identifying trends and drawing conclusions from collected data---but we don't have the tools to sort through the mountains of data that we have available or the training to know where to begin.

We remain, in many ways, an assessment nightmare!

But the process of developing common formative assessments has benefited our students immensely because the instruction that we're delivering today is directly connected to state standards. What's more, we continue to have regular conversations about what students should know and be able to do----and about how we will know when those skills have been mastered.

In the end, those conversations are the "value added" product of teacher teams collaborating around common assessments. While it may seem difficult to quantify the impact of "conversations," just stop by my room someday and I'll show you the standards that I'm addressing in the lesson that I'm teaching----which is something I couldn't have done five years ago!

Posted by William Ferriter at 5:56 PM on July 27, 2007 | Leave Feedback

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