SEED 522 Blog Post 12

Blog Post 12

Opening Remarks from a Teacher's Conference on Student Assessment

Good morning fellow teachers,

Thanks for making the trip to our conference. We are excited to have you all here.

Now, I was a teacher for a long time before I became an education consultant. In the 1980’s, when I started as a clean-behind -the-ears social studies teacher, we did not collaborate like we do today. I taught social studies the way I felt best, and my fellow teachers, teaching the same subject, might be doing it differently. They might have been pulling from different sources, pacing the class faster or slower, and testing as they saw fit.

I had a particular style and had a reputation for being challenging but fair. My style represented what I thought best for the students, and nobody ever really questioned it. Well, maybe a few parents, but generally their kids would blind-side them with a bad grade. My too honest answer to them, at least at the time, was that their child was either not putting in the time necessary, or for some other reason, was just not able manage the work.

Now, I hear your murmuring. I know you would never put the blame on the child in front of their own parent today. Now, kids will be analyzed, sliced and diced, provided experts and testing for psychological and attention issues. The parents will be integral to the process. These kids will be labeled as SWD’s, provided a 504 or IEP. They will be able to utilize technological innovations and work with specialists to take tests and complete their homework.

This is all great and allows kids to participate more fully. We call this inclusion. All I am saying is that kids did not have all that support. It was really just me, a school nurse, the principal, or maybe a referral to the special education program.

That brings me to assessing student learning, the focus of this first day of the conference. I again have some anecdotes from earlier times. I believed I was assessing student learning by comparing the students in my class alone. I would chart the number of students who got each question wrong and change the way I taught that material year over year. I was then able to change my focus of a lesson to include better explanations to many of the more difficult concepts. I noted the progress of each question year over year and changed my lesson plans to focus more on the difficult questions.

I did make progress, but it was slow. And some kids, I would refer to them as the “slower learners”, who never got the answers right. - yes, I know, more groans-this was last century people, we did not have the vocabulary back then- Anyway, this was an awfully slow road, and a very remedial way to use the data.

Now we collaborate on the data, within the school, and within the district. We have a much larger sample size. We have web sites that pull from databases, that log the scores of all collaboratively created assessments. We can see which teachers have had the most success and can query them on their methods. Or better yet, they can write a debrief so that it can be shared among all the teachers. If the method is effective over a larger group- i.e., that teacher did not just happen to have the right mix of students- they will be implemented in more classrooms.

Speaking of assessments, we barely utilized anything I would call formative. Yes, we would have students answer questions during lessons, math problems, facts, etc. But we did not collect and assess artifacts. Any assignments that were submitted would be graded and handed back.

Now we pull data from each artifact- what worked, what fell flat, what needs a little tweaking to be more effective. We have intro questions to see what students already know. I know, how do we assess what students have learned if we do not know what knowledge they came in with? We have exit tickets to make sure they have gotten something out of the lesson. And those “slower kids”? We have the expertise to determine what they need, whether computer aided tools, extra accommodations, or time with special education teachers who can teach to them where they are- yes Student-Centered Learning, folks. Not something I had heard of way back when.

So, we have a great lineup, with many expert-led breakout rooms and ample time to collaborate with new colleagues. Enjoy the rest of the program.