Instructional Agility: Responding to Assessment with Real-Time Decisions

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader. And I'm honored to be joined today by Cassandra Erkins. Cassandra is president of Anamkara Consulting and is an expert in professional development and teacher training. The author of more than half a dozen books on assessment and leadership, she designs and provides training through Solution Tree and the Pearson Assessment Training Institute.

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And now, our feature presentation.

[00:37] SPEAKER_01:

Cassandra, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thanks, Justin. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today. Thanks. So we're here to talk about the book Collaborative Common Assessments. And this is an idea that I think we're all aware as school leaders that we should be We should be implementing collaborative common assessments.

[00:54]

Can you define for us first so that we are all on the same page about what a collaborative common assessment is? What role do these assessments play in schools? When are they given? Who gives them? Who designs them? And so on.

[01:06]

Just kind of give us an overview of the idea here. Sure.

[01:09] SPEAKER_02:

Sure. A collaborative common assessment is truly, and I use the term collaborative on purpose because way too often today, common assessments are being rolled out and handed to teachers, and that's not necessarily working very well. It's like asking a teacher to ride a city bus and care deeply about the road signs along the way. The only way they would care about the signs is if they were driving the bus. So writing that assessment collaboratively in advance sets teachers up for success so that they can have a laser-like focus while they're providing their instruction. Collaborative common assessments are both formative and summative.

[01:43]

Formative because we know from the research, the more that they can do formatively along the way, the fewer kids they'll have requiring intervention on the other side of the summative. But summative also because if we agreed that these priority standards were so important, we were going to guarantee all kids could achieve them, then we would need to have that summative piece to guarantee we'd hit our mark.

[02:04] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Cassandra, I've seen the rise in popularity of common assessments as end-of-course exams, especially at the high school level. We see this coming in sometimes in response to alternatives to state accountability. We see that departments or schools or even districts are having teachers develop end-of-course assessments that are somewhat standardized across the district. But I appreciate your point that it's essential for teachers to actually be the ones to develop those assessments. In your view, who needs to be concerned about this? What grade levels, what subjects are in need of collaborative common assessments?

[02:44] SPEAKER_02:

I would say all teachers, K-12 and maybe even pre-K, post-secondary. And here's why. It's really important if we're going to have educational equity and excellence that we come to some consistencies and agreements from classroom to classroom what's going on. And the only way teachers can monitor whether or not that's actually happening is through the common assessment process. As early as kindergarten, it's important for us to be making sure our kids are ready for the next grade level. So we would need to look consistently at student work and make sure that we were scoring alike, make sure that we were looking at our assessments to see if they were even quality assessments.

[03:20]

So we would use that process to try to get to that guaranteed and viable curriculum that is so well documented in the research as a as a best way to improve achievement.

[03:31] SPEAKER_01:

And I think in terms of format, we often do think of common assessments as kind of a big packet of a test, a big stapled together, huge exam that a department develops together. But I appreciate what you said about looking at student work and about kind of some different formats that might be appropriate, especially if we're talking about the kindergarten, pre-K level. What are some of the different formats that you've seen work well in schools that implement collaborative common assessments?

[04:00] SPEAKER_02:

Well... all formats work well. The issue is oftentimes we default to the traditional paper pencil test for a number of reasons. First, it's fast and easy to score.

[04:10]

It feels like it's the most objective even though there's a high degree of subjectivity in any paper pencil test. But certainly we're trying to mimic what that experience is going to be for kids in the long run when they take the high-stakes assessments or the large-scale assessments. The problem with that is those assessments are not getting us the best information. regarding what our learners can and cannot do and most of our standards today are written at a high level of performance. So using that paper pencil test will get us some pieces but it won't get us all pieces. Teams that have tremendous success take a look at the robustness of that standard and start to talk about what is it the child needs to know and be able to do to be successful and most often those are going to lead to more of your performance assessment or your constructed response to get to that really deep level of proficiency and that deep level of understanding.

[05:03] SPEAKER_01:

Right, right. I think about some writing assessments that I remember, especially at the kind of second through fifth grade level, teachers would have students respond to a common prompt and then cover up the names and pass the papers around and read students' responses and score them according to a rubric and talk about the rubric. And I think we learned a ton from just discussing that rubric and from looking at students' work. Learned a ton both about the writing process and about what our students specifically needed as a result of going through that together. And I think when we're looking just at our own students, when we are...

[05:42]

You know, just thinking about our own personal lesson plans and what we've done in our class and the progress that our kids have made and their individual kind of peculiarities that we know and love. It's easy to lose sight of the value of those common agreements. What are some processes that you've seen schools go through or that you've helped schools go through to develop agreement about what students should know and be able to do when maybe that's been the province of individual teachers, when it's been something that hasn't crossed the classroom wall boundary, that maybe there's been a tradition of seeing those as personal decisions, as matters of individual professional judgment? What do you see schools doing individually? to just kind of change the culture around that collective responsibility for common assessments.

[06:31] SPEAKER_02:

When we start to work together in a professional learning community, we have to make some critical agreements around how we're going to get this work done and what actually needs to be accomplished. And so we're going to start from the very basics of how do we be a team and what do we say is most important. We're going to have to work together to, first of all, we establish those norms, make sure that we're functioning as a team. But then we start to talk about what is it we want kids to know and be able to do, and that's where we prioritize those standards. What's most important? It doesn't mean we throw any standards out.

[07:03]

It means we have to get crystal clear on what the standards are that we're really gunning for, and we have to make sure that we understand what those standards mean. If you ask a teacher what inference means, you can end up with a variety of different questions. interpretations of that. I was sitting with a team. We were talking about their results in terms of assessment. And they realized after they were looking at the student work that they'd all taught inference a little differently.

[07:27]

And so their kids had different understandings. The very process, Justin, that you just named of kids looking at that rubric and talking about what they saw is the same process that we would use at all levels. So what we're talking about in terms of teachers doing this work is the very same process that I would then have them bring into their classrooms. To really build that strong formative base in terms of what does good learning look like, everybody from the teacher to the student needs to be really clear about that. So when teams work together collaboratively, they can literally reach into a pile of student work, pull out samples that didn't come from their own classroom, remove the student names, bring them back into their classroom and say to the kids, Okay, so here are some samples that didn't come from our classroom. Let's score these using our proficiency scale.

[08:14]

Let's make sure we're consistent in what we think excellence looks like." So the process is not just about sitting in a room and looking at data and putting labels on kids and moving them to other places to be fixed some other time. It's about really trying to use assessment to change our outcomes with what's happening in that classroom and to have everybody from the teacher to the student be deeply immersed in talking about learning and quality.

[08:42] SPEAKER_01:

Well, that does give us so much to talk about in terms of the specifics about what we're looking for, about what we're teaching, about how we're teaching, about the progress that our students are making, about the endpoint that we want them to reach, about the supports and interventions. So I could really see this being the grist for some terrific professional conversations. And I appreciate what you said about having kind of a PLC structure that this work can take place within. Do you see kind of a pretty tight integration between some of those PLC processes and the process of developing collaborative assessments?

[09:18] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. First, let me be clear that you don't have to be functioning as a professional learning community to engage in common assessments. We know from the research that's been done in a lot of troubled schools from Karen Chenoweth and others that the number one thing they used was the common assessment process to help teachers move those kids to a different level. and to achieve higher levels of achievement for the whole school. So you don't have to be functioning that way, but if you are functioning that way, and I don't know why anyone wouldn't in today's world, the research is just so clear that this is the best way to move schools forward. If you are functioning that way, the PLC architects, Rick DeFore, Becky DeFore, Bob Aker, and Mike Mattis would tell you that common assessments are the engine of a PLC.

[10:02]

If you're not looking at your results, at your data, and making instructional decisions based on that, then you might be a glorified book group or a happy collaborative group, but you're not necessarily doing the right work.

[10:14] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I think that's often a question people have when they attempt to start PLCs, but they're not really sure what to do with them, that people kind of sit around and say, okay, we have this process that we're supposed to go through, but I'm fine, you're fine, let's just kind of plan the field trip and get back to our individual work. If we don't have that shared task, that common endeavor that we're working toward, and I think about the idea from communities of practice that we have to have joint work, that we're actually working on together, not just work that we're doing independently and then chit-chatting about occasionally, that it really is joint work to produce a set of decisions, a set of assessments, and really a set of outcomes that we take collective responsibility for.

[10:59] SPEAKER_02:

It is. And that cannot be under or overemphasized, I guess I should say, because the truth of the matter is that classroom is only as good as the teacher in front of it. And we have some master teachers. We have expertise, but it can't be left to chance. We have to make sure that we're creating that expertise across all classrooms so we can get to that educational equity. And I'm not promoting the work of common assessments because it's the sexy thing to talk about today or it's the engine of the PLC.

[11:28]

I'm I'm promoting it literally because as I've sat with teens, as we've pushed up our sleeves and engaged in this work, I have seen a fundamental shift in how they understand teaching and learning. I've seen us move toward instructional agility as well as assessment literacy. And we begin to get a more comprehensive and better understanding across all the classrooms on how you could use assessment to literally improve achievement, to increase hope, and efficacy and achievement for every individual learner and your entire classroom. So the work is about shaping our understanding of the teaching and learning process.

[12:09] SPEAKER_01:

And I think that's something that we lose sight of, that assessment can actually be beneficial for students as a learning process. I think we've got a lot of backlash these days against maybe national standardized assessments that we don't particularly like, or we don't like the consequences of them or the way they're being used. But I think there's been some very clear research from Daniel Willingham, from a lot of the cognitive psychology experts who are speaking to the education profession today, that testing can actually be a major boost to the learning process, not just because it helps us make better instructional decisions, but because it helps students as learners. So thinking about the areas where we've kind of had an inappropriate response nationally to assessment, and we're not really using it to its full potential because of some of the backlash that we're seeing around standardized testing.

[13:03]

Where should we be looking in terms of the value of common assessments for student learning?

[13:10] SPEAKER_02:

We as a country are a little confused about the whole idea of assessment. formative and summative. I was just reading a piece the other day that said you can ask any one teacher what assessment means and you'll get very different answers from whoever you happen to be talking to. So it's something that we definitely need to fix. Assessment was always meant, the literal Latin term to us here means to walk beside, and it was always meant to be a gentle process that supported learning, not to be a process that sorted and selected and labeled kids. And so we've got some things that we're going to have to do differently, and teachers don't know how to do that.

[13:51]

We didn't get that in our undergrad program. When Stigitz did some research on undergrad prep programs, he discovered that only a handful of universities spend even more than 20% of their time talking about assessment. But when you go inside that classroom, the average teacher is spending 75% to 80% of his or her day immersed in assessment-like activities. So it's a piece that assessment and learning are two sides of the same coin and that's a piece that got missed when we became teachers. So what I find is when we can use a collaborative common assessment process we can literally build the piece that's been missing by learning by doing and trying to figure out does this work as a question and what kinds of mistakes are kids making and how do we troubleshoot those kinds of mistakes when we walk back into our classroom. So we're trying to isolate when a kid can't do something, what are the types of errors they make?

[14:44]

And we've got to be far more sophisticated about looking at the data. I'm going to give a very simple example. Let's imagine that a child got 12 out of 15 on an assessment. Some people would look at that score and they would say, well, that's proficient. You've hit a high enough level of points that you're proficient. But if you break it down and if that assessment had three different targets in it and a child got one wrong in each target, then 12 out of 15 would be proficient.

[15:10]

But if they got two targets perfect and the last target had three wrong in it, then they're not proficient because there's a whole target area missing. So what we're trying to do with this work is really help teachers understand how to look at assessments, how to design them, how to look at the results, how to make different choices. And even when a child got three wrong, now look at it to say, okay, but what did they get wrong? For example...

[15:35]

If I was asking the child to infer and they were struggling with inference, they could have made one of four errors. One might be they're being literal. One might be they're making wild guesses. One might be they're making a good guess but overgeneralizing and tying it tightly to their own life. And one might be that they're making a good guess and they have no background or no back support to it. So you can't take a child who's got three wrong and say, therefore, I'm reteaching all of inference to you because that's not an appropriate use of a teacher's time.

[16:06]

I would have to look and see what type of error it was. If they were being literal, now you reteach it. If they were making wild guesses, don't even bother with inference. We've got some comprehension issues. If they were making good guesses but overgeneralizing or not supporting it, don't reteach inference they're already being inferential instead help them understand how to create a better response so we've got to get more sophisticated about what we're looking at and how we respond to those results and the common assessment process helps teachers figure that out together so that individually they can go into their classrooms and address those gaps

[16:42] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think that's a powerful vision for what can be. For a school that's starting with not much, if we don't have much going on in the way of common assessments, if we're just kind of all doing our own thing and all over the map as far as how well we're using assessment to support learning, where should a school start and where would you like to see a school end up? What are some of the things that we actually need to do to make this happen?

[17:07] SPEAKER_02:

That's a great question. First, every team, like every student in a classroom, every team is in a different place and principals have to pay attention to where those teams are. They're all going to have different starting points. As a base though, there are some non-negotiables. First of all, teams do need to have those norms because we're asking them to put data on the table and that's terrifying. So we've got to have some norms that generate safety.

[17:32]

We also have to have in place Our known priority standards. We're not going to place common assessments absolutely everywhere. That would be overwhelming. So what are those priority features where we're going to place those common assessments? And what do the outside data say we need to be focusing on? If our data suggests our kids are struggling with math, then we should be doing common assessments in the area of math.

[17:56]

So we pay attention to the big picture and we say, where are we going to place these? Once we're clear about that, teachers go in and they identify their targets inside those priority standards and they start to talk about what's the pathway, what are some of the small formative things we're going to have to do to make sure kids are ready at the summative level. Not every assessment is going to be formative, but we need to talk about which ones would be key points for us to check in together as a team to know that they were going to be successful. and what's our summative going to be. Once we know that path, we know the summative up front, we know some of the small formatives that we're going to check in on along the way, teachers go into their individual classrooms and they do that work and they respond accordingly to what's happening in front of them They give some of those small common formatives. We stop and check to see how it's going, make adjustments if necessary.

[18:46]

We go back in. We keep doing the work with ongoing kinds of formatives until we get to that summative. When we score that summative, then we start to look at, okay, so are there children who are still struggling? And if so, what's our response going to be? What types of errors were they making? Is this a critical piece that they need right now?

[19:05]

Can they pick it up later? So we go through a set of kind of questions to try to figure out what are we going to do to respond. Where do teams start in that process? Like I said, everybody's in a different place. Some people might already know all of their assessments, and now they just need to decide which ones are common. Some people don't even have assessments, and so they might start with what they have in their curricular resources, start to align targets to it, and just realize we've got to change some of these items.

[19:33]

They don't match our standard at all. So they're all going to start in a very different place. But one piece that I really highly recommend is that you look for small wins. If you, for example, have a team that doesn't even want to engage, let's just do a single question exit ticket on a Friday, right? We've been teaching all week this particular concept, justifying our mathematical thinking. So on Friday, we're going to give kids a problem, a single problem, and on a three-by-five card, we're going to ask them to justify their thinking.

[20:04]

Then we're going to get together at the end of the day, and we're going to sort those cards into piles. These are good. These are not so good. And then we're going to subdivide the not so good. What types of mistakes are these making? It could be a 15-minute process of dividing the cards.

[20:19]

Then we're going to look at those cards and say, so what's the instructional intervention for each type of error that was made? We're going to swoop up some cards, walk back into our classroom, and engage our kids in a like process. The reason I say do something small is because celebration is curiously serious business. And so when teams feel the win, when they understand the power of diagnosing error and making a different instructional choice in a very small sound bite, they actually choose to do more. So are there ways that principals can set teams up for success and have them try it and then even come back to the full staff and say, gosh, here's what we tried and here's what we learned. So to answer the second part of your question, what's the long run goal?

[21:07]

When people fully use the process of common assessments, I would love them to have data conversations that were so rejuvenating, so energizing and and enlightening in terms of how we be the best teacher we can be, that teams couldn't understand how not to have that meeting. Today, we don't have those kinds of meetings. People sit in rooms. They sort kids based on numbers. They try to teach over and over and over. The kids aren't getting it.

[21:35]

People are frustrated. So we're not really yet quite deeply looking at learning. And that's the part that I'm hoping we can infuse in the conversation with collaborative common assessments.

[21:46] SPEAKER_01:

Fabulous. So the book is called Collaborative Common Assessments, Teamwork Instruction Results. And I think that that subtitle kind of recaptures the whole sequence of things that do produce those results and that do create a situation where we as adults are working together in teams to meet the needs of our students. So Cassandra, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Thank you.

[22:14] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[22:19] SPEAKER_01:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Cassandra Erkins about collaborative common assessments? For me, one of the biggest takeaways is that all of these things that we talked about previously really feed into each other. Having high functioning professional learning communities, having common assessments that students are working toward, that teachers are working toward, having teachers work together to review student work and identify areas of weakness in their curriculum and identify students who need additional support and talk together about what needs to be done to help all students get to where we want them to be and that process of going through the standards and not eliminating any but really identifying the key standards you can really see how so many of these things fit together so tightly And if we don't have the basic structures in place to help our teachers work together, to really break down those walls of isolation, that's the starting point.

[23:17]

We've got to get teachers working together. But at the same time, we've got to get teachers doing something that's actually meaningful. Because I can't tell you how many times I've heard from people or personally experienced this sense that we're supposed to be meeting, that we're supposed to sit down and work together, but we don't actually have any collaborative work. So if you are looking for that first starting point, what do we have teachers actually work on in their professional learning communities? So they're not just comparing notes on lesson plans and kind of leaving it at that and then getting back to normal team business, but they're actually engaging in. a shared enterprise.

[23:54]

They're working on something together that could not exist without that collaboration. Start with those common assessments and they don't have to be end of course exams. They can be something much more simple. As Cassandra said, they can be an exit ticket that gets looked at the following week. Start there and then And if you're looking for more resources, again, check out her book on Common Collaborative Assessments. Check out the DuFour's books on professional learning communities.

[24:22]

They have a huge series that's helped thousands of schools develop high-functioning professional learning communities. And check out our other interviews on Principal Center Radio. You can find the full archive at principalcenter.com slash radio.

[24:37] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.