establishes her credibility through the use of specific case studies with the real names of schools. That adds immensely to the credibility of the data she reports. While many books provide a composite of schools or hide the identity of the purportedly successful schools, she uses public and verifiable data to establish the validity of her claims. While collaborative common assessments are certainly not the only cause for gains in student achievement, she makes a persuasive case that in different schools with different student populations, the same assessment strategies are often associated with gains in student achievement. Another component of the credibility of this book is a superior synthesis of the research. While the author’s personal experiences are surely important, she does not attempt to generalize her own work to the universe of students. As her extensive reference section attests, she brings together a variety of other research formats, including qualitative and quantitative studies, meta-analyses and syntheses of meta-analyses. Taken as a whole, the evidence strongly supports the author’s claims that the impact of effective assessment depends not merely on the quality of the assessment itself, but on how those assessments are used to improve teaching, learning, and leadership.
Closely related to credibility is authenticity—the degree to which the book reflects real-world classroom experiences. Readers will find extensive quotations from teachers who are directly engaged in the process. These are not authority figures making pronouncements without the distraction of having students in the room. They are real teachers in real schools, who struggle to analyze data, yet persevere through the process. They are professional and confident enough to publicly discuss their assessment results, yet they are also willing to be vulnerable, learning from colleagues and their own students. Another element of authenticity is the author’s understanding of the multiple demands on the time of the classroom teacher. Using the metaphor of the architect, she recognizes that assessment is only part of the daily challenge of classroom instruction. Rather than an afterthought, collaborative common assessments must be placed in the complex system of curriculum design, standards, and externally required tests, as well as a host of other demands on teachers who have a fixed amount of time to deliver on a growing number of demands. Teachers who are reading this book will find an empathetic voice in these pages.
The third characteristic of this book is that it is immensely practical. Chapter 6, “Delivering New Approaches to Assessment,” is a particularly good example of what common collaborative assessments look like in practice. Just as novelists are encouraged to “show, not tell,” Erkens gives the reader not only practical advice but real examples at every level of instruction. “Show me how this works in high school,” readers demand. “Show me how this works in an urban environment, EL environment, suburban environment, and so on.” These are reasonable requests, and this book delivers. By using illustrative dialogues in a variety of contexts, the author shows readers what successful delivery looks like.
Fourth, this book is passionate. When one considers the words passion and assessment, educators and students alike are quick to identify the emotions most associated with any sort of tests: anger, frustration, and fear. While recognizing that these emotions prevail among educators, Erkens brings a different sort of passion to the page. In the fourth chapter, she writes:
Education must be about igniting curiosity, stirring passion, and kindling lifelong intrigue for learners and teachers. It’s time then for teaching teams to name and claim their vision for their learners, to collectively engage in risk taking and exploration, and to track progress in a manner that builds hope and efficacy for all. (p. 69)
Engaging the full intellectual and emotional energies of students and teachers is at the heart of effective collaborative common assessments. For all the practical advice in this book, it is good to remember that practice without passion is a formula for boredom and burnout.
Credibility, authenticity, practicality, and passion—those are the essential characteristics of what you will find in the following pages. I hope that you will enjoy this challenging and rewarding journey.
Introduction
Doing Assessment Right … All the Time
Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all-time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.
—Vince Lombardi
In a culture of over-testing students, it might seem odd to encourage the practice of designing and using common assessments, even if those assessments were designed to be formative in nature. Aren’t such assessments just another level of high-stakes tests getting closer and closer to classroom daily practice with increased frequency? Wouldn’t the use of common assessments, whether formative or summative in nature, only generate additional mounds of accountability data about learners and teachers? Educators already express concerns about being data wealthy but information bankrupt. Teachers state they feel burdened by the quantity of data gathered by or disseminated to any organization beyond their school, and they openly distrust the quality of those data that repeatedly measure that which doesn’t matter and over which they have had little control. Teachers need to be information rich; they need the right information in a timely manner to make informed decisions in their day-by-day and minute-by-minute interactions with learners. They require tools that will help them be instructionally agile, able to quickly adjust instruction to respond to learners’ needs.
When common assessments are not collaborative—when they are not carefully designed and thoughtfully employed by all the members of the teaching team who require the data to inform instruction—the resulting assessments and the system in which they are embedded could serve as yet another set of “gotcha” tests meant to sort and select teachers and students alike. Unfortunately, many common assessment systems are developed by others (internal experts, external experts, committees of teachers, or a few select teachers) and then provided to the staff who are expected to use the assessments without modification. Such practices happen at every level of the educational system. Though the authors of those assessments profess to support learning with their tools, the truth of the matter is that the assessments are employed by the end users as another tool for measuring learning rather than supporting learning.
When common assessment systems are not collaboratively designed, employed, studied, and addressed, the following practices can lead to common assessment systems that merely monitor learning rather than support learning.
• State or district officials use the data to qualify (or alternatively deny) teachers for merit pay.
• Educational leaders within a system gather representative teachers to design end-of-term common assessments to be used as benchmarks.
• District- and building-level administrators require a specific number of assessments and the ensuing data be submitted for accountability purposes, but they themselves do not use the data to support teachers in their own continued learning.
• The test developers rely heavily on pencil-and-paper assessments for common assessment work.
• Teachers employ common assessments solely as a pathway to test preparation for high-stakes end-of-semester or end-of-year testing.
• Teachers select ready-made assessments without an analysis of a match to the learning standards, an adequate sampling of items per standard, and a leveling of the rigor involved in the items, tasks, or performance indicators.
• Teachers generate common data without embedding the practice of collaboratively examining and scoring student work.
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