team members have agreed that the standard is so important that their learners will need to master it; therefore, the team will need a common summative assessment to collectively certify that all of the learners have been successful.
Once the standards have been unpacked and the targets are clear, teams proceed to design formative and summative assessments and determine which will be common. In this step, teams begin to map out an assessment plan that serves as a guide to help them make strategic decisions. Every unit of instruction should include a balanced assessment system, meaning there will be one or more summative assessments along with some formative assessments to help frame the pathway to success for learners and their teachers. Not all assessments on an assessment map will be common.
Once a pathway has been delineated, teams need to make decisions about the timing and frequency of their common assessments. Teams who use common formative assessments throughout units of instruction typically find learners require fewer opportunities to re-engage in the learning after the summative assessment because they monitored learners’ success all along. So, teams will want to identify a few common formative assessments in their unit of instruction.
The most important part of this step involves actually writing the summative assessment. It is critical that the entire team participates in its development and all individuals clearly understand the expectations for the summative assessment in advance of launching their classroom instruction. All teachers must understand the targets and what quality will look like through the summative assessment in order to be successful in any of the following aspects.
• They are certain the assessment accurately measures the standards and targets.
• They are confident they will generate quality evidence to certify mastery for their learners.
• They are clear regarding their formative pathway to success.
• They can deliver laser-like instruction to support learning regarding the standards.
• They will be able to interpret their results with consistency and accuracy.
Once the summative assessment is created, teams can be very focused and specific in their development and use of formative assessments. Without the summative assessments in place, however, common formative assessments become loose pebbles on a pathway that leads nowhere.
The Delivery Phase
With the assessment road map in hand, teachers enter the next step in their classrooms and begin instruction and ongoing assessment. Although what happens from room to room is never exactly the same, as so many different variables play out while teaching, assessment is an integral component of instruction in all classrooms (Chappuis, Stiggins, Chappuis, & Arter, 2012; Hattie, 2009, 2012; Wiliam, 2011). Master teachers adjust instruction minute by minute as they progress through their lessons. Figure 1.4 highlights the components of the delivery phase of the process.
Figure 1.4: The collaborative common assessment delivery phase.
Note the smaller iterative cycle between the triangle highlighting instruction and the assessment rectangle in figure 1.4, which indicates that the individual teacher is monitoring and responding to the results on a more frequent basis, just as the larger team is on a less frequent basis.
The assessments included in the monitoring assessment rectangle range from very informal questions and classroom discussions, to more formal formative assessment checks, to preplanned common formative assessment checkpoints. In essence, the classroom assessments include almost everything the teacher does to determine where the learners are relative to where they need to be. Teams make individual and sometimes collective re-engagement or intervention decisions during the instructional process to ensure their learners are as ready for the summative assessment as possible. Teachers and learners alike should walk into the summative assessment experience already knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt how they will perform. If the formative assessment process is handled well, summative assessments simply become celebrations of all that has been learned during the delivery phase.
The Data Phase
Collaborative common assessments are the engine of a learning team because they provide the data and evidence that inform practice and ultimately lead to a team’s and individual teacher’s instructional agility in his or her classroom. Whether the collaborative assessment was formative or summative, teams must tally and review common assessment results and revise curriculum, instruction, and assessments as needed in the data phase. When teachers collaboratively and thoughtfully engage in the data phase, teachers can respond more appropriately to the individual needs of their learners than they may have on their own.
An added benefit to collaborative common assessments over individual classroom assessments is that teachers can generate program data during this phase. Classroom assessments by themselves do not offer great program improvement data because of the unlimited and unforeseen number of variables that may have contributed to the results, whereas common assessments limit some of the variables and provide comparative data. Data in isolation can only form experiences and frame opinions, but data in comparison create information. Figure 1.5 isolates the parts of the collaborative common assessment process that engage teachers in the data phase.
Figure 1.5: The collaborative common assessment data phase.
As teams tally, review, and explore the artifacts and results of their data, they search for key themes, repeating patterns, anomalies, or any other insightful components that will help them revise curriculum, instruction, and assessments as needed to make program improvements. At this juncture, teams use protocols, data templates, and student work to analyze data, conduct error analysis, and make strategic decisions about what comes next in their work.
The Re-Engagement Process
The design, delivery, and data phases are essential components of the collaborative common assessment process. The re-engagement process, however, is not guaranteed. In fact, if the collaborative common assessment process works as designed, few, if any, learners will require additional instruction. Ideally, there will be no need to re-engage learners in the learning following the initial instruction and summative assessments.
The work of responding with targeted re-engagement strategies is pictured in figure 1.6 as the smaller circle, which is a mirror image of the main circle comprising the design, delivery, and data phases.
Figure 1.6: The collaborative common assessment re-engagement cycle.
The re-engagement circle is smaller in size to represent the idea that fewer and fewer learners should require additional support, especially if the team worked collaboratively during the formative stages. The process is identical. Once teachers identify struggling learners, they must identify the targets that will require additional time and support, design the next assessments, create focused, alternate, and sometimes corrective instructional strategies and tools to address
