I.1.
Table I.1: Instructional Agility and the Other Assessment Tenets
| Assessment Tenet | Brief Explanation | Contribution to Instructional Agility |
| Assessment Purpose | Understanding assessment purpose means having a clear picture of how to use emerging assessment results. | The assessment’s purpose helps clarify what assessment results teachers should use as instruction occurs. Hesitation (or a mixed message) could interfere with the necessary instructional maneuvers and student engagement as students act on feedback they receive during instruction. If the teacher is unclear about the assessment’s purpose, he or she could lead students to care more about completing work than learning from their efforts and improving over time. |
| Assessment Architecture | Assessment is most effective when those responsible for its delivery purposefully plan it and intentionally sequence it in advance of instruction. | Planning with precision allows for maximum agility in response to emerging assessment evidence. By anticipating the most probable errors in thinking, teachers can plan their responses should those errors emerge. Identifying the most essential learning informs teachers when to make instructional moves to help students go deeper and learn more and what to revisit or let go. |
| Accurate Interpretation | Interpreting assessment results must be accurate, accessible, and reliable. | Instructional maneuvers are most efficient and effective when teachers accurately interpret assessment results. Clear next steps for individual students and instruction hinge on a teacher’s interpretation, which he or she has generated from students’ actions, dialogue, and work. Recognizing these moments is essential to accurately interpreting and providing the foundation for communicating those next steps. |
| Communication of Results | Communicating assessment results must generate productive responses from students and all stakeholders who support them. | Communicating results and next steps is essential for students to take immediate action. Opaque communication could cause an unnecessary delay in growth and achievement. Instructionally agile teachers focus on providing and facilitating next steps in learning. They must communicate this type of feedback in a way that inspires students to act and doesn’t shut them down or confuse them. |
| Student Investment | There is a symbiotic relationship between assessment and self-regulation. | The ultimate goal is for students to be instructionally agile on their own behalf. Through self- and peer assessment they can, at best, be a more readily available source of feedback and guidance for one another. |
We explore each of these five tenets in more detail throughout the book. For now, it is important to know that it is the ways in which the tenets interconnect that maximize the power of the classroom assessment experience.
About the Book
We know that you, who are K–12 teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators, will be at varying places in your understanding and assessment practice implementation specific to instructional agility. Some of you might have a noun-like, event-based view of assessment, while others may be further along in intentionally thinking about instructional agility. In this book, we explore the granular use of classroom assessment for instructional purposes, which means moment-to-moment, flexible assessment that occurs at the classroom level. So while we include a few points around grades and scores, as well as interim or large-scale assessments, the primary focus of instructional agility centers on how teachers and students use assessment results within the classroom on a daily basis.
Chapters 1 and 2 are about the culture of learning required to support instructional agility at the classroom level. Chapters 3–6 highlight the specific maneuvers teachers must employ to be agile. Finally, chapter 7 and the “Instructional Agility Manifesto” offer considerations for the beliefs and structures necessary for teachers to engage in the work of instructional agility. Each chapter begins with an instructionally agile maneuver’s main ideas. These ideas include a brief synopsis of the research associated with the specific strategy. Next, we explain each maneuver at play or in action with more details. The maneuvers we offer apply to all grade levels and disciplines and may require minor adjustments for specific grade levels or content areas. The main ideas discuss the why, while the explanation is the how. From there, each chapter highlights strategies and tools teachers can use to be instructionally agile within that maneuver. Each chapter ends with a conclusion and a pause and ponder section, in which questions guide individual teachers and learning teams to consider potential next steps in implementation.
Assessment Is Teaching
Teaching without assessment is not teaching; it is delivering information or creating random, haphazard activities. It is only through assessment that teachers can discern the discrepancy between a student’s current understanding and the desirable performance level; it is only through assessment that teachers know what comes next for each student. The assessment as verb lens ensures teachers view assessment and instruction not as separate silos, but as two halves of the same whole.
Coaches are always assessing their athletes. Teaching through this lens of assessment is how teachers make real-time maneuvers to navigate instructional plans—whether that’s for the next five minutes or even five days—using observations, student work, and student actions to determine if what they are doing is working. Teaching through assessment requires precision in planning, which allows maximum agility in responding to the needs of all students. We invite you to join us as we dive deeply into exploring the concepts and actions of instructional agility.
CHAPTER 1
ESTABLISHING A CULTURE OF LEARNING
Research in both learning and motivation supports the idea that classroom assessment is not solely the end point. Rather, it is a powerful agent for influencing learning and motivation.
—James H. McMillan
Maintaining a classroom culture that is conducive to learning is paramount to every teacher’s instructional efforts and ultimate success. Culture, a group’s generally unspoken but commonly shared attitudes, beliefs, values, goals, behaviors, rituals, and social norms, can act as a lever or a roadblock to change. In other words, a teacher who intends to apply powerful strategies with instruction and assessment but does not attend to the classroom culture will most likely fail despite those strategies. If, for example, the students in a school have adopted the attitude that learning is not cool, and that culture is pervasive, then a teacher’s effort to employ the best instructional strategy will have minimal impact. On the other hand, a teacher who strives to create the desired culture and then aligns instructional efforts to those shared beliefs will experience rapid change. Culture is that powerful.
When educators develop a school culture
