of their instructional efforts. Using those common assessment results, teams can then successfully address both questions three and four: How will we respond when some students do not learn? and How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient? Done well, the entire collaborative common assessment process provides educators with the necessary, timely, and relevant information to make informed, real-time instructional maneuvers. Teams that focus on learning must use their common assessment data to determine the effectiveness of their efforts and improve their overall results.
Phases of the Collaborative Common Assessment Process
The book Collaborative Common Assessments: Teamwork. Instruction. Results. (Erkens, 2016) outlines the common assessment process in five different phases, highlighting the need for collaboration in each phase: (1) preparation, (2) design, (3) delivery, (4) data, and (5) re-engagement.
In the preparation phase, team members form the agreements necessary to guide their work (for example, team norms, essential standards, SMART goals, and assessment road maps indicating when and where common assessments will be used). Though much of this foundational work happens before the common assessment process launches, it is never done. Teams are constantly revisiting their norms and essential standards.
In the second phase, the design phase, teachers work together to unpack and repack standards. The conversation is critical to the team’s success in understanding what the standards mean and what student proficiency will ultimately need to look like. Simply reading documents outlining what is expected of each teacher does not guarantee common understanding or interpretation. Once a team has reached key agreements, it can begin designing the summative assessments and then plan backward for formative assessments that will ultimately lead to student success on the summative assessments.
During the delivery phase, phase 3, teachers provide instruction in their individual classrooms and the team of teachers gathers periodically during collaborative time to monitor the progress of the students in their room. During this phase, teachers use common formative assessments (CFAs), as well as some of their own assessments, to identify errors and strategize regarding the instructional interventions they can use to prepare students for the summative assessments.
In phase 4, the data phase, teachers examine the results of their instructional impact during a previous lesson (formative) or a completed unit of study (summative) by mining the data and artifacts they generated from assessments. In this phase, teachers isolate which students need what type of support and for what reasons; then, together they strategize ways they can further the learning for all of their students through interventions or extensions.
In the final phase, the re-engagement phase, teachers activate the plans they made during the data phase. If they used an intervention, teams reassess to ensure the intervention closed the learning gaps so that all students can continue moving forward. If they used an extension, teams celebrate the learning and help students find ways to share the resulting products or processes that deepened their learning.
Use of This Book
Clearly, each phase of the collaborative common assessment process involves many steps and many decisions. Teams need resources and tools to help them be effective and efficient through collaborative preparation, design, delivery, data, and re-engagement. This handbook serves as a companion to Collaborative Common Assessments (Erkens, 2016). It is intended to assist any team—from the classroom level to the central office level—in implementing the collaborative common assessment process. The handbook offers resources in the form of protocols, templates, tools, and even quality criteria for decision making. While no tool is perfect because it cannot address every context in which a team operates, every tool in this book is offered in the hopes that teams will customize and integrate it to support their own context and effort.
A quick visit to AllThingsPLC (www.allthingsplc.info) will provide readers with compelling evidence of just how powerful schools can be when they embrace the common assessment process. Time and again, K–12 schools of varying sizes, locations, demographics, and cultures prove that schools that embrace common assessments can make staggering academic gains, often in short periods of time. This book offers a multitude of reproducible resources to support your work in this arena. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/assessment to download the free reproducibles featured throughout this book.
Overview of Chapters
Chapter 1 offers foundational information to support readers’ understanding of collaborative common assessments. Chapter 2 introduces readers to research and evidence that show the benefits of collaborative common assessment systems, and sets the tone for the work that teams must do. Chapters 3–7 support teams in implementing and analyzing the collaborative common assessment process. Chapter 3 gives readers tools to navigate the preparation phase of collaborative common assessment work by attending to teamwork, unpacking standards, determining learning targets, and creating assessment road maps. Chapter 4 guides readers through design protocols for planning and writing collaborative common assessments. Chapter 5 focuses on the role of teachers’ instructional agility as they deliver common assessments in the classroom. Chapter 6 shows readers how to review data gleaned from assessments so they ensure all students continue learning. Chapter 7 explores how teams can plan reengagement opportunities after identifying student needs based on common assessment data. Finally, the epilogue offers a fictional story—based on the collaborative common assessment work from many different schools—illustrating how a cross-curricular team can engage in the work of using common assessments with critical competencies. While the story does not provide specifics of each phase, it is meant to provide creative approaches and plausible options regarding the challenges that most often stop a team from engaging in the work at all. It is also meant to reveal how fulfilling and exciting the work can be.
The chapters in this book offer protocols and tools identified as reproducibles so that teams can put them to immediate use. In most cases, the author developed the tools herein alongside teams to support their efforts; in a few cases, teams created the tools and shared them with the author in order to help others embarking in the work. Each chapter also ends with reflection questions that individuals, collaborative teams, and leadership teams can discuss as a means to gauge progress or reflect on general understandings. These questions focus teamwork and guide leadership teams in exploring key areas for decision making as they develop a schoolwide support system for their individual teachers and teams. Looking at the past or the present can always help to guide next steps. Ultimately, the questions are intended to help teams ponder key ideas from the chapter to help them move forward in their own collaborative common assessment efforts. Please accept the challenge to join the ranks of highly effective PLC schools and employ or customize the reproducible resources herein to support your collaborative efforts.
1
Understanding Collaborative Common Assessment
It’s critical that educators ensure every learner graduates prepared to thrive in the complex world that awaits. Toward that end, educators must vigilantly monitor the arc of learning over time. Checklists and tools for designing and monitoring standards, assessment, curriculum, and instruction are key. How do schools and districts equip teachers to harness the power of assessment while bringing joy and passion
