in the collaborative common assessment process. When teacher teams properly design, deliver, and analyze collaborative common assessments, it helps teachers build instructional agility, the ability to quickly adjust instruction so it responds to learners’ needs. Done well, collaborative common assessments are the educators’ formative assessments; the resulting information from common assessments gives educators, like students, additional opportunities to improve their results over time.
As a summary to his meta-analysis of over eight hundred research studies in education, John Hattie (2012) provides a ringing endorsement of the power of common assessments to generate excellence in education when he concludes:
a major theme is when teachers meet to discuss, evaluate, and plan their teaching in light of the feedback evidence about the success or otherwise of their teaching strategies and conceptions about progress and appropriate challenge. This is not critical reflection, but critical reflection in light of evidence about their teaching. (p. 19)
Using such evidence can increase precision, flexibility, and responsiveness among teachers, making common assessments the vehicle for creating teachers who are instructionally agile and teams that are collectively efficacious.
As teams begin the journey of implementing the collaborative common assessment process, they will find it helpful to understand certain foundational concepts of the process. To begin, it’s important teams have a clear, working definition and established criteria for collaborative common assessments. Fortunately, there are many protocols and tools that can help teams determine whether they are meeting quality indicators for their work.
Defining Collaborative Common Assessments
Experts agree that common assessments yield data that educators can use to improve learning (Ainsworth & Viegut, 2006; Bailey & Jakicic, 2012; DuFour et al., 2016; Hattie, 2009; Reeves, 2006). Every author on this subject offers a slightly different definition of common assessments, but all authors—even those who do not classify themselves as professional learning community (PLC) experts—stick with the same theme; namely, common assessments provide the real-time evidence required for educators to reflect critically on their impact so they can then design targeted responses to move learning forward for their students (Ainsworth & Viegut, 2006; Bailey & Jakicic, 2012; DuFour et al., 2016; Hattie, 2009; Reeves, 2006).
The collaborative common assessment process puts educators in the driver’s seat and provides teachers with the necessary opportunity to assess according to their learners’ needs. The process needs to remain as close as possible to the classroom for teachers and their learners. When teachers reference their local classroom assessment results with their observations, experience, and curricular expertise, they tend to have a higher degree of clarity regarding what comes next in the learning for the students they serve. Likewise, schoolwide interventions can miss the mark if the classroom teacher’s concerns and insights are ignored. Teachers must drive the assessment and intervention decisions at the classroom level first.
A collaborative common assessment is any assessment that meets all five of the following criteria.
1. Formative or summative
2. Team created or team endorsed
3. Designed or approved in advance of instruction
4. Administered in close proximity by all instructors
5. Dependent on teamwork
Each of these criteria is integral to the collaborative common assessment process.
Formative or Summative
The goal of using formative assessments is to provide information that improves a learner’s ability to be successful, whereas the goal of using summative assessments is to prove a learner’s level of proficiency at the conclusion of the learning journey (Chappuis, Stiggins, Chappuis, & Arter, 2012; Erkens, Schimmer & Vagle, 2017, Wiliam 2011, 2018). Because both are necessary to support learning, common assessments should be both formative and summative in nature (Erkens, 2016). A team requires a common summative assessment (CSA) in order to ultimately certify mastery on a predetermined priority standard. If teams do not start by framing a collaborative summative assessment, then their CFAs serve as loose pebbles on a meandering pathway, rather than sequential rungs on a ladder with a clear trajectory and targeted destination. A team requires common formative assessments to discover and address areas needing improvement before the summative assessment is given. It is far better to intervene during the unit of instruction than it is to re-engage students in learning after the summative has been given. Teams that develop and effectively employ CFAs typically find that they need to conduct fewer and fewer re-engagement strategies following a CSA.
Team Created or Team Endorsed
The entire team must either write the assessment together or co-review and endorse the assessment that it has selected for use. This detail matters greatly. Asking teachers to give an assessment over which they have little ownership is like asking them to ride a city bus and care deeply about the road signs the bus encounters along the way. They will care deeply about the many road signs only if they are driving the bus. Moreover, if one person writes the assessment for the team and something goes wrong with the assessment process, the team generally blames the author. The entire team must take an active role in determining the assessments that it will use to monitor its instruction.
Designed or Approved in Advance of Instruction
Everyone loses when teachers retrofit assessments to the instruction that preceded the testing experience. Since instruction is the visible and immediate actionable step in the teaching and learning process, it feels natural to plan it first. However, a closer look reveals how that practice costs teachers and students time and learning opportunities. Teachers lose because they have to try to remember all the things they said during instruction and then begin the time-consuming process of prioritizing what’s important to test. Many times, this leads to inaccurate assessments, primarily because they don’t align to the standards. Instruction that wanders without a known, specific target has no chance of hitting its desired mark for teachers or their learners (Erkens et al., 2017; Hattie, 2009; Heritage, 2010, 2013; Wiliam, 2011, 2018). When teachers don’t frame the assessment road map or architecture in advance of the instruction, the instructional designs can misfire, and learners then miss critical components and interconnected concepts.
The greatest concern when teachers retrofit assessment to instruction, however, is that inaccurate assessments yield inaccurate results. In such a case, both the teacher and the learner draw conclusions based on dirty data. Dirty data contain inaccuracies, hide truths with oversimplifications, or mislead with false positives or false negatives. Such data can only lead to inaccurate feedback. When that happens, learners cannot receive the appropriate support they need to master not only what they learn but also how they learn. Conversely, when teams clarify summative assessments in advance of instruction, teams are often able to find instructional time, instead of waste it, because they can strategically determine what it will take for each learner to be successful on the assessment, they can ensure alignment of their assessment and curricular resources, and they can respond more accurately and with a laser focus in their intervention efforts. While the educational literature has recognized this model—backward design—since the 1990s (Jacobs, 1997; McTighe & Ferrara, 2000; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), it is still not a prevalent practice.
Administered in Close Proximity by All Instructors
While most teams succeed in having all students take a common assessment on the same day, that isn’t always doable, as many things (school cancellations, emergency drills, and so on) can easily interrupt the school day. If teams are to respond to learners
