errors.
The more valid, reliable, and frequent local improvement data become, the more likely teams and schools can manage program improvements in significant and timely ways without relying so heavily on external testing data.
Overall, the collaborative common assessment process requires a far greater commitment to teamwork, instruction, and results than the simplistic, popular notion that teams give benchmark assessments and look at the results together.
Ensuring Safety and Shared Commitments
Without a doubt, learning in a public setting by exposing personal successes and failures is risky business. Because of this, the mere suggestion of common assessments may terrify teachers. Without clarity of purpose and commitments of support from administrators, teachers may fear that a negative motivation underpins the organization’s intent.
In truth, common assessments were always only meant to serve as a promising practice to increase teacher success and student achievement. But if teams, schools, and districts don’t handle the common assessment process with thought and great care, concerns regarding uniformity, competition, compliance, or overtesting could become a reality. Think of the common assessment process like any other tool; for example, a hammer could help build a house, but it could also help tear a house down.
When all levels of the organization—teams, schools, and even districts—manage common assessments in collaborative ways, and when teachers receive clear expectations and participate in generating and endorsing shared commitments, then teachers can feel safe to take intellectual risks and explore what deep learning looks like in their content area and grade level. This, then, makes collaborative common assessments the most promising practice teachers can use to support job-embedded, real-time learning regarding the complex issues they face daily in the classroom.
To support the right work happening, leaders must have transparency. Transparency, however, must exceed simply clarifying purpose, as that rarely removes suspicion of motivation. It’s extremely helpful when leaders engage teachers in generating shared commitments to allow for an ego-free zone. Shared expectations provide clarity of purpose, but truly shared commitments provide teachers with the language and tools to keep each other safe and hold each other mutually responsible for the work at hand. It is only when teams feel safe on the journey that they will launch into the risk taking necessary to learn from their experiences.
Shared commitments establish clear understanding and develop parameters to guide the work at all levels of the organization. Such commitment statements offer the organizational promises necessary to create the culture of safety required for intellectual risk taking among professionals.
The following examples of shared commitment statements highlight the kinds of agreements teams might create in order to guide their future decision making and hold each other mutually accountable to the work of common assessments.
• Team commitments statements:
° We will strive to set preferences aside and come together collaboratively to examine best practices and appropriately adapt in data-based ways to address individual student learning needs. Ultimately, we will increase student achievement.
° We will use the collaborative common assessment process to become more reflective and to improve our core instruction, our assessment practices and tools, and our curricular resources.
° We commit to provide extensions and interventions for all of our learners, ensuring they receive the targeted support required to move them forward. We will continue to work with them to ensure mastery on our prioritized learning expectations.
• School commitment statements:
° We will use collaborative common assessments within our teams and across this school to generate evidence of learning. We will use the evidence to reveal successes, learn about improvements, and create supporting learning structures for our students.
° We will build a system of interventions to target the instructional needs that emerge from common assessments. We will monitor the effectiveness of our intervention system and commit to improve it when and where necessary.
° We will improve and refocus instruction based on emerging evidence from common assessments so we can better prepare our learners to succeed beyond our school walls and ultimately to contribute to a global and competitive society.
• District commitment statements:
° We commit to employ rigorous and relevant benchmark assessments with stakeholder input and to monitor the consistency of opportunity from school to school and classroom to classroom.
° We will empower PLCs to elicit, analyze, and act on evidence of student learning for the purpose of continuous improvement in teaching and learning. A shared ownership of learning is critical to the success of both teachers and students.
° We will work with schools to identify areas of concern so that we can support teachers in understanding and implementing the work.
Collective commitments, developed by all who have a hand in doing the work, provide the safety net teachers require to feel safe during the common assessment process. Figure 1.1 (page 14) outlines a general process that organizations can use to develop commitment statements.
While developing commitment statements can take time, the work allows all stakeholders to become clear and comfortable with the changes the statements ask them to make. Commitment statements increase buy-in and provide the assurances needed to encourage intellectual risk taking. Shared agreements naturally form the parameters for all future decision making.
Figure 1.1: Transforming collective statements into commitment statements.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/assessment for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Navigating the Process
Seeing the big picture of the process of collaborative common assessments does for teams what the global positioning system (GPS) does for drivers: it helps teams see the path ahead so they can anticipate next steps. And, just as most maps offer no straight line or single option to get from point A to point B, the road map for collaborative common assessments is recursive and iterative. Teams may find themselves moving from the foundation to monitor learning and going back to the foundation for clarification, and so on. Figure 1.2 offers a pictorial representation of the collaborative common assessment process. This figure maintains the same elements of the collaborative common assessment process defined in Collaborative Common Assessments (Erkens, 2016); however, inside arrows have been added to show the relationships among different parts of the process, and some terminology is different within the individual boxes because, as with any quality process, improvements must occur.
Teams find it helpful to keep figure 1.2 on hand during their work, especially as they initially learn the process. In addition, it helps when teams consider the criteria for quality during the design, delivery, and data phases.
Using Quality Indicators
Because the quality of the common assessment system can vary based on how teams implement it, it’s helpful to have a set of quality
