as they develop and continuously monitor their common assessment system. Figure 1.3 (pages 16–17) offers a tool for discussing, planning, and monitoring quality indicators during the design, delivery, and data phases of the collaborative common assessment process. Teams can use the listed indicators to guide decision making during the planning phases or to evaluate their current efforts. The tool includes a rating scale for teams that prefer to use it as a discussion tool about quality levels for each criterion.
Figure 1.2: A pictorial representation of the collaborative common assessment process.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/assessment for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Figure 1.3: Quality indicators for collaborative common assessments.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/assessment for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Teams can use such a tool in many ways. At the school level, teachers could submit their individual responses anonymously to designated leaders (teacher leaders or administrators) so those designated key leaders have a sense of how the collaborative common assessment process is going across the building. Or, a team with high levels of trust and rapport could simply conduct a round-robin to share what teachers individually scored each item and then discuss their final results. If they do not use this as a survey tool, teams could use each indicator as a discussion point as they strive to revise and continuously improve their design, delivery, and data systems. Healthy and productive teams consistently self-evaluate their processes and then make the necessary modifications or refinements to guarantee their ultimate success (Erkens & Twadell, 2012).
Conclusion
Confusion and mistrust reign when the common assessment process is approached as a series of disparate activities rather than a cohesive and integrated system. Staff need to see the big picture of the common assessment process. Members need to understand the rationale, co-create commitments to one another, and then, with a high degree of comfort in place, make themselves vulnerable and available to learning. The teaching and learning process should never be something educators reserve exclusively for the classroom. When collaborative team meetings involve exploring the team’s impact from a place of openness, inviting intellectual risk taking for creative problem solving, and sharing responsibility for challenges that loom ahead, then teachers engage the teaching and learning process within their team meetings.
Team Reflections
Take a few moments to reflect on the following questions.
• What benefits do we anticipate having, or what benefits have we already experienced, from the process of engaging in collaborative common assessment?
• Do the staff (or does our team) clearly understand the work of collaborative common assessment? If so, what evidence do we have to support our belief? If not, what evidence do we have to support our belief, and how can we help them understand it?
• Do staff (or does our team) feel safe? How do we know? Are there promises we need to provide to create a safety net? If so, what might those be? What process or processes would we have to use to create and share those promises?
• How will our current teamwork help us fully utilize the collaborative common assessment process? Are there things we might need to improve on? If so, what, and how?
• Is our team, school, or district system ready for the collaborative common assessment process? Have we identified the elements that we will need to add, modify, or delete as we embark on the collaborative common assessment process? If so, what are they?
2
Evidence and Research Supporting the Collaborative Common Assessment Process
As noted in Collaborative Common Assessments (Erkens, 2016), in a culture of assessment fatigue:
Collaborative common assessments provide a powerful mode of inquiry-based professional development that seeks to improve student achievement and professional practice. For teams to develop the shared knowledge and skills of assessment literacy and instructional agility, they must work together to ask the right questions, explore their own results, and create solutions to complex challenges. (p. 5)
Collaborative common assessments require teachers’ involvement in the entire process—from accurate design to effective use of classroom assessment information. Research and evidence show that, when teachers do this well, the full process benefits learners, teachers, and schools and systems.
A Win for Learners
When everyone fully participates in the consistent and systematic process of collaborative common assessment, no question, the learners win. Educational researchers and experts (Chenoweth, 2008, 2009a; Gallimore, Ermeling, Saunders, & Goldenberg, 2009; Hattie, 2009; Levin, 2008; Odden & Archibald, 2009) as well as practitioners consistently find that when teams use collaborative common assessment strategies, their schools experience remarkable change. See, for example, www.allthingsplc.info/evidence, which showcases the tremendous results K–12 schools of all sizes and socioeconomic circumstances, from all parts of the United States, and other countries as well, can achieve when they fully embrace the common assessment process as PLCs. The examples featured on this site highlight how schools’ student achievement dramatically increases when teams have consistent and clear work patterns and maintain a laser focus on using the practices necessary for collaborative common assessment. These achievement results have driven experts to unpack and analyze the strategies that teams use in these schools, which include collaborating, narrowing the curriculum and aligning it to standards, employing formative assessments for frequent results monitoring, and using data to inform instruction. Two such schools, Hawk Elementary in Texas and Rutland High School in Vermont, made great gains using the common assessment process in unique ways. While their stories began some time ago, the conditions under which they launched the work are worth noting.
In 2012, all grade-level teams at Mildred M. Hawk Elementary School (affectionately known as Hawk Elementary), a K–5 building in Texas’s Denton Independent School District, set about raising student achievement in mathematics through the use of collaborative common assessments. While Hawk Elementary didn’t have terrible aggregate scores compared with the state, they weren’t at 100 percent success, and they clearly had groups of learners who were struggling. The staff wanted to make certain that they did not simply focus on the results of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test but instead prepared their learners to be career and college ready. They developed a schoolwide goal to increase the learners’ proficiency levels in the areas of problem solving and critical thinking, as they firmly believed that if their learners could do that level of rigorous work, they would perform well on any state test they encountered. That year, the third-grade team received its 2012 STAAR test results for mathematics, which table 2.1 shows.
Based on these state data, each team from kindergarten to grade 5 established improvement goals, commonly identified as SMART goals, that aligned to the building-level goal to improve mathematics
