the standard for that day?
Most likely, many of these lesson-design elements are already a part of your effort. It must become your intent to bring efficiency and clarity to your use of each of these lesson-design criteria.
The Story of Your Mathematics Homework Design and Grading Routines
There are two additional mathematics issues your team must address: (1) homework and (2) grading. These two very difficult topics tell a story about your professional work as a mathematics teacher or leader.
When it comes to designing mathematics homework, there are many noisy voices and experts claiming advice. You can help your team cut through the noise and find the best wisdom for these important K–12 mathematics issues. In doing so, your story shows that you understand mathematics homework and grading routines through the lens of Mathematics in a PLC at Work. The criteria for a highly effective homework, grading, and design story expect students to reflect, refine, and act as part of the learning process.
Whether it’s basic number sense or calculus, you answer the questions, What is the best we know about the meaningful design elements of homework assignments, the scoring of those assignments, and the effective use of those assignments in class? and How does research inform the idea of homework?
When you lead the process to achieve these answers, you will realize you cannot ignore the role grading can play in inspiring students to learn mathematics—or in destroying their desire to learn mathematics. To that end, we decided to provide the best wisdom we could to help you tell a story of efficient and effective grading routines in mathematics, designed to inspire student perseverance, effort, and engagement in learning all year long. Although you may view grading as a back-burner issue to student learning, you realize that grading eventually becomes part of your required work.
This reaches beyond the role of teachers. As we examined poster papers from an initial brainstorming day, we also found that we had quite a few mile markers for mathematics coaches, team leaders, and administrators. This serves as a reminder that there are many leaders pulling the mathematics teacher collaboration story forward, and so we made the decision to also provide meaningful tools and support for mathematics coaches and leaders.
Common Unit Assessment Formative Process Evaluation
Use this tool to evaluate the current reality of the mathematics assessment process quality for your grade level or course. Unlike in other evaluation tools written into the Every Student Can Learn Mathematics series, the six criteria present in this team discussion tool are somewhat linear. Meaning, your grade-level or course-based team should identify areas to improve in your team’s formative assessment process in the order the criteria are listed.
In some sense, this tool reveals why it is so important for your students to take common unit mathematics assessments that your teacher team writes. It is in the action students take on your mathematics assessment feedback (scoring), the nature in which they embrace their errors, and then your subsequent coordinated team effort to design equitable quality interventions that this tool will significantly impact every student’s mathematics learning.
Formative feedback requires intentional team planning to determine the essential learning standards to be assessed and create common unit assessments that reveal student thinking and learning. From the data revealed through student work on the assessments, your team can plan for students to reflect and set goals for continued learning. You can also plan for how your students will re-engage in learning through the shared intervention opportunities your team provides.
The intent of students analyzing their performance on the end-of-unit assessment is to help each student build responsibility for his or her own learning. Although each student takes ownership of his or her individual progress toward each of the essential learning standards, students may still work together to meet those standards. Students can work together when your team provides equitable feedback to students, regardless of which teacher students have.
Student goal setting during and at the end of each unit helps them to see what they learned well and what they still need to learn. Such collaboration with peers and this ownership of learning engage students more deeply in the learning process and provide evidence for each student that effective effort built on the reflect, refine, and act cycle of learning leads to improved mathematical understanding and success.
Common Assessment Self-Reflection Protocol
Use the self-reflection team assessment protocol as a survey for each member of your team. Then, use your responses for a subsequent discussion with each member of your grade-level or course-based mathematics team. Share your personal unit-by-unit assessment practices and routines with one another. You can use each team member’s responses to find initial common ground for your collective mathematics assessment work. Discuss your responses and, as a collaborative team, reach consensus and determine how you will build your common assessments and how you will use those assessments to support formative student learning routines.
Assessment Instrument Quality Evaluation Rubric
A great place to begin your initial work as a professional learning community team in mathematics is the collaborative design and writing of your common unit assessments. DuFour et al. (2016) describe the importance of using common assessment instruments this way: “One of the most powerful, high-leverage strategies for improving student learning available to schools is the creation of frequent, high-quality common assessments by teachers who are working collaboratively to help a group of students acquire agreed-on knowledge and skills” (p. 141).
Creating common assessments to use during and at the end of each unit ensures equity in the rigor of the mathematics problems used for the assessments. It will also help your team to backward-map your instruction during the unit as you prepare the students for the expected and required rigor. Ideally, your team should create these common unit assessments before the unit begins.
You can use the eight criteria in this evaluation rubric to determine the quality of your current common unit assessments. A rating of 1 has a description attached and would be considered poor performance with these test criteria. A rating of 4 indicates your current common assessments act as an exemplar in these criteria we could all learn from. Regardless of your self-rating, make it a team goal to keep improving the quality of your unit-by-unit mathematics assessments.
You should also note that, if you do not collaborate to become a 4 in each category, the first four mathematics assessment design criteria listed here often create places of great inequity in your mathematics assessment process and professional work. Perhaps the most important are the identification of and emphasis on essential learning standards, the balance of higher- and lower-level-cognitive-demand tasks, the variety of assessment-task formats and use of technology, and the appropriate scoring rubric. Yet, these are also the most limiting aspects of many mathematics unit assessments—both during and at the end of a unit.
Mathematics Intervention Program Evaluation Tool
The third critical question of a PLC at Work expects your team and school to develop a robust response to the question: What will be our response when students do not learn the expected standards for each grade level or course? You can use this evaluation tool to rate
