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Promoting the Use of Assessment and Data for School and District Improvement
Assessment and data are teachers' best tools for understanding where their students are and where they need to go. An age-old adage I often hear is “meet the students at their level”. It is impossible to do so without reliable and effective assessment data that gives teachers a clear understanding of students' content knowledge and skills. Collaborating with colleagues to design and interpret assessment data is the first step to improvement. Additionally, building trust can open up opportunities to have reflective conversations about what the data reflects and collaborate on ways to move forward to create improvement.
Artifact 1
At my current school, second language learners make up the majority of my students. To support my students’ language acquisition within my content area, it is important for me to understand their overall language skills in English. At the beginning of this year, I advocated for specialist teachers to gain access to WIDA scores and data that is collected by our language support teachers. Gaining access to this data allowed other specialists and me to better understand what level of language our students possessed and what supports and scaffolding we needed to put in place to support their content vocabulary acquisition better. For example, I was able to identify a student who I previously thought had little understanding of musical concepts based on their output; however, the WIDA data Told me that the student had high listening skills but low reading, writing, and speaking skills. With this data in mind and the WIDA framework of “I can do” statements, specialists spent time in team meetings reviewing how content vocabulary instruction is scaffolded and the best ways to assess students based on their language strengths.
WIDACanDosPreK-12-1.xlsx.pdfArtifact 2
To learn more about coaching during my internship, I set up a coaching cycle with one of my school's cognitive coaches. During my conversations with the coach, we identified the need to improve assessment for responding standards in music. Specifically, we worked together to redesign the reflection assessment by reviewing and rewriting the questions and sentence stems provided for students during the assessment. The coach assisted me in brainstorming a variety of questions and sentence stems to support this process. As a result of redesigning my reflection assessment, the data from students shows that students are making deeper connections between their musical choices and the concept we learn about. Additionally, students are using more music content vocabulary and giving more complex answers to questions. This improvement in responding is due to improved questioning and scaffolding provided to students during these assessments. For teachers who do not teach the same subject or grade level as another teacher in the school, coaches are a good resource for reviewing data and improving assessments when team members are not available.
Improved Assessment & Responses
Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium. (2011). Teacher leader model standards. https://www.ets.org/s/education_topics/teaching_quality/pdf/teacher_leader_model_standards.pdf
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