Assessmentology- Why We Need Assessments

My seven year old son is way into sports, and we have tried them all it seems-- soccer, baseball, basketball, you name it-- we are holding off on football.  It is necessary for me to say here that I like some sports, but I am not the sports fanatic.  I like basketball the best, but I do not have to watch games to survive.  I did not play organized sports growing up, so I have had to adjust my thinking as my son has been in many sports.  I always have my  teacher hat on, so I was recently observing him at baseball practice, and through I had drawn the analogy before, it came clear to me how important formative assessment is.  The coach knows exactly where his weaknesses are (throwing the ball and batting), and that has given him the opportunity to hone practice for him, and it has given me an idea of how to help him at home.  So, when he is home and we are practicing, I know that we are batting (Today, he hit 7 out of 9), and we are still working on that throwing. But I see how sports relates big time to formative assessments.  I am sure that a coach would not want a player to continue to practice something incorrectly or have to correct something during the game.  That is why we have practice.

I have shared this analogy with teachers, and I immediately get the quick retorts:  Yeah, but kids out on the field want to play and want to be there.  Sports are different from learning.  I reply that kids are engaged in the sport usually and they see progress.  My son was highly discouraged as he watched all the balls fly by and he swung, just to miss the ball.  When he began hitting, he built up confidence.  Kids want to be engaged in learning, but they want and need success. Often in classrooms we ask for students to go to the big game without practice and expect greatness without emphasizing the process. When we slow down and teach the process, students do excel

Assessment.  This word gets a lot of attention, and frankly a bad wrap.  I vividly remember when I began teaching at Athens Drive High School, I was recharged.  I had finished three years of grueling learning and teaching in another county, and I came to Athens loaded with optimism.  I remember that year (1996) that I stopped using he word "test" and began using the word "assessment" when I was trying to gauge understanding. In fact, my students fond this humorous, and I would always remind them that I was assessing not testing.  "Testing" has a connotation of trickery, and that is not what I was doing. In this post, I want to look specifically 1) the kinds of assessments that we should be using   2) Why high stakes assessments are not the evil we paint them to be   and 3) how we need to use assessment to move instruction forward

So, I will start with the easiest-- kinds of assessments-- and the least controversial of assessmentology.  Most of s educators are aware of formative and summative assessment and many of us are probably aware of Benchmark assessments.  All of these are important to the learning process, and I argue that diagnostic assessment is an oft overlooked form of assessment. I also content that education often focuses more on summative assessments.  I begin with the basic definitions of assessments:

• Diagnostic assessments were always important to me in the classroom.  These assessments are an amalgamation of previous work and pretty much previous scores on high stake tests.  Looking at overall patterns over time gives me a good idea of where students are when they enter my classroom.  However, it is important to assess students in different ways- even diagnostically.  Vocabulary assessments, writing assessments, and prior content knowledge assessments can be important for students.  Also, it was important for me to get to know students, so I wanted to know their likes and interests and how they learn, so I spent the time gathering this important information.  I used this information all year to group students and to plan instruction. 
• Formative Assessment: This is the buzz word of the day, and they take on many forms.  Warm-ups, exit tickets, question trackers, observations, short quizzes, any form that gathers information about how students are understanding during learning.  These assessments to me are the most important because they are low stakes, highly informative and often given the least attention. Teachers will say (and I do understand) that students will not take these seriously if they know they will not count, but my experience has been different.  Students quickly learn that because I use assessments to differentiate and design curriculum this information become personally important to them.  I have seen the power of formative assessment as students are able to tackle the curriculum focused on their ability. 
• Benchmark Assessments: These are not used as often, but they can be powerful.  Unfortunately, it takes a great deal of time to make because the benchmark should cover a body of material and gauge understanding at a particular time in learning.  This information can then be used formatively.  I used to give a midterm exam that I used as a benchmark to help plan instruction for the rest of the course.  It is important here to explain that my assessments had to be skill driven and not content driven.  
• Summative Assessments: This is the form of assessments that we dwell in most often in education.  We may term them unit tests, chapter tests, etc. These assessments by design are intended to measure what the student has learned.  There really should be little surprises here if teachers have assessed in different ways during the learning process and adjusted curriculum based on the assessment. The pitfall here is that often summative assessments take on a traditional format of multiple choice, matching, fill in the blank, and short answer.  There is nothing inherently wrong with these types of assessments, but mostly they support a content driven summative.  I came to the conclusion that students have End of Course tests, End of grade tests and they have been tested to death, so I moved toward more alternative assessments and assessments where students could show me that they could apply information and create from learned knowledge.  Again, this is a great place to differentiate products for mastery.

Formative assessment with diagnostic assessment can be powerful.  Take this example:  When I went back to the classroom two years ago to teach a restart English III class (another future post), I began by quickly assessing students' reading levels through a short reading assessment that I administered to students the first two days of class.  I was able to quickly identify and group my struggling readers, my on level readers and advanced readers in the class.  Early on in  the class, I was going to teach the Transcendentalists, so I grouped students based on their reading levels.  I used different strategies with my different levels, but our outcome was the same. As the year rolled on, students moved reading groups as some showed weaknesses in reading literary works but not informational works.  I was able to work with the students and gradually release responsibility.Each passing day, students gained confidence.  Did this work for all students? No. Did it work for most? Yes.

One of the biggest arguments that I get about formative assessment in the classroom is that if we do not grade them, students will not take them seriously, so I want to address this portion a bit because it is important.  I will say that I fell into this trap.  A couple of years ago as an Assistant Principal for Curriculum at my school, I decided to teach a class to test out some of the ideas that I had preached: differentiation, grading practices and assessments.  I began every class with a warm-up- a strategy I learned from my math friends. I took them up and graded them and gave students the paper back the next day-- usually 5 questions, so grades were usually 0, 20, 40, etc. I put them in the gradebook, and moved on.  The catch is that when I placed them in the electronic gradebook, they were weighted as 0 weight, so they did not impact the average.  Of course, as students do they began to compare with one another and some healthy competition arose.  After a while students were checking to see who had the higher grades, and I was using the data to customize instruction- high impact, low stakes.  By the way when I printed progress reports, all of the grades for these warm-ups were there, and I never really said if I was counting or not, because in my classroom- "Everything Counts for something."  I used this strategy a lot, and it did work.

Recently the county I work with implemented Benchmark assessments in the high stakes area of testing. So, off we went with benchmarking.  When we got the results back and I disseminated them to the teachers, and we discussed how to use them, I was surprised at the positive feedback that there was for the assessments.  Teachers felt that the information that they gained from the assessments helped them better hone in on areas of weakness for students.  I will pause here because somebody is out there thinking, "Well, there we go teaching to the test."  I will say again, we always teach to some test, so the information that is on the benchmark is aligned to the curriculum that we teach, and we want students to learn the curriculum, so I am not sure what the controversy is.  Again, high impact, low stakes! I have seen some good things happening with teachers and this information:  teachers are customizing learning goals for students based on data, teachers are able to incorporate some on-line help for students based on results, and teachers are able to assign lunch time help with a focus.  Students are able to work on the areas that they need support in and not continue to work on those they do not.  Back to baseball.  There is a kid on my son's team who can hit the ball like nobody's business, so while my son is having drills in batting, this kid is drilling catching.

Recently the state of NC has implemented common assessments for most courses in high school in Math, Science, English and Social Studies.  This has, as you can imagine, caused a rip current of dissent.  Outcries of let me teach, teach to the test, micromanagement...on and on. Again, I go back to the fact that if we are teaching the curriculum, the test will take care of itself.  It is important to take a look at these assessments.  Are they perfect, no! Is any assessment? What is good about them is that most of them have constructed responses on them which requires students to synthesize information and write responses to explain these outcomes.  The assessments ask students to do something with information.  I hear teachers say all the time that a multiple choice test cannot measure what a student knows, and often these are the kinds of tests that I see teachers give to students.  So what makes my multiple choice test better or more valid than a "standardized test"?  Most teacher I hear complaining about these assessments are the ones who give primarily objective tests anyway.  Some of these common exams are going to actually be better than some teacher made exams.  I will get into validity of assessments later in another post, but teachers are not typically trained in test creation.  The difference is that teacher (I am as guilty) is in control of the teacher made exam up to the  day or even the period it is given.

 I cannot say how many inaccurate assessments that I probably gave. Take for example, a teacher who may count all the fill-in-the blanks as three points each, but clearly 4 out of the 10 questions require a deeper understanding than the other 6.  Most of us do not take the time in our teacher-made tests to rank questions according to difficulty or level of thought (Depth of Knowledge comes to mind here), and we can change the test at the last minute.  I cannot tell you how many times that I have heard (and said myself) that a teacher does not want to use an assessment created by another teacher (usually a bad idea anyway) or an assessment created by a PLC group (a good idea) because "I teach this differently."  This idea I do not understand! How does one teach the standards differently if the assessment is aligned to the standards.  The approach may differ, but if the curriculum requires that students are able to apply historical thinking to explain the impact of the American Revolution, then that is what students should be able to do.  I hearken back to the Backward Design idea.  If a question asks students to look at primary documents to come to a conclusion about how the American Revolution impacted different groups of people on an assessment, then any student taking the same course with any teacher should be able to tackle that question successfully.

I hear all of the banter about state mandated assessments and how we are teaching to the test, and I truly do understand where this is coming from. As I have said before, high stakes assessments are necessary- they should not be the be all and end all of a students' demonstration of mastery (hence, they are only 20%-25% of a final grade in NC), so we are still responsible for 75%-80% of demonstration of mastery of content in our classes. I often hear the argument that the real world is not like this--and we need to prepare students for the real world.  Well, doctors and lawyers have to take high stakes assessments to practice; hair stylists have to pass an exam; teachers have to pass exams to get a license, insurance salespeople have to pass a test to get a license; we have to pass a driver's assessment to get a license and the list goes on.  I think that what has happened in education is that we have allowed the assessment to become bigger and more important than the learning.  Assessments were never intended to take over a classroom.  It all has to do with what we do with them.  Think of  the creation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein who took over and hunted down the creator.  The assessment is a creation and a measurement that was intended to measure understanding and mastery of content.  It was never intended to become a lesson plan for an entire semester or year, but sadly that is how it has begun to unfold.  As educators, we need to learn how to live with this creation harmoniously. We need to continue focus on powerful teaching and capturing those moments for why we became teachers anyway.  As an administrator I have vowed to stop emphasizing the assessments and emphasize teaching and learning. Will we do benchmarks? Yes.  Are they aligned with the curriculum and designed to support success on the high stakes test? Yes.  As humans, we have extraordinary power to shape how something works for us.  We are in control of this creation, so go forth and teach and focus on solid teaching and learning based on the prescribed standards, and the high stakes assessments will take care of themselves

Creativity and Teaching

The first years of my teaching, I taught in what would be termed a difficult county...low wealth, discipline issues, very limited resources, and little administrative support within  the school.  Everything I learned about teaching I really learned in these three years.  I started teaching English in 1993, and I was, of course, over the moon excited about teaching.  This is what I have wanted to do for a long time, and I was going to spread some culture to the young ones, and thus save another generation.  What I learned is that I needed another education beyond the education that I received at East Carolina University.  After all, I was going to be the first college graduate in my immediate family, I had some troubles growing up, and I did not have the world handed to me.  I could relate.

My first year was less than desirable.  All of the things that I had thought up in my mind to impart knowledge to an eager young generation was tested by students, other teachers and ultimately myself.  I soon learned that students didn't really care about Longfellow, or the students cared more about Usher than the "Fall of the House of Usher."  There were no resources.  When I asked where were the novel sets for students, I got blank stares.  No Huck Finn.  No Hester Prynne.  No Jay Gatsby. Oh dear! Not to mention, I was in a school where traditional values of teaching were revered.  Effectiveness was measured by how quiet your class was and how well they took notes and spit them back at you on a test.  I was young.  I was crazy, and I was scared as hell! I was teaching American Literature to a group of students whose claim to fame was driving new teachers from the school, and they were successful on many counts. There are many horror stories of my first year:

• The day the screen fell from the ceiling and knocked me in the head just as Cassandra and Corey re-entered the room from their latest trip to the Principal's office. This was all they needed to tear up 6th period.  That day, they won.
• The day that we were reading The Crucible, and a chorus of students kept asking, "what page did you say? Could you repeat the page number- I had it written on the board.  I stood in the middle of the room and shouted, "If you all would shut the hell up, you would know what page we were on." The class was quiet.  I longed to be like Ms. Coplin down the hall whose students hung on her every word.
• The day  that I intervened between a girl and a boy who were going to fight over the fact that the boy had stolen her hair weave (allegedly). This ended with me  on the ground, bleeding from my chin, and the young lady finding her hair piece in the hood of her sweat jacket.
• The day that Wesley explained to the class that "negligent" was a lady's nightgown.

This was a long first year, and I left for the summer not with plans to find another position at a closer high school to my home, but to regroup and come up with a gameplan to win.  I had to work a second job that summer, but in my spare time, I totally revamped my lessons and thought about how to reach children and what they needed and didn't need, and what I did wrong.  I was reflecting when reflecting wasn't cool.  By the way, I had all of my evaluations from the AP in the spring in a span of a week, so there was no feedback there.  What I decided is that I had a gift and a passion and the students had a need.  I wasn't meeting their needs through the endless worksheets that the school supported or the transparency packs that came with book adoptions.  There was no learning going on with answering mindless questions in the back of the book after reading a story.  We were humans who had to come together for 55 minutes each day and do something. My job was to connect students, and to this day, I ask, why are we doing __________________.  Why are we reading Oedipus? Why are we studying The Great Depression? and if I cannot give a relevant answer, then I can't teach it.  Of course, I always could.

I learned that we needed to interact. I had not really learned teaching strategies in college, so I went on about redesigning my classroom.  It was not an easy job and not always successful . Early on in my second year a group of young boys in 5th period decided that they would mimic the Budweiser commercial and chant Bud. Weis. Er from various parts of the room during my lesson. Then the next day, they had decided to do a chorus of farm animal noises.  "Bahh" came from the corner.  Then a "mooooo" from the center of the room, a cluck, a snort, etc.  This time I was ready, I calmly turned around and said, "Now who is going to be the Jackass?" and carried on with my lesson. No more noises and I won. Sarcasm was a tool for me.

When we approached our study of The Crucible, I was ready.  We were reading this because 1) It was in the curriculum and the book  and 2) more importantly, it is a study of human nature, and haven't we all been there when something goes too far or we tell an untruth that takes on a life of its own?  When we had finished half of the play, I broke the students into groups (they were shocked).  I did not have a worksheet. I did not have questions that were recall.  I did not have a transparency.  Each group had a card with a word: Revenge, Honesty, Understanding, Responsibility. We spent a few minutes talking about what these words meant in life, then I told the groups to be able to explain how this abstract idea revealed itself in the play so far, and give me details (take that Common Core!) from the play to support.  My classroom came alive!  Students were talking and writing and looking back at the play.  They were arguing, coming to conclusions, debating....it was beautiful.  The Advanced Placement teacher next door thought that I was just a young idiot, but what I saw was pure magic.  These kids were making connections to what we had done in class and they were enjoying it. My creativity did not stop there.  I set about to designing ways that students could dig into the content.  What about writing.  By the way, when I asked these students to write a definition paper after reading, these were some of the best I had ever gotten. I had made it possible for us to have discourse about learning.  I looked for ways that students could contrast ideas from work to work:  How was Phoenix Jackson like Granny Weatherall? We were bound by the stories in the book, so I had to keep the ideas flowing.

I say all of this to make the point that creativity is a cornerstone of good teaching.  I work with some teachers now who say all the time:  I had to cut this project out because of the curriculum, or I can't be creative because we have these PLCs, and You want me to teach like everybody else, or This new curriculum has taken any creativity that I have about teaching and thrown it out the window. With these assessments, I barely have time to cover the curriculum.  Now, I am told what I have to teach.  Newsflash: We have always been told what to teach- it is called the curriculum.  Never have I seen a curriculum that tells you how to teach anything. I have an ongoing debate with some of my colleagues about the PLC (Professional Learning Communities) idea- another blog for another time. In essence the teachers say that the PLCs keep them from teaching the way that they want to teach.  I immediately reply that they are likely PLC-ing incorrectly. The team does not dictate how one does something but analyzes the effectiveness of how a lesson or a series of lessons are taught. If your methodology is showing little improvement in students' understanding compared to the other team members, then you have an obligation  to change your approach.

So, let's dwell on assessment a little here not too much because I am cooking up quite a post about assessment.  I hear over and over that with the new tests, I don't have time to do what I used to do.  What are we doing in class all day? Going over released test items? That is a colossal waste of time. When I taught English I and English II, I did not dwell on the test (Well, I did until I saw the light!).  I still had my Renaissance Fair and my African Feast. I still had students do Multiple Intelligences Projects to help explain the thematic ideas in All Quiet on the Western Front. We still did group work where we looked at motivation of characters and how the setting (physical environment) influences our actions. My students did as well or often better on the tests than the classes who were memorizing a litany of literary terms or who were answering questions that look like the test. What they were doing was actively participating in developing theme statements, looking at irony, setting, and the structure of the story.  

The Common Core asks us to infuse literacy throughout all content areas (AMEN!), and how that looks is different for everyone. Weren't good, effective teachers already doing this? What teacher would not find having students read and extract information and discuss one of the highest forms of engagement?  Isn't that how we were trained? Don't we want students to find information and use it in some way? My wish is that we stop blaming initiatives (flavor of the month syndrome, which is another blog post about how this is a myth), curriculum, and assessments and get to teaching kids who are inquisitive, connected to media where there are sure to be stories that parallel our curriculum, who may not be able to fully name and explain all the conflicts in To Kill a Mockingbird, but who may understand discrimination and the results of those conflicts in their own lives. I wax poetic here, an I have completely ignored Science and Math and other technical subjects.  I am reminded of a quote in the movie Shadowlands about the great CS Lewis.  At one point, the character portrayed by Anthony Hopkins says, "We read to know we are not alone."  I think we teach and learn to know that we are not alone. See, none of this stuff is about draining creativity.  In reality, it is about empowering teachers to be more creative, and develop ways to relate to humans in this ever shrinking, complex world.

Accountability (One of Four in Focus on Education Series)

"Accountability" is a term that we hear  lot in education.  Teachers want to hold students accountable; teachers want parents to be accountable' administrators want to hold teachers accountable, but few want to dig in to accountability.  The fact is accountability and holding people accountable takes a lot of energy and introspection. For when someone feels we are not being accountable, our job is to show that we indeed are or work to make sure that we take responsibility for whatever, and work to make sure that we are indeed being accountable for our work.

I will be the first to tell you that educators have a very difficult job, and we are asked to do a lot, and teachers are the nucleus of any educational institution. However, as educators we are quick to throw up smoke screens to explain why X,Y, or Z was not successful.  We are all guilty at some point of the pitfalls to avoid taking responsibility for learning and teaching: The parents are not engaged, the administration expects too much, there are just not enough resources, I do not get paid what I am worth (does anybody?), that all takes time that I do not have, the students are disrespectful, the state mandates make it impossible for me to teach...just let me teach and leave me alone!!!  I am not suggesting here that these are not at times valid arguments and these happen daily in schools. What we have to do as educators is find ways to do our work and be effective despite some of these things, and we need to spend our energy overcoming these and not dwelling on them as excuses for not being effective.

Do not get me wrong! I am blessed to work in a school with extremely talented teachers who care and are fantastic at what they do, and most of them are effective, but all of them (and me) have been guilty of throwing up these screens to avoid accountability. In fact, I have been known to throw them up for the teacher in conferences or post evaluation sessions, and I could kick myself when I do it.  The fact of the matter is that we are at schools to teach and make sure that students learn. I believe that all students can learn.  They may not meet all of the goals or every expectation that you have, but they should grow from the day you have them until the last day you teach them. (I know, there is a teacher out there now saying that if the student came to school, then I could teach him or her.  She is NEVER here!)  I do not want to minimize the problems that some students have, and I know that there are some that have attendance issues or other issues that are far from our control, but what I am talking about is reaching the kids we do have and working to ensure that these students are learning.

Accountability for teachers is interesting.  Teachers are in the business of accountability.  We check progress, we grade papers to give feedback, we get undone when kids don't do homework or classwork (as we should if the work is legitimate- later post), but yet many of us do not want to be held accountable because we take issue with the accountability measures.  Well, we have to measure effectiveness, and I am the first to admit that there are many ways, both qualitative and quantitative to measure effectiveness. We do tend to hone in on the quantitative measurement logically as this is something we can point to as a measurement,  I do fault school leadership generally in this arena as we have placed a great deal on test scores and academic readiness data, etc., however, these are important-- so much so that I will blog about assessment data separately. For now, it is important for us to pay attention to all kinds of data and hold ourselves accountable.  I hear all the time: We have to teach to the test, these state exams are ruining my classroom, let me just TEACH, and leave me alone.

We as educators are always drawing comparisons between ourselves and other professions, when many of us have not been in other professions and the world of education is different than the world of business.  Believe me, accountability is the cornerstone of any successful business or profession.  I read recently on a Facebook comment about teaching: "Do doctors get bonuses when they have more healthy patients or get penalized when their patients are sick?"  I am sure that if a doctor has repeated cases of sick patients, his business will drop off, and if  he or she has multiple patients die (heaven forbid), then there will be accountability.  If a lawyer loses case after case, then likely no one will ask for services.  On the other side, if a lawyer wins many cases, then he or she may have more business than they can handle, and there is a bonus of sorts with more business. I am not saying that I am a proponent of merit pay or bonus, etc., but what I am saying is that if year after year a teacher, an administrator, a doctor, a nurse, a pilot, or anybody continues to be ineffective with no intervention or no signs of improvement, he or she should not continue to practice. Ask most people and they will tell you that there are little things in their jobs that are not the best or "useless."  Accountability is not one of those; the method of accountability may be. One of the issues in schools is that ineffective educators (teachers, counselors, administrators) continue to be ineffective and there is little accountability, so the cycle continues. As an administrator and as a teacher, I say bring on the measurements of accountability because if I am doing what I should be doing daily, yearly, I will get results....and I have.  When I get bad results, I reflect back on that to make them better next time.  I cannot lay back and make 3000 excuses as to why my results were not what they should be, but I have to find ways to change the results.  The great Steve Jobs, said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."  Each day that I am an educator I am inventing [creating] the results because I am focused on the how and not the why.

I am not saying that all teachers feel this way, but what I am saying is that the philosophy is becoming more pervasive in the school, but this makes sense as we hear more about testing and testing tied to performance, etc., etc.  When we as a school come to this mentality or allow a group to bring the school down with this philosophy, then we have begun a steep decline. These are big stakes and they are not all right, but here is the advice that I give to new teachers or to teachers who are willing to listen. Teach the standards, that is what we have always been asked to do. Use your creativity to reach multiple learners as long as you are teaching the curriculum.  Take risks and don't worry about the tests.  The tests will take care of themselves.  These are measurements that we administer at the end of a course or a year, but you will already know what your kids can do.  I like the advice that one of our Instructional coaches gave to a group of our STEM teachers recently: The test is 20-25% of the grade, do not make it become 100%. The most dynamic classrooms that I have been in are those where the test is not mentioned daily.  Believe me, students do not need practice on how to bubble an answer sheet.  They need all the rich lessons that teachers say they want to teach but cannot.  I am here to say you can and you should. The kids deserve all that you have.  Let your drive be their learning and not your accountability measure.

Focus on Education Series

I spend a lot of time in the educational world both working in a school and working with my own children as they navigate the through their own education.  This series will focus on several key blogs about some of the biggest debated issues in education:

• Accountability:  This is a hotly contested and often discussed idea.  "Accountability" is a huge word that we often misunderstand and throw about way too often in education.  This post will focus on external accountability and internal accountability and why we need it.
• Creativity: Why teachers feel that they can no longer be creative, and why creativity is a MUST in this complex learning environment.
• Assessment: This is the hottest topic in education today, and everybody has an opinion about this.  I will delve into formative assessments, summative assessments and even high stakes assessment and discuss why we need assessment.
• Teacher Evaluation: Having been assessed as a teacher and as an assessor of teachers, I will discuss this controversial process, and discuss how evaluation can be a good thing.
• Instructional Technology: This topic is near and dear to my heart. For those of you who follow me on Twitter (@adhsapi) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/athenshs).

I will go ahead and disclaim that these blogs may make teachers irate or may inspire. I am not going to say that these ideas are true for all, but they are based on my experiences and beliefs, and I welcome your comments!