Professional Development
January1 4, 2010
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Fill in “Self Assessment” as honestly as
possible. No one else will see your results, so
please be brutally honest.
Using the marker placed on your table, circle
your score.
Place your score sheet in the collection basket
marked with your department name.
Volunteers will mark the scores for each dept
and divide by the number of folks in the dept.
Anyone too busy
to reflect
Anyone
too
busy
on one’s practice is also too
tobusy
reflect
to improve.on one’s
practice is also too
busy to improve.
Robert Garmston
Robert Garmston
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Collaborative teams always attempt to answer
critical questions by building shared
knowledge.
If people make decisions based upon access to
the same pool of information, they increase the
likelihood that they will arrive at the same
conclusion.
Collaborative cultures, which by definition have
close relationships, are indeed powerful, but
unless they are focusing on the right things
they may end up being powerfully wrong.
 Michael Fullan
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What makes an effective meeting?/Team
Protocols
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Team norms
Method of Consensus
Vision
Agenda with assigned minutes per topic
 Time keeper
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Critical Questions for Teams
SMART Goal
Interventions
Product orientation
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How can we create common assessments to
monitor and promote student learning?
-- High quality assessments are
collaboratively developed and collectively
used to monitor, measure, and promote high
levels of students achievement.
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Reflect on your Self Assessment Score and decide
if a collaborative effort would create better
learning by your students.
 Definition 1~
Any assessment given by 2 or more instructors with the intention of
collaboratively examining the results for
• shared learning,
• instructional planning for individual students, and/or
• curriculum, instruction, and/or assessment modifications.
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Definition 2~
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Created collaboratively by teams of teachers
Frequent
Formative
Connected to the essential outcomes
Given to all students enrolled in the same class, course, or grade level
Identify and discuss similarities and
differences.
Take one idea from the list
and describe why that idea
is on this list?
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Efficiency
Fairness
Effective Monitoring
Informed practice
Assessment literacy
Raised expectations
Team capacity
Collective Response
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Modified from R. DuFour keynote address at PLC Institutes
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Assessment of Learning (Summative Assessment):
How much have students learned as of a
particular point in time?
Assessment for Learning (Formative Assessment):
How can we use assessments to help students
learn more?
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Value of Common Assessments
Focused instruction
 Common core curriculum
 Focused, common learning
 Better tests
 Identification of curricular areas needing attention
 Provision of objective indicators of effectiveness for
teachers
 Promotes collaboration
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• Efficiency - by sharing the load teachers save time
• Fairness - promotes common goals, similar pacing, and
consistent standards for assessing student proficiency
• Effective monitoring - provides timely evidence of
whether the guaranteed and viable curriculum is being
taught and learned
• Informs individual teacher practice - provides teachers
with a basis of comparison regarding the achievement of
their students so they can see strengths and weaknesses of
their teaching
• Team capacity - collaborative teacher teams are able to
identify and address problem areas in their program
• Collective Response - helps teams and the school create
timely, systematic interventions for students
Study
Bloom (1984)
S.D. Gains
1.0 to 2.0 *
Black and Wiliam (1998)
Meisels, et al. (2003)
Rodriguez (2004)
.5 to 1.0**
.7 to 1.5
.5 to 1.8**
* Rivals one-on-one tutorial instruction
** Largest gains for low achievers
35 Percentile Points
 2-4 Grade Equivalents
 100 SAT Score Points
 5 ACT Composite Score Points
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Accurate Assessment
Clear Targets
Clear Purposes
Assess What?
What are the learning targets?
Are they clear?
Are they good?
Why Assess?
What’s the purpose?
Who will use results?
Good Design
Assess How?
What method?
Sampled how?
Avoid bias how?
Sound Communication
Effectively Used
Communicate How?
How manage information?
How report?
Student Involvement
Students are users, too.
Students need to understand learning targets, too.
Students can participate in the assessment process, too.
Students can track progress and communicate, too.
When teachers (working in collaborative teams)
clarify essential outcomes, develop common
assessments, and set standards they want all
students to achieve by test and by essential
outcomes, they are in a position to establish goals
that can only be achieved if each member
contributes.
•Collaborative teams of teachers analyzing learning data
•Translating data into information (i.e. attaching “meaning” to the data)
•Targeting specific areas for improvement
•Collaboratively engaging in collective inquiry (i.e. seeking out best practices)
•Experimenting with “best practice” in classrooms (i.e. action research)
•Collaboratively analyzing the results of interventions
•Developing a culture where this process is cyclical, internalized, and part of
how business is done every day
What we know today does
not make yesterday wrong,
it makes tomorrow better.
Carol Commodore