Assessment in the Service of Learning

It's funny how, every once in a while, everyone seems to start talking about the same thing at the same time.

This spring, I've been reading and reflecting on ways to utilize student self-assessment for evaluating the new Core Competencies in the BC Redesigned Curriculum.  Earlier in the year, I challenged our district's team of learning services teachers to write "competency driven IEP goals."  We spent time looking over the profiles for each of the competencies, and talked about ways that this work is linked to classroom programs.  We talked about ways to embed this work into things the students are already working on, and how we could collaborate with classroom teachers to make it happen.

It was a lofty goal, and we knew it was a "process,"  not a "moment."  

Fast forward 6 months, and now we're faced with the task of evaluating progress toward these goals, and starting our planning for next year as we review the current Individual Education Plans. Thus, my hunt for tools/suggestions/supports to offer to the team in our conversations.

I've come across a couple of things that I believe are useful in this quest.

1.  Kallik and Zmuda's book Students at the Centre. 

In it, the authors talk about four aspects of self-assessment to engage students:  co-creation of goals and steps toward them; finding their voice in sharing their work with each other, teachers, and parents; building ideas through relationships (social construction), and coming to understand themselves as learners through self-discovery.  

The text goes on to describe the 16 Habits of Mind that are characteristics for students' success, and provides examples of assessment strategies and rubrics for promoting student growth.

2. Successful Learner Traits:

School District 71 (Comox) began this conversation, but it's gaining traction across the province because of the flexibility of the framework, and the many, many ways it can be integrated into classrooms for students of all ages.  It supports learners towards being mindful of their approach and the way they apply themselves to various tasks.  The list is similar to the list of Habits of Mind above-  and is captured on a variety of colorful posters featuring different animals.  Strategies for Assessment for Learning are embedded throughout the materials.  (Click the photo to link to the website).

3.  In Grading, Reporting and Professional Judgement in Elementary Classrooms, (as well as in their companion book for the secondary school setting),  Sandra Herbst and Anne Davies share some  perspective on ways to prepare students and teachers to engage in self-assessment, and encourage teachers to collect "triangulated" data....from work samples, from observations of students, and from conversations with them.  

Herbst and Davies describe Assessment for Learning as "Assessment in the Service of Learning."  I love this.  It fits beautifully with my belief that educators are advocates for all students, and that we need to teach all students to be advocates for themselves.  Everything we say, do, experience, in school, has an aspect of service built it.  I'm a Scout.  This works for me.  

I enjoyed these texts while I was working through them, but it wasn't until I had the opportunity to sit in a session with them,  and they emphasized a few key ideas, that the deep meaning of what they were really saying, fully landed. 

They challenge us all to consider:

How can we put students at the center of pedagogical reflection?

In what ways does capturing evidence allow us to better know our learners?  
(Because Professional Judgement is not "trust me, I'm a teacher.  It's informed decision making based on solid evidence.)

They offered suggestions-  such as tools for collecting observational data, proof cards, and apps such as Aurasma and SeeSaw - to help us collect evidence beyond work samples in a seamless way.  For a deeper look, their website, Connect2Learning has lots of great tools and ideas available for educators to use.  

This brings me to the personal part of my reflection.  In sitting in the session with Herbst and Davies, I also realized there was so much more I could be doing as a leader to support my team in developing a deep commitment to student self-assessment of the competencies.  

So far, I have shared a collection of articles and artifacts.  I've spent time developing rubrics and participated in "group marking sessions" with colleagues.  I've reviewed IEP goals with teams and helped to tweak the language and determine assessment tools that matched.  I've modeled self-assessment strategies when teaching lessons in classrooms.

In every case, I was modelling and supporting things for others to do, but I wasn't really owning the journey for myself.   I've been saying for ages that it's really difficult to maintain a connection to classrooms and students when working in a district capacity, yet I now realize I've missed the first step in changing this.  While I've spent lots of time thinking about how to help and support others, I haven't worked nearly hard enough at helping and supporting myself.

Herbst and Davies challenged all of the administrators in my district to engage in their own learning and exploring of the tools as a way to model effective practice for others.  If you've not engaged in students in self-assessment in an embedded, authentic way, it's a leap of faith to implement things that will result in very different types of data than has been collected in the past.  If, as an administrator, it is my hope that the educators I work with will engage in this type of practice with their learners, then I should be authentically doing it myself.  

How have others modeled this journey as administrators?

- By creating a bulletin board of photos, work samples, and transcribed conversations, that support the school's journey toward the school goals
- By blogging....not just about personal areas of exploration, as I have been doing, but in response to specific goals and areas of growth
- By creating a personal e-portfolio of learning towards a professional growth plan, and sharing it with staff
- By being a part of classroom environments-  not just for a walk-through, but by practicing new things alongside a colleague
- By working with admin colleagues to practice offering deep feedback to teachers, and receiving/reflecting on deep feedback ourselves in terms of how effective this feedback is.

So.  I've decided to embark in my own process of Self Assessment for the Service of Learning. Herbst and Davies say that that getting going means taking the first, next, step.  I need to take two.

First....I'm going to begin transforming my e-portfolio.  I have one, but it shows where I've been.  It needs revamping to show where I'm going.  I will work on a goal and some plans for stepping toward it, so that it's all ready for the exploration that will follow.

Second...I'm going to find myself two critical friends.  One who is a classroom practitioner who is willing to let me come in and explore alongside next year.  Together, we can pick something to work on and begin crafting our pathway toward it together.    The other is an admin colleague who is willing to offer feedback on my journey, to help me reflect the learning I will do as I deepen my own understanding of self-assessment and using the competencies enhance student learning.

Assessment in the Service of Learning.  It's worth it, because They're All Our Kids.

Our PATH to our North Star

I always love the start of new school year.  Buildings are shiny, we're all well-rested.  We've been thinking about ways to tweak our practice and collected some new resources we can't wait to try out.  I especially love energy that results from the reunions of educators gathering together to renew collaboration and get things started.

For me, the first "real" day of the school year is the Thursday afternoon of the first week of school.  As a District Principal, I'm still busy with the behind-the-scenes stuff the first couple of days while things get underway at the various sites.  But Thursday afternoon of that first week, at the first Learning Services meeting of the year, I get an opportunity to re-connect with the amazing group of educators that I work with, to share some of my summer learning, and update everyone on district directions for the year.

This year, it was also time to renew our vision statement for Learning Services.  With a new BC Re-Designed Curriculum to consider,  and our ongoing commitment to create the most inclusive classroom opportunities we can for the students we support, I really wanted to make sure we were starting the year in the same place.

Having been at a summer meeting that used a graphic artist to collect our thoughts, I had seen the benefit of a visual representation of our thinking, and wanted to try it with my team.  I have a number of colleagues who were trained in the PATH process a couple of years ago, and I knew this format to be a really exciting, positive way to visualize some goals and determine the initial action steps toward them.

If you're not familiar  PATHs, the North Star Paths, two masterful educators from Saanich School district near Victoria, BC, have put together some great resources to support things.  They're website is at:  www.northstarpaths.com.  This short video is a great overview of the PATH process.

 

We began our session by watching this clip to set the stage for everyone, then read Peter Reynold's story The North Star, to help everyone think about what their "North Star" is for working with the learners on their individual caseloads.   It's a great story for working with all ages, in considering thoughtful and personal goals.  

After that, we turned to our large page for setting goals and brainstormed what "Success for Our Students" would look like.  I'm super proud to be working with a group of people who kept such a clear focus on the whole-child.  We talked about everything, from academic success, to friendships, to self-regulation and self-advocacy.  

The list kept going, until we decided we'd better start turning this "technicolor dream" into some action steps, if we were going to help make it a reality for our learners.  I love this group.  We could have gone on celebrating successes all day long!

The next step was to define where we wanted our learners to be at by the end of the school year.  It's an ambitious list:

• to have strategies
• to be engaged, self-regulated learners
• to be connected
• to have good self-esteem
• to see possibilities

To decide where we were going, we next thought about "Now."  How are things for our students, what do we notice about them at this time of year?   This quickly brought us to a focus on relationships, and on collecting baseline information regarding our learners' strengths and lagging skills.  We also needed to decide who was along this journey with us.  This is the "enroll" stage. 

 

 The following step was to figure out what we needed to do by November, then by April, to help us reach our goal by the end of the year.  We agreed that knowing our learners super well, and fostering solid relationships with them and between them, was our greatest shot at helping them make significant progress this year.

 

We're going to word-smith our list of goals into a vision statement, and bring out our larger sheet again in November and April, to see how we're doing.  In the meantime, it feels to me like we've done a great job recognizing that regardless of where we work, or who we are supporting, They Are All Our Kids.

Thinking Critically About Classrooms

If you've been glancing at what I've been reading at all, you'll see I've been reflecting on the most recent offering of Roland Case and Garfield Gini-Newman from the Critical Thinking Consortium- titled Creating Thinking Classrooms.

I was lucky enough this past week to spend a day with Roland Case at our administrators' annual retreat, where we explored ways and reasons to shift traditional lesson structures and provide more differentiated, inclusive, engaging ways to help our students learn to problem-solve and to think critically.  Roland really put us through our paces-  challenging us to personally experience some of the lessons he's used with students in classrooms, and to think about ways to ask really good questions of our students-  the type of questions that help them to reflect, synthesize, make connections-  really learn to be learners, and not just learn to provide right answers.

In his book, Roland states that "many existing practices and the proposals for new practices will succeed only if they embody powerful principles of effective teaching and learning."  Case argues that the key areas to address are to:
-  engage students
-  sustain inquiry
-  nurture self-regulated learners
-  create assessment-rich learning
-  enhance learning through digital technology.

When I reflect on these principles through the lens of inclusion, I can't find one thing on the list that isn't a critical piece of planning for our more complex students.  It's certainly the list I hope teachers are thinking about when planning things for my own children at their school.

I had an opportunity to chat with one of our district's learning services teachers about a student who is really struggling with the math curriculum this year.  He was concerned not only about her progress with mathematics, but about the fact that, even in a heavily adapted environment, the material was still out of reach for her a lot of the time, and that she had left class that day in tears.

We brainstormed a little about ways that the current day's lesson could be adapted for next time, and I think we have a plan for the next little bit-  but we were both aware that something more radically different than just tweaked assignments is needed for this student to have success.

That conversation led me back to some of the activities that we worked through with Roland.  In particular, we worked on a line graph assignment where we were asked to set our own parameters for the axis, and then draw a line which told a story where we travelled a distance over time.  Some of us got going right away, most of us needed his example to get started, a few of us needed a bit of coaching from a peer or from Roland personally.  All of us had to really think about what we were doing, and then reflect on our choices critically in order to see if the story our partner was suggesting  was accurate.  I personally thought I had it, drew a line quickly, then scribbled a bunch of changes while talking to my partner and finally, went back to where I started as I talked it through and my understanding deepened.  If it had been a worksheet, or less open ended, I would have ended with the first drawing, and missed the best part of my thinking.

So...back to the challenge of supporting the young lady in her math class.  If I think about her experience in terms of Roland's principles, the path becomes clearer for me.  At the moment, she's engaged.  That's where her frustration is coming from.  She desperately wants to be successful, but is not yet able to sustain her inquiry because we're asking questions she's not confidently or comfortably able to explore.  We need to reframe things in an open-ended way to allow her to enter the conversation from the place she's currently at.  We can only expect her to self-regulate if she has the capacity and confidence to tackle the tasks we offer her.  What kind of assessment can we possibly complete if we're giving her work we already know she can't do before we ask it of her.  We were using calculators for that particular lesson, but we have so many other options as well -  virtual manipulatives (have you peeked at the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives????  Google NLVM if you haven't seen it-  transformed my math classroom, but more on that another day....)-  we could show some video tutorials, or record some examples for her to follow-  all of these are options-  but what's landed as the question for me this week is, "How would Roland do it?" 

I've just been given access to the myriad of resources in the Critical Thinking Consortium's website (http://tc2.ca/). That's where I'm going to start.  I plan to head back to the teacher and see if, together, we can build an open-ended frame for some of the concepts he's planning on tackling in the next little while.  There's no doubt in my mind that what will support this student will support all of the students in this classroom.  If his experience with this type of supported task is anything like mine was last week, the approach will gain momentum quickly.  It feels good to think about things deeply and feel better at it when the assignment's done.    It just makes sense to find things we can all explore together.  A classroom is a community-  and after all, THEY'RE ALL OUR KIDS.

Envisioning Inclusive Classrooms

 

This fall, I've been engaged in conversations at a variety of schools with caring, dedicated educators who are struggling to find the most successful way to be inclusive of all learners in their classrooms.  I know of many people who are open to embracing the diversity in their classroom spaces, but do not always know how, or when, to provide options or supports, to allow all learners to get the most out of their experiences.  Knowing this is problem-solving that we do every fall as we meet new children and begin to build community, I went seeking a resource over the summer that might help guide our fall conversations.

 I found June Downing's Academic Instruction for Students with Moderate and Severe Intellectual Disabilities in Inclusive Classrooms.    How I've not encountered June Downing's work prior to now, I'll never know-  what a practical and pragmatic approach.  I'm looking forward to exploring some of her other books...

This particular text has a chapter where she explores something she's titled an Ecological Assessment.  Downing argues that undertaking an "observational assessment [which] occurs in the natural environment, where the demands and impact of that environment can be seen....is a valuable approach to assessing student with severe disabilities."  These focused observations, first of the class as a whole, and then of individual students in that environment, allow teachers to determine what students are expected to be able to do in the environment, and what natural supports exist to support them.  For me, the most lovely part of this type of observation is the underlying assumption that ALL learners are PART OF the learning community, and that there is at least a foundational set of expectations and goals that are achievable for everyone.   Here are some sample tables from the book: 

  

While I was excited about the potential of Ecological Assessments as a strategy for enhancing inclusive classroom practices, and for framing IEP goals, the strategy was not as accessible for some of my colleagues as I had hoped-  not everyone had spent the summer immersed in the ideas presented in the book, and it is a lot to process in the first weeks of a new school year.

Last week, our school district was fortunate enough to spend a morning with Shelley Moore-  (you'll see her name on my blog roll)-  an exceptionally talented BC educator who has reframed what is essentially an Ecological Assessment into a simplified planning document.  She encourages teachers to consider the physical, social/emotional, and curricular aspects of the learning community, to think about what ALL students should be able to do in that environment, and then find a place of connection for the students who need additional time or support to access them. 

Shelley and I come from a similar perspective.  It's not IF a student can/should participate, it's HOW.   Inclusion is a complex process, and it may not be possible to include everyone in every environment right away-  but that should be the end-goal for all students-  and if we all choose one place to begin, we'll get much closer to reaching that goal.

By observing all students and the learning environment carefully, it becomes much easier to determine what things ALL students are able to do, as well as illuminating the types of structures and supports to be more inclusive of EVERYONE. 


For example, in a content classroom, a student might be in there practicing regulating behavior, his social/emotional goal might be to greet peers, and his learning might be to participate in a partner reading activity or  have hand-over-hand support from a peer or adult during a science project. 

Shelley was also part of developing a new course for SET-BC called Curriculum For All - a great set of modules for people to work through individually, or in groups.  In our district, we're looking forward to hosting some sessions for classroom teachers, support teachers, administrators and educational assistants, to do some learning about UDL and inclusion together.  You can link to it at:  http://www.setbc.org/course/curriculum-for-all/. 


I can't wait to discover the ways our learners find themselves in environments that they've never explored before as we work together to make inclusion happen.  It takes a village.  They're All Our Kids.