22
ASSESSMENT as a
Catalyst
for LEARNING
Collaboration Around Assessment
Using assessment as an instructional tool allows teachers to focus on learning over instruction. In that sense, teachers essentially do less day-to-day planning so they can implement more instructional agility based on emerging evidence of learning or a lack of learning. This focus on learning and the instructional response cannot happen unless teams first reach common understanding of the prioritized curricular standards, what proficiency looks like, and learning progressions (chapter 2, page 29). With the complexity of curricular standards, taking on this assessment journey alone can be cumbersome and overwhelming. While it is achievable alone, creating a responsive and fluid assessment process benefits from a collaborative culture, which brings more voices to the table and makes everyone responsible for the learning. The assessment process starts with teacher teams coming together to provide accurate inferences and interpretations of the standards, reach agreed-on definitions and uses for formative and summative assessment, and achieve common understanding of the assessment process as a whole. An entire team of teachers possesses a wealth of knowledge when it comes to resources, content expertise, and instructional strategies. When teams pool their knowledge, they begin to take collective responsibility for all students, and everyone benefits. It is impossible to overemphasize the power of a teacher team when it comes to the question, What will we do when they haven’t learned it? Working to achieve a common understanding of assessment purpose and use is critical. If one teacher uses formative assessment to gather data, find errors and misconceptions, provide individualized feedback, and plan accordingly while another teacher simply scores formative assessment, it will lose its meaning, and these different uses will confuse students and parents. Effective collaboration ensures consistency so teachers can communicate that clarity to other stakeholders. Consider the following language that teachers could include in a syllabus, newsletter, or beginning-of-year communication with students and parents (figure 1.2).
© 2021 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.
In order to add a sense of structure and purpose to the assessment process as a whole, teachers and collaborative teams in schools and districts that function as PLCs use three big ideas and four critical questions to develop and evolve their understanding. The three big ideas of a PLC are (1) a focus on learning, (2) a collaborative culture and collective responsibility, and (3) a results orientation (DuFour et al., 2010, 2016). These ideas lie at the center of the assessment process. Defining and using assessment in its intended manner creates and supports a collaborative culture focused on learning and results. When teams come together to plan assessment, their response to results, and targeted intervention, collaboration fuels their learning as well as learning for students.
