Formative Assessment Leadership

Identify, Plan, Apply, Assess, Refine

Karen L. Sanzo, Steve Myran, John Caggiano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317670926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

This exciting new book is for school leaders who are interested in transforming their school and district practices. Discussing issues that impact students, teachers within their classrooms, and the larger school community, Formative Assessment Leadership explores how leaders can implement effective professional development and positive change in their schools. Breaking down formative assessment into manageable, understandable parts, the authors provide:

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• An exploration of what formative data-based decision making looks like

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• Scaffolding that enables school leaders to effectively integrate processes into their own school structure

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• Discussion of potential barriers to success and how to overcome these challenges

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• Practical examples that help ground the formative assessment leadership concepts

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• A range of worksheets and templates to help implement formative assessment leadership in your schools

I Laying the Groundwork for Formative Assessment

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315769943-1

This is a book for school leaders—principals, assistant principals, teacher leaders, school leadership team members, and others involved in guiding and leading schools to implement formative assessment practices in your school. In our research we have read many books and articles directed at engaging classroom teachers to make formative assessment an integral part of daily classroom practices. These are terrific resources and help cultivate— at the micro level—a classroom environment that embraces formative assessment. But we found something was missing “on the market” and “in the journals”—guidance for school leaders on how to start and guide the formative assessment process at the school level.

What does it mean to effectively use data to assist in making instructional decisions that will have a positive impact on student achievement? How do leaders do this? What types of data should be used? And by whom? And what process should be used? These are some of the questions we seek to answer for you in this book.

Halverson, Grigg, Prichett, and Thomas (2007) describe data based decision making (DBDM) as “link[ing] the results of summative testing to formative information systems that teachers can use to improve instruction across schools” (p. 163). That is a simple description for a complex educational concept. DBDM is not simple or procedural. According to Preuss (2007), DBDM must permeate school processes, emphasizing that DBDM “is a system of deeply rooted beliefs, actions, and processes that infuses organizational culture and regularly organizes and transforms data to wisdom for the purpose of making organizational decisions” (p. 10).

A Data Driven Culture

Today most educators find themselves working in very data driven school cultures. A number of federal and state requirements set on schools have caused school leaders, and the educational community as a whole, to critically examine our educational practices, as well as to delve into the unique characteristics of our student populations. Accountability efforts have forced educators to reexamine school structures, district practices, teacher evaluation, and assessment techniques. Although we have seen some truly remarkable gains in student achievement, clearly it is not enough as we still have many students who are failing to attain success in school and are leaving our educational environments unprepared.

Anyone who has spent a week in a school knows that teachers and school leaders are working hard to try to help their students be successful. Educators are inundated with strategies, processes, programs, and practices “specially designed” to increase student achievement. If you have been in the front office answering the phones or opening the mail, you also know that during any given week, numerous sales pitches selling prepackaged products designed to help our students meet and exceed “the standards” are given. But, as our national scores continue to demonstrate, there are students in our classrooms who are not being successful in spite of the myriad of items out there on the market and the newest trends surfacing.

Formative Assessment

In this book we are talking about what may be considered one of the newest trends in the accountability movement and the search for how to positively impact student achievement: formative assessment. Formative assessment is actually not new and has a very strong research base to support its efficacy in helping students be successful. Let us emphasize that formative assessment is a substantiated process that, when implemented correctly, contributes to academically successful learners. In fact, if you walk into one of your stellar teacher’s classrooms—the type of teacher who teaches students who have been labeled as underperformers and who helps those students be overwhelmingly successful—you will see clear evidence of effective formative assessment practices.

Our goal in presenting this to you is to let you know that using formative assessment practices in your schools and classrooms is “not another thing to do” and “to add to the overflowing” plate of your staff members. This is something good teachers do already. We also want to peel away the misconceptions, the ambiguous processes of and barriers to formative assessment, and provide you the knowledge base and structure to begin a concerted effort within your school that has proved successful.

Formative assessment can be—and should be—embedded into the daily practices of your school. It fits well with school improvement and continuous learning processes, whether they may be professional learning communities, focus groups, response to intervention, or another structure. Smart teaching and smart formative assessment practices will help your students attain success.

It Is All About Productive Student Learning

Formative assessment goes to the heart of substantive student learning from kindergarten to high school and has critical links to virtually every aspect of quality instruction. But, through this book, we want to make sure that people really understand what formative assessment is all about. Right now formative assessment is a popular topic with a catchy phrase that is often thrown about in schools. There is a real danger that formative assessment can become “the trend of the moment,” with all of the popular verbiage associated with it and absorbed into the dominant culture, becoming applied inconsistently without the fundamental understandings of why formative assessment is effective.

Self-Regulated Learning Is Central to Productive Learning

Formative assessment is a developmental process that involves cycles of goal setting, instruction, assessment, feedback, and adjustment both by learners and teachers. Formative assessment is the mechanism that makes it possible to effect those skills and behaviors in students. Formative assessment provides critical feedback to students while still working toward a learning goal. This makes formative assessment a fundamental part of pedagogy and critical to learning. Often, however, instructional practices are not successful in positively impacting student achievement because there is a lack of understanding revolving around self-regulated learning and formative assessment. There is an inescapable need for strong formative assessment leadership in our schools that emphasizes the power of engaging students in self-regulated learning.

Assessment Literacy

Because of our work in formative classroom assessment and DBDM in recent years, we have come to recognize the vital importance of assessment literacy for teachers and school leaders. In the current climate of high-stakes testing and accountability, assessment has taken on a narrow and often educationally negative character. Unfortunately, preservice and in-service teacher and leadership training has not sufficiently addressed classroom assessment practices. This lack of training has led to a climate where teachers tend to use a “hodgepodge grade of attitude, effort, and achievement” (Brookhart, 1991, p. 36; Cross & Frary, 1996). It is also clear teachers use a variety of assessment techniques, even if established measurement principles are often violated (Cross & Frary, 1996; Frary, Cross, & Weber, 1993; Gullickson, 1993; Plake & Impara, 1993; Stiggins & Conklin, 1992).

Although over the last two decades significant emphasis has been placed on using alternative assessments, such as performance assessments and portfolios (McMillan, Myran, & Workman, 2002), appropriate preservice and in-service training has not been adequate for teachers to effectively utilize these assessment practices. More important, current assessment practices, and misunderstandings about them, are often counterproductive to deep and substantive learning.

Assessment literacy is critical to the effective use of data to make decisions; without both clear theoretical and practical understandings of assessment principles (both formative and summative) that become part of the regular structure of schools, programs will fail to capitalize on their potential. Moreover, it is the formative aspects of assessment that has the greatest impact on student learning.

Formative Assessment Leadership Approach

Our unique approach focuses on the direct student-oriented nature of formative assessment and its necessity to breathe pedagogical life into otherwise lifeless efforts. This approach is rooted in the substantial literature from across disciplines that highlight when students are provided with scaffolding that specifically prepares them to take active responsibility for their own learning they perform at significantly higher academic levels. We refer to this as “active agency,” or the students as active agents in their own learning (Skilton-Sylvester, 1999). This is similar to what Paul Pintrich (2003) called the intentional learner, which integrates a number of key learning behaviors that include motivation, self-regulation, and self-efficacy.

Active agency is central to formative assessment and in turn formative assessment is central to effective DBDM efforts. Students must be active agents in their own learning. Without a student having an active agent outlook, the formative assessment practices known to significantly improve student learning will not work.

Theory to Practice

Equally important is our distinctive way of conceptualizing and addressing the perennial concern over the theory-to-practice divide. Often there appears to be a disconnect between what is espoused in research circles and in higher education as educational theory and what actually happens in the schools and classrooms. We are interested in helping you make substantive student achievement gains and focus on where “the rubber meets the road”—what actually takes place in helping students learn. Throughout this book you will see we address bridging theory to practices through a framework that helps teachers and school leaders articulate theory from their own contextualized professional experiences; that is articulating theory from practice.

Most professional development (PD) programs do not create any lasting scaffolding for teachers to explore, try out, and refine their efforts. Too often PD activities last once or twice and have no framework for sustainability. The inability of most PD programs to allow this exploration means the various instructional and assessment strategies they were espousing do not bridge the gap between generalized theory and daily actual classroom practices. Without time and other critical resources, the transition from ideas to application in the classroom simply does not happen. Organizing teacher PD around such a model invites failure.

The Formative Assessment Professional Development Model

In our PD model, we address this challenge by advocating a framework that utilizes real-life, practical examples as building blocks to developing deep substantive understandings of formative assessment and DBDM principles. It is crucial to use one’s own contextualized professional experience. Our approach enables school leaders to help teachers understand how to effectively use sound formative assessment practices by capitalizing on educators’ lived experiences working with students and by using this contextual knowledge to build “usable knowledge”.

In our work promoting the use of formative classroom assessment strategies with teachers and school leaders in a variety of PD contexts, we have learned educators are not receptive to topically, academically abstracted, or thematic approaches to PD. Educators have been more receptive to incorporating aspects of formative assessment as part of their ongoing, day-to-day subject matter teaching responsibilities. Teachers want to know how the PD activity will have an impact on them immediately—they need to know the relevance. Without that, then the PD is useless.

Structure and Scaffolding

This book provides a structure for teams of teachers and school leaders to work together to develop deep contextualized understandings of effective formative assessment within the context of a DBDM atmosphere. More important, we provide the scaffolding for educators to articulate theory from their own practice and acquire purposeful and practical skills. We also address the many barriers to effective implementation of sound assessment practices assessment and DBDM models and make practical suggestions on overcoming these barriers.

We have found there is a large gap between what can be referred to as “Utopian” theories of how schools should operate and the day-to-day realities of school practice. Educators are often locked in the daily rigors of teaching and have a difficult time transitioning to new structures and practices, whereas academics look at the ideal without addressing in pragmatic terms how you bridge the vision and reality. The space between these two states is often left unexplored by PD processes, leaving no structure or support for educators and undermining the purposes of the intended PD provided and change process. Without any scaffolding to get you to that ultimate vision, you are undermining your own purposes for the effort. There is need to break down the theories without losing the deeper meaning and fidelity. We seek through this book to break down the formative DBDM process into an understandable and manageable process via a five-step cycle that assists leaders in implementing and leading the effort.

Using Data and Learning

Considerable research evidence points to how a formative approach to DBDM can foster significant improvements in teachers’ uses of effective instructional practices and student achievement. “School improvement is most surely and thoroughly achieved when teachers engage in frequent, continuous, and increasingly concrete and precise talk about teaching practice” (Little, 1990, p. 527) what some have called “schools as centers of inquiry for adults as well as children” (Schmoker, 2004, p. 431). This inquiry-based approach to using data to improve instruction and student performance is built on a solid foundation of our field’s best understanding about how students learn and how school organizations can work to better meet students’ learning needs.

Although a detailed review of the learning sciences literature is outside the scope of this book, several key findings can be drawn which are straightforward and actionable. Learning requires:

1. engagement;
2. development of both factual knowledge and strong conceptual frameworks; and
3. self-monitoring of one’s own efforts in progress towards a learning goal. (Bransford, Brown, & Cockring, 2000)

Instructional Core

It is certainly no mystery to educators that effective teaching is a key predictor of student success, nor that instructionally focused leadership is crucial to facilitate and support improvement in teacher quality. In fact, when principals and other leaders are well trained and focused on the instructional core they have a greater influence on student achievement (Robinson, 2007; Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008). In the current high-stakes testing accountability environment, DBDM and assessment literacy are central aspects of the instructional core and require both teachers and school leaders to enhance their skills and knowledge of these areas.

Unfortunately, DBDM is often viewed as a panacea, a cure-all to the challenges schools face in this time of high pressure testing and accountability. Although it does offer a well-organized set of strategies for bringing about improvements, much of the basis for the effectiveness of these strategies is not prese...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Laying the Groundwork for Formative Assessment
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Understanding Assessment
• Part II The Cycle of Formative Data Based Decision Making
• 3 Introducing the Cycle
• 4 Identify
• 5 Plan
• 6 Apply
• 7 Assess
• 8 Refine
• Part III Tools to Support the Cycle of Formative Data Based Decision Making
• Worksheets
• Glossary
• Data Scenarios
• References
• Index