Thinking About Balanced Assessment

On Tuesdays, the writing community at Two Writing Teachers hosts the Slice of Life. Everyone is welcome to join in by writing, commenting, or just reading slices from around the world!

I have been participating in a district think tank about assessment over the last couple of months. Today, we had a six hour meeting to try to develop a brochure that communicates, articulates, and condenses our beliefs about balanced assessment. Integrating the work of other institutions and districts, I love the concept of balancing growth and achievement, and the other elementary educators and I developed bullets to support this concept, crafting statements about balanced assessment.

Our bullets align to my beliefs about assessment--that we assess for three basic reasons: to make instructional decisions, to determine whether students have learned the objectives, and to hold ourselves (and be held) accountable for student achievement.

And yet, the experience that I had with my own daughters who are high school students are gnawing at me as I reflect on the work and the thinking that we did today. Conceptually, I believe that assessment is a cornerstone to education, right there along with curriculum and instruction in a rock solid triangle. And, I believe that great assessment leads to great learning, driving instructional decisions and curriculum development/revision.

But what about college? Assessment also creates GPAs. At any college admission information presentation, the presenter talks about the rigor and the overall performance as important factors in potential acceptance. How do we get around the fact that assessments create GPAs, and in competitive high schools, GPAs are important components of college applications? Do we count formative assessments into GPAs? Within our conference room of teacher leaders, we did not have consensus. Some teachers do count formative assessment, while others use it only to provide information to students about how they are doing. If they don't average formative assessment into reported grades, should students who reach targets more quickly receive higher grades? Do high quality assessment practices lend themselves to 100 point grading scales, or should we be thinking about reporting meeting and not meeting standards? But then, how would that serve students as they apply to highly selective colleges and universities?

I was so proud of the work we accomplished this morning--of the clarity of our bullets that explain balanced assessment. However, the complexities and questions that surround assessment overwhelm me as I think about communicating these ideas and visions to the rest of the community. The more I think about it, the more questions I have. Oh dear.

Happy Slicing,

Slice #18 of 31- Is It All About the GPA?

For the month of March, I am participating in the Slice of Life Challenge, hosted by the community of writers at Two Writing Teachers. Many of my slices are at my personal blog, Just Write, Melanie, but ones that deal specifically with education appear here. All are welcome to join the slicing party by reading and commenting. People write amazing posts.

Every three years, our district has a town-wide orchestra festival where students from all grades, 3-12, play together in the gymnasium. Because I only videoed, and I did not take pictures, I am gong to "write without sight" (thank you, Dana Murphy. If you missed this post, I highly recommend reading it!). Picture this. Five orchestras sitting in folding chairs where the basketball teams usually play. At center court and spreading out is the high school orchestra, all students dressed in white and black, playing the violins, violas, cellos, and basses. A few drums are on the back sideline. To the left and in front are three elementary orchestras, each with about fifty musicians, and to the right is the middle school orchestra. Every student is in white and black. Only one of the music directors varies from the black and white with the splash of green from his St Patrick Day's vest, cumberbund, and bow tie. The bleachers are packed with parents cameras, and video devices. 

Listening to the progression of the orchestras is impressive, but the highlight is when all of the orchestras play together. Tonight, after This Land is Your Land, they played Oh Beautiful as the Color Guard surprised us, marching in with flags and full uniform. Add some tears to the parents, cameras and video devices. 

But here's the rub. Both my daughters are planning to quit this year. Clare plays the cello beautifully, and is in the high level orchestra as a sophomore. Cecily plays violin and struggles through it, but has worked hard to stay with the program for almost six years. 

"Are you sure that you really want to quit?" I asked, as we sat in the parking lot. "It's so beautiful."

Clare shrugged.

I seized the opportunity. Maybe she's changing her mind. Maybe she'll keep playing. She loves music--plays the piano, sings, is learning the guitar. 

Then she stuns me.

"It brings down my GPA," she said. 

In the gridlock of the parking lot, I thought about this sentence and the thinking behind it. What if she could take orchestra pass/fail? What if it wasn't graded? What if her teacher knew that the grading policies and the emphasis on assessment was pushing her to quit making beautiful music? 

And then, some bigger questions. What is the purpose of grading? When we teach optional courses, like art and music, what happens when the grades are low? Will we weed out the kids who aren't musical? Will we drive out the kids who love music, but won't be music majors? And, what do we want to have happen? If we grade hard, will it lift the level of the work? And what do we really want kids to get out of a music program?

And maybe, even bigger questions... Why does my daughter care more about her GPA than about doing something she enjoys? And should she? 

Frank Bruni wrote a wonderful piece in Sunday's New York Times about college admissions. One of my take-aways was to help my girls see that there are many colleges and universities that offer pathways to happy, productive lives, but wow, in the part of the pathway that goes through high school, the GPA pressures are intense. 

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Clare changes her mind, and I watch her perform for two more years.

Happy Slicing,

Quick Ideas and Strategies to Prepare Students for Writing Assessments

As we get closer and closer to the administration of the SBAC in our district, many teachers are asking about how to get their students ready for this assessment. I have been collecting ideas and resources for our teachers, as well as helping them realize that all of their instruction, all of our curriculum will help students be ready for this assessment. You don't study for it. You don't "prep" for it. You have good, engaging, purposeful instruction and learning happening in classrooms throughout the year.

That being said, I have some ideas, charts and handouts for teachers and students to help them navigate the writing portions of the SBAC. (I'm sorry, PARCC takers, I have not spent time analyzing the PARCC sample assessments so I don't know how helpful these will be...)

1. Make sure your students understand that we can categorize writing genres into three types of writing. I wrote about this in another post , but have developed another chart about this, as well.  This chart that I am sharing is one that I developed in a flipped lesson. (I'm not confident enough to link the video, but I would share it with anyone who wants to send me their email for it...)  I could picture developing this chart with or in front of students. They need to know that they already know this information.

I think that it's important to also emphasize to students that these types of writing should not be pure. Stories contain opinions and information. Information contains opinions and stories. Opinions contain stories and information. However, it's helpful for all of us to learn the characteristics of writing types by categorizing them.

2. I have many teachers ask me about the vocabulary they should be using. The more that we can use different terms with students, the better, not only for the SBAC, but also for life. A thesis and a claim can usually be used synonymously. If you google what the difference is, you might be inspired to write a blog post about just that. (I might do that later this afternoon...) A feature article is almost always informative in nature.


This chart is a useful one to help students realize how much of what they will be asked to do on the SBAC, they are already doing. It's also helpful for teachers to see how much they are already teaching.



3. Teach the basic prompts for the three types of writing. The directions for the SBAC are complex and overwhelming. The directions, in and of themselves, are an exercise in close reading. Writing Pathways (Heinemann Press) contains basic prompts for each type of writing with quick descriptors of them. Give students exposure to basic prompts of the three types of writing so that they can flex quickly among them.  They will feel better if they know right away how to tackle planning for any of the genres.

4. Give students as many opportunities to compose on the keyboard as possible. Typing stories they have already written is a very different skill. Yes, that might help them with their keyboarding speed, but they need to be able to think and write from their brains to their fingertips.

I know that this won't be everyone's favorite post to read, and it hasn't been my favorite post to write. That being said, we can give students a few strategies so that when they see these assessments, they feel prepared and confident.

Take care,

Pre-assessing With Different Lenses

During the month of March, I am participating in the Slice of Life Challenge, hosted by twowritingteachers.wordpress.com. Most of my posts are at justwritemelanie.blogspot.com, but the ones that really have to do with education are here.

My personal one little word may be kindness, but my educational one little word for the 2013-2014 would have to be lenses. I love the concept of reading with different lenses, written about so beautifully by Christopher Lehman and Kate Roberts in Falling in Love With Close Reading. Yesterday, I wrote about some of the work that our first-grade team did with Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Staff Developer Christine Holley here. Our work focused on the new unit of study for Realistic Fiction, From Scenes to Series, that Christine and Mary Ehrenworth wrote last year.

One of the emphases in all of TC's new writing units is on pre-assessment and on demand prompts. At the beginning of the unit, teachers are encouraged to have students write a piece of writing within the upcoming genre. To prepare for our work session, I "borrowed" a first-grade classroom and asked them to show off their narrative skills for me. I asked them to write a story for me, remembering whatever they could from their small moment unit. I made a quick chart for them, reminding them that stories have a beginning, a setting, a character, and an ending. When one of the students asked if he could make up a character, I said sure--they were welcome to use "I" or a made-up character. I just wanted to see how they were at writing a story.

Their teacher brought the pile of "stories" to our meeting and Christine helped us think about how to sort them, using the three different lenses of structure, development, and language/conventions.

I like to go to tournaments. I get trophies. You get to watch other people do their stuff. You could get a medal there, too. Some get first place. Some get last place. Some use weapons.

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Emma and she liked to find things. One day she found a hat. It had a little heart on it. The next day, she found a girl playing hide and seek. Emma said can I play too, please. Yes, said the girl.

Looking at these two pieces, we sorted them with the different lenses of structure, organization, and language/conventions. Then, we continued to sort other pieces, using a similar process. The first child's name would go in the following chart under overall organization, since he had no structure of a story in place at all. However, the second child's name could go under elaboration, since she did already demonstrate understanding of story structure; her story had a clear beginning and sense of plot. Her name could also go under punctuation, as she could use some work on end punctuation--names can show up in more than one place!

Christine developed a chart like this one with a group of many teachers and it is incredibly useful for any unit and any grade for establishing strategy groups for targeted instruction. I could see using it at various points in units when students are cycling through pieces, and it would serve as a tool for monitoring progress. 

I have one or two more posts to write about the learning that happened on Wednesday, but this is enough for today. Off to watch some basketball!

Happy Slicing!

Initial Reflections on Performance-Based Assessments

Since we are trying to prepare students for Smarter Balanced Assessment that will begin in 2014-2015, fourth-graders across our district completed performance assessments over the last week. We used an assessment that Teachers College Reading and Writing Project designed. If you are looking for examples of assessments, their website contains several at various grade levels.

We used one of the fourth-grade performance assessments that challenged students to think about school lunches. The materials include two articles and a video that students watch twice, according to the directions. Students then decided whether they were in favor of being allowed to bring lunches from home or having programs where all students buy lunch. I watched some of our classes take the assessment, I have looked at student work, at I have talked to students and teachers about this assessment and some of the feedback and implications for instruction are:

• Taking notes from and gaining information from a video is difficult. Even though most of our students have had their fair share of screen time, they watch as passive participants without much debate, conversation or learning going on after sessions of screent time. Several students talked about the video going too fast for them to take notes. Some implications for instruction?
• We had at least one class watch the video once on the big screen and then individually on computers with the option of pausing. I'll be interested in talking to these students about their experience with the task.
• Students have to learn how to take notes without feeling the need to write full, perfect sentences. They have to develop an understanding of why we take notes, but for many students who are just mastering the skill of writing in sentences, this is really, really hard.

• The video is designed as the first task of the assessment and is contains a clear bias toward purchasing/providing school lunches. We have teaching points that address the point of view and bias of the author and we will need to develop some points around the point of view and bias of the video-maker, as well. That being said, some questions around the concept of video as a part of assessment:
• Should there be a balance of biased clips? At least one of our students got stuck because she was in favor of bringing school lunches but that side of the argument did not exist in the video clip. If that's the case, a long assessment becomes longer...
• Should the point of view of the makers be highlighted?
• Should video clips be neutral? Those would be hard to find for many of the topics that lend themselves to making claims.
• Should students be allowed as much time as they choose to stop and start the clip? With the pressures of on-line testing, districts should be acquiring the resources for this to happen...but are they?

• Let's keep going with the concept of bias. Students had been working on research-based essays leading up to the performance assessment so we have been developing text sets around specific topics. When the topics are controversial, it is challenging to find level-appropriate collections that support both sides. The TC assessment definitely leaned toward providing school lunches through not only the video, but also the reading selections. Because we want students to use evidence from texts and not just their own thinking and experiences, there are implications for instruction. I'm wondering if we need to:
• teach students that they should choose the side that has more evidence, regardless of their opinion. My teenage daughter is taught this strategy to prepare for AP exams but at what age are students really developmentally able to argue a stance that they don't support? And what about those of us who are so committed to teaching about purpose in writing workshop? For the assessment, you might need to assume a position with which you don't agree?
• teach students to be adept at addressing the opposing beliefs. (Some people think... but I think becomes an even more important thinking prompt to teach students).

I'm sure that there will be much more to come as I reflect with the teachers about the unit and the assessment--we will be meeting in June to share struggles, strategies and celebrations. I'd really be interested to hear about other districts' experiences as I'm sure that we are not the only ones trying out these new assessments.

Enjoy the weekend!

#Slice 2013: 29 of 31- Thinking about assessment

This month I am participating in the Slice of Life Challenge hosted by Stacey and Ruth at twowritingteachers.wordpress.com. Check out some of the comments there to see what others are writing.

While many unintended consequences exist because of the high-stakes testing that exists in education, one of them is a misunderstanding of what assessment actually is and why we should be assessing. There are three reasons that I know of for assessing:

1. Accountability (we all know about this one)
2. To determine what students have learned
3. To guide our instruction

In my work as the district's writing coordinator, many teachers have asked me about the pre-assessments that exist at the beginning of almost every one of our units. "How can I ask them to do something that I haven't really taught them?"

Part of the answer to this question goes back to the Lucy Calkins adage, teach the writer, not the writing. Part of the answer also lies in a question: Why teach them what they already know? They might surprise you. Pre-assessment does not mean that the expectation is to stay with that writing piece and work on it until it is perfect. Pre-assessment is one of the strongest examples of how we use assessment to guide instruction.

Yesterday, we were in a classroom with a staff developer from Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and she launched fourth graders into an argument essay unit. Most of them had never written an essay before, so Emily Smith gave a quick lesson on how an essay goes and how to plan for it by having them read a mentor essay. She gave them the topic of dress code to think about and walked them through how to think about reasons and examples. All of this took less than fifteen minutes. 

Then, she sent the students off to write. Within another ten minutes, here are some of the products.

These two examples are pretty solid introductions, especially when we think about the fact that this is the first day of the unit. These were two of the higher examples that I saw, although there were some students who were able to keep going using paragraphs and ordinal words. These students would thrive on various ways to craft an introduction, incorporate quotes, interject voice--they could explore some sophisticated craft moves.

This next example was from a child who was having a harder time accessing his reasons. From an instructional standpoint, he might need verbal rehearsal of reasons--he might even need practice at stating his opinion since I'm not sure he didn't just copy the one that Emily had put on the class chart. 

So the question is what to do next? Do we go back to these pieces and work with them? You could. But, maybe you don't go back to them at all, but just tuck them away so that you can take them out at the end of the unit and celebrate the learning. 

I share this because it was an example of an assessment designed to guide instruction, regardless of whether the teacher continues with these pieces or tucks them away. The students were not stressed, the results are not to be entered into the computer, they do not impact report cards. Assessment can actually be a really good thing for teaching and learning. 

Enjoy your day!

Progress Monitoring for Writing

As a Special Education teacher, an important part of my job is progress monitoring. While I like my assessment systems for reading and math, I have struggled with how to progress monitor writing. My colleagues have been using a system that involves giving students prompts and then assessing how many words they produce in a three minute time period. For some students with fluency or production issues, this is meaningful. However, many of my students struggle with executive processing and they need specialized instruction to develop focus, organization, and their abilities to respond to questions. Therefore, asking them to write as much as possible to a prompt is not really measuring the skills that will help them become more successful and independent within regular education.

This year, I set up writing binders for my  5th and 6th graders, scaffolding the writing process for them. Fifth and sixth graders have been working on essay writing and when students first learn about essays, we teach them the basic structure of the five paragraph essay. Therefore, I set them up with tabbed sections for:

• Developing a topic. All they have to do is state a thesis and three supporting details.
• Expanding the topic. They have to do the above, but add anecdotal stories, facts, or evidence that support the details.
• A scaffolded introduction. I give them the written prompts for a hook, their thesis statement, and a sentence containing their three reasons.
• An unscaffolded introduction. They have to write the introduction without my support.
• A scaffolded developmental paragraph. I worked out templates for them to follow to maintain their essay's organization and include the details from their expanded topic.
• An unscaffolded developmental paragraph.

My experience with this indicated that once students could work through all of these steps, I did not need to include the conclusion, because they were independently able to summarize their work if they got that far.

The benefits of using this system was that I knew exactly where individual students struggled in the writing process. For example, one of my students couldn't think of ideas but once he did, could move through the steps. Another student required significant instruction to write an introduction. Therefore, he stayed in the scaffolded introduction section for several lessons. For all of my students with writing goals and objectives, I know exactly where they are sequentially in the steps of writing essays and, more importantly, they know where they are! Essays are overwhelming for students who have struggled with writing so I found that laying it out for them with specific steps to master was empowering to students.

For next year, I will continue to set up binders and I may try some color-coding to help some of my visual learners. One of my colleagues has added a place for students to organize and self-assess whether they have included elaboration strategies such as quotes, facts, anecdotes, statistics and descriptions. I may work on including this step within my binder, as well--thank you, Heather. In the meantime, benchmark assessments are underway and so far, I am pleased with the growth I have seen in most of my students for written expression.

Using Quick Assessments to Help Form Small Groups

Years ago, I met Jennifer Serravallo through the pages of her book, Conferring With Readers which gave me new insights into conferring.  It also helped me coach other teachers on their own conferring.  I’ve attended many of Jen’s workshop sessions at Teachers College over the years on conferring and small groups so I was thrilled when I heard she was writing a new book on Teaching Reading in Small Groups.  Of course I bought it as soon as it came out last year and tagged parts with multiple post-its and notes.  This year, our school is focusing on strengthening our small group instruction across grades and subjects and are reading Teaching Reading in Small Groups as a school book club.  So when I saw that Jen Serravallo was presenting a session at the TC Saturday Reunion titled:  Using Quick Assessments to be sure our small group work in reading has traction, I added it to my list of sessions! 

In addition to her two professional books, Jen Serravallo recently published  Independent Reading Assessment which is a new assessment resource through Scholastic. 

During this session, Jen talked about the many different forms of assessments that can be more powerful and informative than formative pencil and paper tests.

Some of the assessment examples she talked about are:

·        Reading logs

·        Engagement Inventory

·        Writing about reading (post-its and readers notebooks)

·        Conversations (partners, whole class, book clubs)

·        Comprehension continuums

Importance of Reading Logs:

Both teachers and students need to ask questions about the logs and notice patterns so they are purposeful, inform instruction, and are reflective tools.  Some possible questions and noticings are:

·    What is it about this series or author that you like so much?

·    Hmmm…I’m noticing that you are reading more when you are home than in school. Why do you think this is?

Engagement Inventory:

Jen developed this idea when she realized one day that her students were quiet during reading workshop, but doing everything they could to avoid reading.  She created an engagement inventory to document her observations of what kids were doing in 10 minute increments.  The engagement inventory is a class list document with 10 minute increments across the top and an abbreviation note-taking key on the bottom.  For example:

·   a check mark = engaged

·   W = looking out window

·   T = looking at teacher

·   NB = writing in notebook or on post-its

I began using this inventory in my classroom when I read about it in her book, Teaching Reading in Small Groups and it is very informative! Once you notice and make note of the avoidance behaviors, you can create and pull small groups to teach them strategies that can help strengthen their stamina and engagement as readers. 

Having Students Create Portfolio Pages of Post-its from Read Aloud:

One of Jen’s ideas is to have students create a portfolio page of post-its for each marking period to show their individual comprehension continuum and growth in specific comprehension skills.  Three times a year (beginning, middle, end of year), give students four specific prompts to jot down their thinking while you are reading aloud.  They jot down their thinking on individual post-its that you will collect at the end of the read aloud. 

Some comprehension skills that you can assess through the prompts are:

·    Visualization (Imagine what the character’s home is like and describe it OR Describe this scene using all of your senses)

·    Developing theories about characters (Describe what kind of person _____is OR What’s an idea you are having about _____)

·    Determining Themes/Lessons (Even though we aren’t at the end of the story, jot down what you are thinking so far about the theme/lesson/author’s message that you are learning)

·    Making Connections (What does this story remind you of?)

·    Questioning (What are you wondering right now?)

·    Predictions (Based on what you know about the character so far, what do you think s/he will do next or how will they react?)

·    Synthesis (Now that we finished the story, what are you left thinking about the characters? OR How has_____changed from the beginning to the end of this book? )

·    Empathy (Put yourself in the characters shoes and explain how s/he is feeling right now)

·    Interpretation (Why do you think the character acted or reacted in this way? What’s motivating or causing their behavior/actions? OR What is the story really about? )

After you collect all the students’ post-its, you can sort them into three piles for each skill based on their level (low, medium, high level of understanding of the skill).  So if you ask four prompts, you will have three piles of post-its for each of those prompts.  Once you have your sorted piles, you can begin to form small groups based on the similar needs you notice for each skill.  My next couple of posts will talk more about small groups and what to do next with these piles so stay tuned! J

When you are finished sorting and forming the small groups, you can give the post-its back to the students so they can tape the four post-its onto a sheet of paper with the title of the book, date, and each post-it labeled with the skill (i.e. prediction, question, theory, etc.).  These papers go into their reading portfolios and by the end of the year, you will have three examples to help see the students’ growth in comprehension skills. 

Happy Reading! :)

Reflections on the writing prompt

For years, I have looked forward to March Madness and basketball tournaments but I’m thinking that the madness also applies just as well to the standardized testing that we are living through in our public schools. My family loves the college tournaments and we all fill out brackets. One year, I won the overall family pool when I filled out my bracket based exclusively on alphabetical order. (Arizona, Baylor, Connecticut and Duke are pretty reliable picks.) When Chris Webber called time out for Michigan, thinking he had one more available time out in the NCAA finals, I remember feeling really sorry for him. I also felt bad for Diana Taurasi when she couldn’t hit a basket in the NCAA finals as a freshman at U-Conn. But I never thought that these people were not tremendous players and their careers were not defined by these moments or  games. 
                                                                       
I made a connection to these two basketball memories as I watched one of my students struggle to think of how to answer this year’s writing prompt for the Connecticut Mastery Tests. I am sure that Webber and Taurasi worked on dribbling, passing, guarding, and more; likewise, my student had worked on focus, organization, elaboration, and fluency. In class, she had written high quality, high scoring essays and she could consistently tell me all of the traits of good writing. But she drew a blank on how to address this particular prompt—some of the prompts are just as random as picking the brackets alphabetically. So now, should all of the growth that she made over the course of the year in writing be trumped by the late start she had on her CMT essay since she spent way too long thinking about it? Webber played professional basketball for Sacramento for several years and Taurasi led her team to three national championships before playing professionally. I’m going to choose to believe that, even though my student couldn’t get much written on the CMT writing prompt, she is still a good writer. One 45-minute writing session should not define a writer.

Twas the night before CMTs

So our first official blog on this site is on the night before the two weeks of standardized testing begins in Connecticut. There is a certain amount of irony in this meeting of dates since teachers dread these two weeks and this blog is designed to promote strong reflection and love for teaching and learning.

We have admittedly spent a fair amount of classroom time preparing our students to take these tests since we want our students to feel confident when they open the pages of the test booklet. And, some of the tasks that they will be asked to perform are useful and important for them to know how to do.

We definitely wanted the name of our blog to emphasize the importance of reflection in our daily work.  Perhaps the most important lessons we gave our students during the test prep unit had to do with reflection. We encouraged our students to take an active role in planning for their own preparation. Since the Connecticut Mastery Tests assess specific skills for each grade, we shared what the students would need to know with the students. Then, they shared the responsibility of identifying and remediating areas of weakness. They set goals for themselves and we offered daily workshops on specific skills; students could choose to participate or work independently. No, they weren’t all able to do this and yes, there were some students who received personal invitations to strategy sessions that we deemed necessary. However, most of the students were impressively accurate about their own personal strengths and weaknesses and they were receptive and responsive to this level of differentiated instruction. What important life skills for our students, compliments of the impending mastery tests!