Transcript Slide 1

 "The quality of an education system cannot exceed the
quality of its teachers.”
 "The only way to improve outcomes is to improve
instruction.”
 “How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come
Out on Top,” McKinsey and Co., 2007
 “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
 W. Fusselman, Swiss-British art critic
 "... the future of our economy, the strength of our
democracy and perhaps even the health of the planet's
ecosystems depend on educating future generations in
ways very different from how many of us were
schooled.”
 Tony Wagner, The Global Achievement Gap, p. xxvii
 Ten years ago, seminal research based on data from
Tennessee, showed that if two average eight-year-old
students were given different teachers – one of them a
high performer, the other a low performer – their
performances diverge by more than 50 percentile
points within three years.
 “How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come
Out on Top,” McKinsey and Co., 2007
 Assessment literacy is not hard learning, but it is slow
learning and it requires sustained and targeted support.
 ABQ, pg. 160
 Secrets to Change
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Capacity building prevails
Connect peers with purpose
Learning is the work
Transparency
 Michael Fullan
Understanding the Change Process
 The goal is not to innovate the most.
 It is not enough to have the best ideas.
 Appreciate the implementation dip.
 Redefine resistance.
 Reculturing is the name of the game.
 Never a checklist, always complexity.
 Michael Fullan
 When principals and superintendents are unable to
distinguish sound instruction and assessment from
substandard practice, the likelihood that teachers will
value and implement effective practices is not great.
 Daniel L. Duke
 No amount of embarrassment can help teachers do
what they are not capable of.
 Michael Fullan
 Formative assessment represents evidence-based
instructional decision-making. If you want to become
more instructionally effective, and if you want your
students to achieve more, then formative assessments
should be for you.
 Popham (2008), p. 15
 No assessment system can really be in balance unless
the classroom level of assessment is fulfilling its role in
supporting and verifying learning.
 An Action Guide for School Leaders
 Proposition
 More skillful assessment will not improve student
achievement unless it serves as a catalyst for adult
learning and changes in teacher practice.
 DuFour (2008)
 Designing clear learning goals and objectives is a
staple of effective teaching. We might even say that
goal setting is a necessary condition for effective
teaching.
 Robert Marzano, Designing & Teaching Learning Goals &
Objectives (2009)
 Goals are the reason classroom activities are
designed. Without clear goals, classroom activities are
without direction.
 Robert Marzano, Designing & Teaching Learning Goals &
Objectives (2009)
 Good teaching begins with clear learning goals from
which teachers select appropriate instructional
activities and assessments that help determine
students’ progress on the learning goals.
 Krajcik, McNeill, and Reiser
 Well-structured learning goals make assessment tasks
easier to construct, and well-constructed assessment
tasks help operationalize learning goals.
 Robert Marzano, Designing & Teaching Learning Goals &
Objectives (2009)
 You can enhance or destroy students’ desire to
succeed in school more quickly and permanently
through your use of assessment than with any other
tools you have at your disposal.
 Rick Stiggins
 The gap between knowing and doing becomes as wide
as the Grand Canyon when the new skills differ from
familiar and comfortable habits. Educators can take
between two and three years to develop these skills
and use them at a high level of quality.
 Joyce and Showers, Student Achievement Through Staff
Development, (1988)
 For formative assessment, teachers must not only be
clear about what they want students to learn (the lesson
objective or intended outcome for students who “get it”);
they also must know typical student steps and missteps
toward this goal (the typical learning progression).
 Moss and Brookhart, Advancing Formative Assessment in
Every Classroom, (2009)
 All too often, the term “formative assessment”
conjures images of quizzes and tests, while in
reality, formative assessment is a process used by
teachers and students during instruction that
provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and
learning.
 Gene Wilhoit, CCSSO
 …the teacher's role in formative assessment is not
simply to use feedback to promote content learning, but
also to help students understand the goal being aimed
for, assist them to develop the skills to make judgments
about their learning in relation to the standard, and
establish a repertoire of operational strategies to
regulate their own learning.
 Margaret Heritage, Formative Assessment and Next-Generation
Assessment Systems: Are We Losing an Opportunity?, 2010
 …formative assessment [must] be regarded as a
process rather than a particular kind of
assessment. In other words, there is no such thing
as “a formative test.” Instead, there are a number
of formative assessment strategies that can be
implemented during classroom instruction. These
range from informal observations and
conversations to purposefully planned
instructionally embedded techniques designed to
elicit evidence of student learning to inform and
adjust instruction.
 FAST SCASS, 2008
 [An] unequivocal requirement [is] that the formative
assessment process involve both teachers and
students. The students must be actively involved in
the systematic process intended to improve their
learning. The process requires the teacher to share
learning goals with students and provide
opportunities for students to monitor their ongoing
progress.
 FAST SCASS, 2008
 Assessment for learning should be regarded as a key
professional skill for teachers. Teachers require the
professional knowledge and skills to: plan for
assessment; observe learning; analyze and interpret
evidence of learning; give feedback to learners and
support learners in self- assessment. Teachers should
be supported in developing these skills through initial
and continuing professional development.
 Assessment Reform Group, 2002
 It is essential that schools and districts provide
teachers the time to work together to learn the
curriculum, plan lessons and assessments, and
continue their own learning in the academic disciplines
they teach.
 Schmoker, 2002
 “If we take care of the learning, the
learning will take care of the testing.”
 Harvey Silver
 Too often assessment is associated with reporting, not
supporting.
 Daniel L. Duke
 Three interrelated conditions for formative assessment
that teachers and students must:
 Possess a concept of the standard being aimed for;
 Compare the actual level of performance with the
standard; and
 Engage in appropriate action which leads to some closure
of the gap.
 Royce Sadler, 1989
 We must be mindful of our students, but take them
beyond where they happen to be.
 Diana Senechal, Educational Leadership, March 2011
 Students who don’t know the intention of a lesson
expend precious time and energy trying to figure out
what their teachers expect them to learn.
 Moss, Brookhart, Long, Educational Leadership, March
2011
 With good relationships in place, all other instructional
strategies seem to work better.
 Marzano, Educational Leadership, March 2011
 Indeed, the single most common source of leadership
failure we’ve been able to identify – in politics,
community life, business, or the non-profit sector – is
that people, especially those in positions of authority,
treat adaptive challenges like technical problems.
 Heifetz & Linsky (2002), Leadership on the Line
 Targets must be mastered by the teachers who must
teach them.
 Carol Commodore
 The principle goal of education is to create people who
are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating
what other generations have done – people who are
creative, inventive, discoverers.
 Jean Piaget