21 February 2010

Alignment and Frequency of Assessment of Competency Understanding

Competencies at their basis come down to a goal, an assessment and a plan to get to the goal. A lot of work has been done in recent years on the first step--establishing the goal. Different groups will be ready at different times but the logical next step is to examine assessments. If your group is ready to examine assessments these are 2 simple activities that could help.

Inspired by the work of
Larry Ainsworth.

If you look at the link above and scroll to page 70 and 71 you will see two activities that check common assessments for alignment to Power Standards (our word is competencies and I will use it from here forward) and for frequency of assessment of competencies.

Activity 1 Alignment
This is a check for whether or not current assessments align to the competencies. Teachers could bring some assessments and go through this activity. I would suggest that the groups would be small and used to working with one another. This is not a "gotcha" activity. The idea is to see where we are now and what we might want to do to improve.
  1. How many of our assessment items align to the competencies? Which ones?
  2. How many of our assessment items do not align to the competencies? Which ones?
  3. Do our assessment items directly match the "unwrapped" concepts and skills of the competencies?
  4. Do our assessment items math the level of rigor required by particular "unwrapped" competency skills, such as evaluate or analyze?
  5. Do our assessment items use the same terms that appear in the standards as opposed to more student-friendly wording (i.e., identify rather than label)?
  6. Do our assessment items align with or resemble the formatting of our district and state assessments so the such formats will be familiar to students?
  7. What does this tell us? Are our assessment items matched to our intended instructional purposes (the targeted competencies)?
  8. What do we need to do next in this regard? Which items do we keep? Which items do we need to replace or modify so that they do align with our competencies?
Activity 2 Frequency
Again teachers could look at the assessments that they currently give and go through these questions.
  1. How many of our assessment items match each competency?
  2. Are certain competencies underrepresented? Which ones?
  3. Are certain competencies overrepresented? Which ones?
  4. Are we trying to address too many competencies in this one assessment?
  5. What does this tell us? Do we need to redistribute our assessment items so that the appropriate number of competencies are more equally represented?
  6. What do we need to do next in this regard? Which items do we keep as they are? Which items do we need to replace or modify so that there is a better balance between the actual number of items and each of the targeted competencies?

Trying to Put it All Together--Again

4:45 am brainstorming about District in Need of Improvement

The keys remain for me:

  • Focus. We need a laser like focus on student learning.
  • Coordination of the focus. Individuals currently do a pretty good job at focus. The district does an OK job. This needs to change to the district doing an excellent job.
  • The Extra Department. Currently we have Special Education for students with 504 plans or IEP. What about an Department of Extra Services. This would be a fully functioning and organized department just like Special Education but it would be for students that need extra help but are not in Special Education or English Language Learning.
  • Eliminate the grades concept from our thinking at the high school. Make high school about completing the requirements not about progressing through grade 9, 10, 11, 12. Make being a 5th year OK--this will be right for some students.
  • Hire "right match" people. Make sure new hires know what they are getting into. Lots of sharing, lots of collaboration, lots of openness. Very little of the closed classroom door environment.
  • Leadership. Allow principals to spend some time each day focused on learning.
  • More teacher leaders. In order for principals to spend more time on learning everyone will have to do a little bit more.
  • Duties at HS--First and second year teachers do not have duties. Their duty is to visit other classrooms and watch what veteran teachers do.
Just some ideas--no permanent suggestions.