Student Achievement

As regular readers of this blog already know, we offered four days of classroom formative assessment training to teams from 27J schools last spring.  We offered each session twice, and trained something like 140 people.  I want to keep you up to date on what has happened since then, and what will happen next.

Professional Development at Schools

I or someone else from my team has met or will soon meet with each principal to talk about their professional development plans for the upcoming school year.  We are using a planning template that asks about topic, venue, and relationship to classroom formative assessment.

We have a couple of objectives beyond knowing what each school is doing.

1. We want to be involved in the conversation about how to link next year’s professional development with both previous years’ professional development and with classroom formative assessment.  For example, there is a very clear link in my mind betweeen classroom formative assessment and AVID strategies, but if you haven’t had AVID training, that may not be really clear to you, and when your school does training on AVID strategies, you might appreciate knowing how that connects to classroom formative assessment, which you know the executive director for student achievement spouts about all the time and therefore must be really important.
2. We want to be involved in the conversation about how what happens on a professional development day links to what happens in team meetings to what happens in staff meetings.
3. We want to make sure that schools get the support they need to deliver high quality professional development.

Classroom Formative Assessment training for Special Education and ESL teachers

The slots we had available for the training last spring were limited, and so we didn’t have as many special education teachers and ESL teachers trained as we would have liked.  So this summer (in fact, we just finished), we brought around 35 of those teachers together for training on classroom formative assessment, and how it links to the instructional model and their role in their buildings.  What a great group.  I got to spend half a day with them yesterday talking about the instructional model, and they had great things to say and asked great questions, one of which I want to address here, and some of which I’m putting in a separate blog post.

The same question was asked several times to different members of my team (which tells me that a) there’s quite a lot concern about this and b) they’re testing to see if they get the same answer each time).  What is our responsibility with regard to carrying this training back to our buildings?  The answer is couched in a negative: we do NOT advocate a trainer of trainers model where we expect teachers to go back to their buildings and train other teachers.  The Achievement Team supports building principals in developing and implementing school improvement plans and professional development plans for their buildings.  Principals are the primary meaning-makers for their schools, and hold the responsibility for putting in place plans that meet the needs of the building in that moment, which includes honoring what has been done in the past.  We provided the teachers at the training with a planning template for their own plan for how to support classroom formative assessment, because leadership is taking responsibility for what matters to you, and any change effort has to begin with yourself.

Focus

I don’t think there’s anyone left who hasn’t heard me say that the instructional model is all I’m ever going to talk about.  One of the things we know is that we need to be thoughtful and cautious about what we focus on and how fast we move.  Two years ago, we focused on ELTs.  Last year we focused on clarity of target.  The way things are shaping up, we will spend this year focused on descriptive feedback.  In other words, we will work our way slowly through the seven strategies of assessment for learning.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other facets of the instructional model that require development.  The trick will be not to bite off more than we can chew, and to make sure we provide people with the opportunity to make those part-to-whole connections.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Student Achievement and tagged classroom formative assessment, instructional model. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.