As I shared in our last bulletin, we went through some ideas and protocols for stronger CFAs from the one book that I love picking up time and time again …our PLC bible, Learning by Doing. In continuing from last week’s bulletin on Chapter 6, I continued to read on Depth of Knowledge and deeper learning.
A few more notes/reminders/thoughts to keep in your back pocket from rereading pieces of Chapter 6 (I highly encourage you to read it in entirety as well!):
· Deeper learning is the process through which an individual becomes capable of taking what was learned in one situation and applying it to new situations (i.e., transfer)…by developing cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal competencies.
· Deeper learning is preparing students to master core academic content, think critically and solve complex problems, work collaboratively, communicate effectively and learn how to learn.
· Norman Webb has classified Depth of Knowledge (DOK) into the following four levels, with levels 3 and 4 representing deeper learning. The four levels are as follows.
- DOK 1: Recall of a fact, term, concept or procedure-basic comprehension
- DOK 2: Application of concepts or procedures involving some mental processing
- DOK 3: Application requiring abstract thinking, reasoning, or more complex inference
- DOK 4: Extended analysis or investigation that requires synthesis and analysis across multiple contexts and nonroutine applications
· If educators are to help students acquire deeper knowledge and skills, they must create assessments that provide timely information on each student’s proficiency in these key areas of learning.
· They must engage in collective inquiry regarding how to monitor deeper learning for their students. They must become students of assessments that are intended to provide insights into a student’s ability to apply his or her knowledge and skills
· To help teams with collective inquiry, providing them with clear parameters and guidelines for creating such assessments that will call on students to demonstrate deeper learning:
- Create a specific number of common assessments to use in their course or grade level during the semester to ensure student learning is monitored on a timely basis (we will discuss in a staff meeting soon)
- Include multiple levels of knowledge questions on each assessments
- Demonstrate how each item on the assessment is aligned to an essential outcome of the course or grade level
- Specify the proficiency standard for each skill or concept so that teachers and students alike are able to identify, with precision, where the student needs help
- Clarify the conditions for administering the test consistently
- Ensure that the demonstration of proficiency on team assessment will be highly correlated to success on high-stakes testing at the district, state, provincial or national level
- Assess a few key concepts frequently rather than many concepts infrequently
Resources teachers should use might include:
- State or provincial assessment frameworks to make sure staff are familiar with the format and rigor of the state test
- Data on student performance on past indicators of achievement
- Examples of rubrics for performance-based assessments
- Recommendations from assessment experts such as Rick Stiggins, W. James Popham, Dylan Williams and Larry Ainsworth
- Tests that individual team members developed
· Teams should have the autonomy to develop the kind of assessments they believe will result in valid and authentic measures of the learning of their students. They should have autonomy in designating the proficiency targets for each skill; however, they should also be called on to demonstrate that student success on their assessments is strongly correlated to success on other indicators of achievement the school is monitoring.
· Frequent monitoring of each student’s learning is a critical element of effective teaching, and no teacher should be absolved from that task or allowed to assign responsibility of it to state test-maskers, central office coordinators or textbook publishers.
· The administrative team will make commitments to the staff that common assessment data will not be used in a punitive way to formally or informally evaluate teacher performance.
· Assessment experts agree that the best way for educators to build their capacity to create quality assessments is to address the challenge as collaborative team members rather than as individuals.
Until next time…Next we will discuss the “why” behind CFAs.
