Looking at our Work through an Assessment Lens
by Jonathan VanderEls • • 0 Comments
Our staff recently had the opportunity to wrap up a year’s worth of professional development related to building Quality Performance Assessments. During the 2013 summer and over this past school year, I attended five days of training with four of our classroom teachers from our elementary school along with colleagues from other schools in our district. The training we received during these days became the focal point for our PD throughout the past school year, and has really helped us to tie together the significant amount of work we have been engaged in over the past five years.
Our district, Sanborn Regional School District in Southern New Hampshire, has admittedly taken the plunge with a number of best practices designed to increase our understanding of curriculum and our ability to most effectively instruct students. This work included teachers developing “crosswalks” between the NH GLEs and the Common Core about three years ago. This was done through professional release days and was led by our Director of Curriculum, Ellen Hume-Howard. We made the switch to assessing students’ performance only through the Common Core over the past two years. Teachers’ transition to these standards was seamless because of the support provided during the transition and the teachers’ understanding that the work we were engaged in together was helping them help our students. In fact, teachers requested that all other standards be dropped from their grade book because they understood the Core standards and the others weren’t needed for guidance any longer.
We have also been grading students through a competency-based grading system for the past four years. The pathway to effectively implementing a standards/competency-based grading system has not yet been traveled by many, so the work we have been doing has been replete with learning experiences. Despite any bumps we have encountered, it has also allowed us to better understand students’ needs, has been a perfect complement for our tiered intervention and Looking at our Work through an Assessment Lens | Connected Principals: