It’s been some time since I last wrote about educational topics. As many educators know, the demands of day-to-day teaching can sometimes make it difficult to find time for reflection. Although I haven’t written in a while, my growth as an educator continues. Like all those in a learning environment, I am constantly questioning, exploring, and refining my practice. This ongoing evolution is a fundamental part of being an educator, and it shapes how I approach teaching and assessment.
Author and educator Maxine Greene captured the importance of professional reflection in the midst of growth when she asserted, “An ability to take a fresh look at the taken for granted seems equally important; without that ability, most of us, along with our students, would remain submerged in the habitual.” (1995, p.100)
Assessment in evolution
The gift of being human is the ability to change, stretch, and refine our understanding, even in areas in which we might have some expertise.
So how has my practice been evolving? While I have always known assessment to be the center of classroom decision making, my work with teachers around the world continues to add nuance to this understanding. This critical process offers teachers the opportunity to clarify what they are hoping to achieve, gather a body of evidence on which to base decisions, and then respond to what they learn in meaningful, targeted ways.
Through daily exploration with educators, I’ve deepened my understanding of how both teachers and students can make assessments more purposeful and impactful. This year, my insights have focused on three key areas:
- Assessment design
- Analysis and interpretation of assessment evidence
- Intervention and response following assessment experiences
Why prioritizing learning goals are important to success
The more I work with school teams, the more I see the importance of prioritization. When teams focus on key learning goals—standards or competencies essential for student success—they enable more effective collaboration. Prioritization ensures that student needs are met systematically, as not every learning experience can be addressed with intervention. Some things are simply more important than others.
I often ask teachers, “If you had 30 minutes of intervention time (revisiting, revising, relearning, reassessing) available tomorrow, what would you focus on?”
When I ask this question and highlight the time limitation, it helps teams identify the priorities that should drive their collaborative and intervention efforts.
I have also seen firsthand the power of refining prioritization with vertical teams, even after they’ve completed previous rounds of prioritization.
Recently, I worked with an amazing K-6 elementary school (shout out to Alta Vista Elementary in Cheyenne, WY) who revisited their priority standards in grade level teams and then arranged these prioritized goals vertically to ensure alignment and the development of pre-requisite skills from grade to grade.
The clarity each team experienced from this alignment was powerful.
The teachers could not wipe the smiles off their faces because they felt absolute clarity about how to ensure success in both the short and long term for every single student in their care. This activity also provided a real focus for each grade level, which led to more targeted planning when designing units and intervention times. I also recently worked with a secondary team that discussed the key precursor skills and understandings of incoming learners. This conversation led to adjustments in course focus, ensuring better preparation as students advanced through secondary courses.
How clear expectations lead to better results for everyone
In my experience working with schools on assessment design, I have consistently seen teams benefit from refining their personal and collective understanding of learning goals. Defining proficiency often reveals underlying assumptions: that colleagues share a unified definition, that students clearly understand what proficiency looks like, and that parents comprehend how proficiency is assessed in a professional context. These areas frequently require deliberate clarification to ensure alignment and transparency among educators, students, and families.
In fact, these assumptions are rarely accurate, and teams often need to revisit and thoroughly redefine their learning goals. This means articulating the skills students are expected to demonstrate and describing what these skills look and sound like when they are done with proficient quality. Making these descriptions clear to students and families is essential. There are various methods for achieving this, such as co-construction, using exemplars, or providing short video clips.
Once proficient quality is clear, teachers and students have flexibility in how the various types of assessment in education might occur and under what conditions. Proficiency is precise and the rest can be flexible. Furthermore, when teachers calibrate proficiency alongside colleagues, equitable outcomes are more likely because all students are exposed to the kinds of learning that are critical for the development of proficiency.
Collaboration: The heart of analyzing student assessments
When leaders ask me where to begin in their assessment work, if I don’t say, “Start by calibrating proficiency,” then I recommend looking at student assessment evidence in teams. Examining students’ thinking through the assessment evidence they provide is both enlightening and empowering. By looking together at responses to test questions, paragraphs written by learners, or video evidence of performances, teachers can build a shared understanding of proficiency, strengths, and student needs. This collaborative practice focuses on responding to the evidence, not just scoring, and helps guide future instructional decisions, benefiting both teachers and students.
How to intervene when students achieve early proficiency
Teachers often focus on the gap between students’ current state and desired outcomes, as this is where the work of an educator lies. While analyzing assessment evidence for student needs is essential, it’s equally important to recognize when students achieve proficiency early. Identifying early proficiency allows for extending learning by offering more complex tasks and challenges. This helps students continue to grow, develop resilience, and deepen their understanding.
Finding opportunities in a deficiency
Sometimes, in an educator’s need to process assessment information efficiently, they may miss a critical aspect of connecting assessment analysis to a strong response. Identifying that a student is missing a component of their skill development or understanding does not yet inform why those strengths are missing from the evidence presented. The “why” is important because when teachers (with students as their partners) determine why a deficiency is present, they usually connect with strategies and decisions that will lead to greater success in the future.
Often, when students do not yet produce quality products or performances, it is not due to a lack of desire, but rather, to a lack of “know-how”. As researchers John Hattie and Gregory Donoghue (2016) note, “Too many (particularly struggling) students over-rehearse a few learning strategies (e.g., copying and highlighting) and apply them in situations regardless of the demands of new tasks.” When we interrogate why a student might have struggled, we can begin to craft responses to these reasons that will remove them as barriers and, instead, insert strategies that will lead to more successful outcomes.
For example, a student might struggle with a complex problem due to a misunderstanding of the prompt, difficulty finding a suitable strategy, or failure to organize their thoughts, leading to simple mistakes. Discovering why a need presented itself in the assessment evidence can lead to a more efficient and effective response by the teacher.
How change makes us better educators
Each time I step back from my practice of guiding teachers and teams through assessment design, analysis, interpretation, and response, I am able to see patterns in how these skills can best be developed. Working in any learning environment means being willing to adapt and shift as required, and providing effective teacher support in their learning is no different. The insights I gain when exploring alongside my colleagues helps me to evolve and refine my own practice, and I hope they help you with your practice, too.
About the Educator
Katie White is an author and presenter with more than 30 years of experience in education. She has been a system leader, an administrator, a learning coach, and a K–12 classroom and online teacher.
References
Bloom, B. S. (1968). Learning for mastery. Evaluation Comment (UCLA-CSIEP), 1(2), 1–12.
Bloom, B. S. (1971). Mastery learning. In J. H. Block (Ed.), Mastery learning: Theory and practice (pp. 47–63). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Hattie, H.A.C. & Donoghue, G.M. (2016). Learning strategies: A synthesis and conceptual model. Science of Learning, retrieved at http://www.nature.com/articles/npjscilearn201613 on September 26, 2024.
