 |
|||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
Fellowship Paper
Massachusetts Charter School Fellowship Program 2001 Educational assessment has traditionally been viewed as something that
takes place at set intervals, as when a teacher gives a quiz every other
week and relies on this information to measure student progress. However,
over the past two decades, educators have increasingly taken a view of assessment
as a continuous, student-centered process. This view allows for assessment
to be used as a tool to enhance individual student learning and achievement,
rather than only as a means with which to compare students to each other
and categorize them as "high" or "low" achieving. In 1999, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam of King's College in London conducted
an extensive survey of research literature which they summarized in the
article, "Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom
Assessment." In it they discuss the benefits of continuous assessment
and offer possibilities for its implementation. They write, We use the general term assessment to refer to all those activities
undertaken by teachersand by their students in assessing themselves--that
provide information to be used as feedback to modify teaching and learning
activities. Such assessment becomes formative assessment when the
evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching to meet student needs (1999,
2). The findings of Black and Wiliam include another important insight: formative
assessment practices help "low" achievers more than they help
other students (1999, 3). Such assessment, then, is critical for any school
that hopes to narrow the gap between underachieving youth and their peers. The Neighborhood House Charter School (NHCS) has such hopes. A K1-8 charter
school located in Dorchester, Massachusetts, NHCS serves a predominantly
African-American, low-income population in inner-city Boston. Our school
subscribes to a "Succeed Anywhere" standard that proposes that
all students will be well prepared to enter a high quality public or private
secondary school. Since it opened its doors in 1996, NHCS has posted strong
showings on external tests, outscoring students in Boston on the MCAS exam
in every subject every year, in some areas by as much as ten points. Our
first two graduating eighth grades--the Classes of 2000 and 2001--were placed
in a number of top secondary schools. The teachers at NHCS believe we owe much of our students' success to
our success at using formative assessment effectively. Over the years, we
have developed a number of systems that seamlessly integrate formative assessment
into the work that students, teachers, and parents do as members of the
NHCS community. This paper highlights two of those systems: Monthly Compositions
and Goal-Setting Meetings. Research to arrive at the information here was
conducted by a number of teachers and specialists at NHCS throughout the
2000-01 school year and tested in discussions with other schools with similar
demographics--including the Frederick Douglass Charter School (grades 6-8)
and the Mather School (a local public school, grades K-5)--that are working
to adopt these practices and adapt them to their own school environments. Teachers everywhere are faced with the challenge
of looking at the rich variety of writing that kids produce in schools and
making decisions about how to evaluate it. Any discussion teachers have
about assessing writing is as full of different ideas as there are voices
in the conversation. Some would have us focus on "academic" kinds
of writing. Others emphasize writing as a means of creative expression.
The conventions of writing--especially the twin ogres of spelling and grammar--are
certainly important for students to master. But important too is mastering
the variety of genres, styles, voices, tones and all the elusive aspects
of what makes for effective self-expression. We asked ourselves, how
can we develop a system to test writing, one that serves the purposes of
formative assessment in that it is, as Black and Wiliam state, "actually
used to adapt the teaching to meet student needs"? At NHCS, we
have found the answer to this question--the Monthly Composition. Monthly Compositions, as the name implies, are
compositions written once a month by each student from kindergarten to eighth
grade. With a simple structure and a few key elements, Monthly Compositions
achieve three important goals for teachers. First, they help teachers focus
on and address academic standards. Second, they help teachers track individual
student growth. Third, they help teachers identify themes (common areas
of difficulty) in the class as a whole. All teachers are bound by state mandate to address
specific standards in each area of the curriculum. At NHCS the state standards
for written composition are reflected in a rubric designed by teachers for
assessing Monthly Compositions and in a schedule of writing that assigns
students specific genres in which to write their compositions. Both the
rubric and the genre schedule are used throughout the school, at every grade
level, every month. The consistent use of these tools, and in particular
the Monthly Compositions, helps teachers across the school become more aware
of, and focused on, a regular set of standards. Each student's collection of monthly compositions
is stored in a binder. A record of each student's writing, therefore, is
readily available to the teachers. This record enables teachers to track
the progress of individual students over time and then use that information
to design personalized instruction. The value of this record can be seen
in the example of Charlie, a third grader with severe learning needs. Measures
of performance that compare Charlie to third grade standards show him chronically
failing. But using his monthly compositions from second and third grade,
Charlie's teachers were able to identify a great deal of growth in his writing
over the course of those two years. The use of a monthly measure to track
the work of every student makes it possible to perceive individual growth
that would easily go unnoticed otherwise. When the monthly compositions are complete,
the teachers collect them, and score them. They then and meet with our school's
Writing Specialist who analyzes the writing, identifying areas (themes)
in which the class as a whole is experiencing difficulty. The process allows
teachers to identify their students' needs and design lessons accordingly,
making teaching more effective. With one-time tests or writing prompts administered
once or twice a year, it is often difficult to identify such themes. Teachers
do not have enough information from which draw conclusions, and we can easily
be thrown off by anomalies in student performance. The routine nature of
Monthly Compositions allows us to gather a wealth of data and see patterns
as they change over time. Monthly Compositions: Key Steps to Implementation In designing Monthly Compositions, teachers
at NHCS had four primary questions to grapple with. Each of our questions
about writing relates to a question we commonly hear from our students.
We asked ourselves: "What genres should we assess?" (Or, as our
students might ask, "What should I write?"); "How
should we assess the writing?" ("Is it good?"); "How
will the assessment inform instruction? ("What next?");
and finally "How do we make this matter to students?" ("Why
should I do this?"). In an attempt to make Monthly Compositions
as effective and useful as possible, we experimented with different answers
for each of these questions. The four steps outlined below represent elements
key to implementing Monthly Compositions effectively. One question students often ask is: "What
should I write?" Teachers and students alike are faced with an overwhelming
number of possible genres: research reports, fairy tales, mysteries, friendly
letters, business letters, persuasive essays, poetry, and so on. At one
time, at NHCS a list of genres was specified for each grade; teachers were
to instruct in a given genre and have their students write in it each month.
But this system quickly became too disjointed and complicated. So we stepped
back and asked ourselves: "What kind of writing is it most important
that our students learn?" Our answer: narratives, informational
writing, and responses to literature. At all levels, from kindergarten to
eighth grade, we want our students to know how to write an engaging story,
an informative report, and a thoughtful critique. Of course, these genres
look different at different levels. While our third graders' narratives
are fairy tales, our eighth graders write about an event that has shaped
their lives. The literature responses of second graders include a brief
summary of a book and each student's favorite part, while each sixth grader
writes about the theme of a poem, using evidence to support his or her view.
At other schools, teachers may arrive at a different
answer to the dilemma of what genres to cover. The important thing is that
the question is asked, and the temptation of including every genre under
the sun is avoided. For us, it was also important that Monthly Compositions
not be an add-on, separate from the rest of the writing that our students
produce. To avoid such isolation of subject matter and skill development,
we made a schedule of genres based on the curriculum of each class. For
example, the students write literature responses in seventh grade in the
month when they are reading a collection of short stories. The first graders
write their informational writing as a part of their study of mammals in
science. Teachers often spend two months on one genre, allowing students
to have multiple experiences with it. Two months for literary responses,
for example, allows a teacher to have students do a lot of writing in relation
to a book the class reads together, using two of those pieces of writing
as the Monthly Compositions. Another question our students pose about their writing is: "Is it good?" In developing Monthly Compositions, our goal was for our students to see writing as a tool for learning as well as a skill in and of itself. How could we tell if our students were growing as writers over the course of the school year and over the course of their school careers? How could we compare the letter Ariel wrote to her mother in October of first grade with the report on mammals she wrote in April? To do this, it was important to create a focused and consistent rubric that could apply to every grade level. In designing this rubric, we also wanted to identify aspects of writing that made sense to our students. We adapted the state standards and crated three categories for evaluation: organization, written conventions, and language usage. Organization. In evaluating organization, we look at the structure of the piece of writing. We look for a clear beginning, middle, and end in a story. In non-narrative genres, we look for topic, supporting, and concluding sentences and paragraphs. A piece of writing that reflects minimal understanding of the structural elements of the genre receives a one, while a piece of writing that illustrates a particularly sophisticated understanding of the genre receives a four. Written Conventions. In evaluating conventions, we assess the more technical aspects of writing: spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. We consider how well each composition reflects an understanding of grade-level standards in each of these areas. A one signifies that the piece of writing contains many errors in the mechanics of writing. A four signifies that the piece of writing includes the use of conventions beyond the expectations for the grade level. Language Usage. A piece of writing can
be perfectly organized and every aspect of the writing can be correct, and
the piece can still be lacking. In assessing language usage, we evaluate
the student's use of words to express ideas. Does the story capture our
interest? Does the report on rocks and minerals reveal the author's knowledge
in an interesting and accurate manner? A piece of writing that relies on
the same limited vocabulary and sentence structure throughout would receive
a one. A four is assigned to a piece of writing that uses
sophisticated language, and uses it well, to convey the author's ideas.
Another question teachers hear regularly from
their students is: "What do I do next?" Monthly Compositions are
not to be read, scored, and filed by the teacher alone. Essential to the
process of formative assessment is the evaluation of the piece of writing,
done in conjunction with other teachers, and the sharing of feedback with
students. Early in the year, teachers meet to score compositions
together; this way, they are on the "same page" as to how to do
the scoring. We look to Monthly Compositions to see how well our students
understand the different genres and the different aspects of writing, and
we make decisions about instruction based on that understanding. Throughout
the year, teachers refer to the scores on Monthly Compositions when they
participate in planning meetings with their co-teachers. For example, the
sixth grade teachers noticed that their students received lower scores for
language usage than they did in the other two categories, and that the low
scores were due primarily to a limited use of vocabulary. They began to
focus on vocabulary in the texts the students read across the curriculum.
Students looked up words and received credit for using them in their writing.
Student-generated lists of synonyms for words like "said" and
"good" were posted in the classroom. These approaches helped the
students use a wider variety of words and more sophisticated vocabulary
in their writing. Higher scores in language usage on the next round of Monthly
Compositions provided evidence for the improvement. Another example comes from a fifth grade class,
about which teachers met to discuss the responses to literature that students
had written in November. Looking together at the writing and the scores
assigned to the writing, the teachers noted a lack of depth of analysis
on the part of the entire class. In response to this, the teachers planned
to continue their literature response study with an emphasis on character
and how a central character in a novel develops and changes over time. The
following Monthly Composition, it was decided, would focus on writing about
character; prior to requiring students to do that writing teachers were
to equip the students with the tools to more deeply analyze character development.
In this way, Monthly Compositions formed assessment "bookends"
for a lesson. The November Compositions provided initial data that served
as the impetus for the lesson plan, while December Compositions provided
follow-up data to measure the lessons' effectiveness. Of course, we can't leave the students out of
the assessment process. After they have written their Compositions, students
meet with their teachers for a conference; here students see their rubric
scores and discuss how they can improve their work as writers. The students
set writing goals for themselves, and in regularly held goal-setting conferences
(with the teacher, the student, and his or her parents present) these goals
are shared. Sharing the compositions with the students does
more than provide them with an understanding of how their writing can improve.
We've found that kindergartners and eighth graders alike love to look back
at their Monthly Compositions. They enjoy seeing their own growth. At graduation
our eighth graders receive a bound copy of all their Monthly Compositions,
those written in their first month at the school through those written in
June of their eighth grade year. After the ceremony, we watch them pore
over this collection of their writing. These collections contain a precious
picture of each student as a writer, from when that student first held the
pencil and wrote a series of letters to the time when he or she wrote a
letter to the headmaster trying to persuade him to reconsider the school
uniform policy. Finally, there is the age-old question from
students: "Why should I do this?" Monthly Compositions would be
of no use as an assessment tool if they didn't matter to the students. Similarly,
they would be of no use to students if they didn't address the kind of writing
that students need to learn. Students in any school experience writing in
a variety of contexts. For example, our students take the MCAS, in which
they write a multi-paragraph essay on a surprise assigned topic; they write
in silence, with sharpened number-two pencils and cannot ask the teacher
questions. Day to day in the classroom, on the other hand, our students
do a lot of writing on topics related to the curriculum; here they have
guidance, from peers and the teacher, throughout the process. As adults,
we face similar situations: writing on our own under pressure at some times,
writing as a collaborative effort with editors and feedback at others. We wanted Monthly Compositions to be somewhere
in between these two kinds of writing. We see writing compositions as not
an entirely individual process, but not an entirely interactive process
either. We feel it is not a terribly daunting, high-stakes experience,
but it is one to be taken seriously. Our students know
that Monthly Compositions receive considerable attention from teachers,
and they respond accordingly. Teachers capitalize on this response, reminding
students frequently of the importance of Monthly Compositions. There is, of course, much more that can be done
with Monthly Compositions, and many more variations on the theme can be
used. We feel these four key steps, however, have helped us implement a
program that helps our teachers teach better and our students learn better.
Monthly Compositions allow us to utilize formative assessment in the classroom.
Outside the classroom, in the school as a whole, we utilize Goal-Setting
Meetings. Goal-Setting Meetings are similar to the time-honored
educational practice of the parent-teacher conference. However, there is
a critical difference. Parent-teacher conferences have traditionally left
one crucial element out of the picture: the student. Teachers often meet
with parents and together they decide what is best for the child--what the
child needs to learn and how the child needs to change. Unfortunately, without
the child's active participation in this meeting, the adults' plans may
never become a reality. In Goal-Setting Meetings, students, teachers, and
parents meet together two times a year as a central part of the student
assessment process. In Goal-Setting Meetings, we do not merely come
up with a checklist of student goals and send the child off with it. We
recognize that often students have an understanding of what is hard for
them and what comes more easily. In Goal-Setting Meetings teacher and student
work as a team; the teacher helps the student identify their strengths and
challenges, and together they discuss how the student will meet his
or her goals. As children participate in these conversations, they become
more aware of themselves as learners, and they develop knowledge of how
they learn best. Any real learning occurs because the learner
has a desire to learn. No matter how perfectly designed the curriculum,
teachers cannot teach students who do not take responsibility for their
own learning. Participation in the Goal-Setting Meetings gives the student
a heightened sense of accountability. Parents, too, feel involved in the
process and have a clear sense of their role. Students, teachers, and parents
all feel responsible for achievement of the goals, and because they work
out steps together, they all know how to go about accomplishing them. In the Goal-Setting Meeting, teachers and students
are able to gauge progress that might have been otherwise overlooked. Teachers
identify what the student has already learned, and they use that information
as a springboard to determine where he or she can go from there. For example,
in noting that the student has memorized all multiplication tables, teacher
and student then set the goal of learning the division tables. Identifying
progress is satisfying for the student (and the teacher and parents) and
encourages further growth. A student who feels proud of what he or she has
accomplished thus far sets new goals with confidence. In our experience, in order for Goal-Setting
Meetings to bring about such positive results, they must follow three guidelines.
First, students, parents, and teacher must all be actively involved. Second,
goals set should be concrete and achievable. Third, meetings should have
follow up in the form of frequent progress checks. As stated earlier, Goal-Setting Meetings go
beyond the traditional parent-teacher conference. We've all been there;
the teacher sits down with the parent and gives an overview of the child's
strengths and weaknesses and a list of things the child needs to do next.
Goal-setting conferences, on the other hand, require not only the presence
but also the participation of the student. It is the student's responsibility
to participate--identifying goals and establishing plans for achieving them.
Often teachers meet with students before the Goal-Setting Meeting, to discuss
what goals they think are important for them. In other cases, teachers have
students write the goals they would like to set for themselves. Thinking
about goals before the conferences helps students to be well prepared. In
the conference the teacher may help the student clarify his or her goals,
or the student may add to the goals. The student, teacher, and parent then
discuss how to best achieve the goals. In Goal-Setting Meetings (and follow up to them)
the teacher's role is also different from that assumed in a traditional
parent-teacher conference. The teacher guides the student in setting individual
goals and considers how the student will accomplish them. The teacher then
acts as coach--reminding the student of the goals, and providing the support
in the classroom necessary for the child to reach those goals. Teachers
at NHCS have found, however, that we need to be careful not to set goals
that turn out to be our goals--goals that create additional work
for us, work that, in all likelihood, we won't be able to do. The parent's role is critical as well. The parent's
active presence at the conference makes it more likely that the student's
goals will be achieved. The parent becomes aware of the student's goals,
and can provide crucial support. The child's progress can then be supported
at home as well as at school. We've found that we can ensure parent involvement
by setting at least one goal that involves the parent. Parents of younger
students, for example, can read at home to their children. Parents of older
students can be asked to sign the student's homework assignment each night,
after reviewing it for completion and overall quality. The goals have to be concrete and achievable. Vague or overly ambitious goals don't work. Students need to know exactly what the goal means and what accomplishing it will look like. "I will revise my writing," isn't as effective as "I will underline four words that I changed in each piece of writing that I hand in." "I will learn my multiplication facts," isn't as concrete as "I will pass my timed multiplication quizzes through the twelves." Teachers and students alike can see when such measurable goals are accomplished. The goals also have to be within reach of the
student. This often means teachers must help break goals down into quantifiable
parts. Instead of having the child "complete a research report"
on the rain forest, a teacher might have the child "read three books
about the rain forest and write a summary note card for each." Instead
of having the student "participate more in class," the teacher
might have the student "raise her hand at least once in each academic
class period." With such specificity there should be no question as
to when the goal has been reached. The Goal-Setting Meeting is not a one-shot deal. Our teachers follow up the conferences with support for the students, and they remind students of their goals. For easy reference, some teachers post the goals in the classroom; others keep goal books on their desks. Some students keep their goals on a card taped inside their desks. That way they can check off goals as they are accomplished, and gain a satisfied feeling of completion. Moreover, at appropriate times during the school day, teachers remind students of their goals. "Those of you who have an editing goal should remember to underline the changes you make as you edit," a teacher might tell the class, or she may comment to an individual student after class, "I noticed that you raised your hand twice during Social Studies. Good for you! Remember that your goal is to raise your hand in every class." Focusing on an individual's goals for the next two or three days after they have been set helps drive them home as well. We want students' goals to be present in their minds as they go about the day. Goal setting is a school-wide endeavor. All
members of the school community are aware that students have goals. The
headmaster and other teachers in the school frequently ask students what
their goals are and how they are progressing toward achieving them. We offer
students support in their efforts. "You did a great job reciting that
poem in Town Meeting," the sixth grade teacher might say to a third
grader out on the playground. "Thanks," the student might respond,
"it was one of my goals." Some goals involve behavior or activities
in non-academic classes-- music or art, for example. The language of goal
setting runs like a current throughout the school. Teachers themselves meet
with the headmaster to set goals for themselves and design action plans
to meet those goals. Assessment is a part of the school culture at
Neighborhood House Charter School. Recognizing how important it is to make
teaching responsive to student needs, we have taken pains to build formative
assessment into everything we do. Monthly Compositions and Goal-Setting
Meetings are two examples of our most successful practices. Monthly Compositions
help teachers focus on and address academic standards, track individual
student progress, and identify themes on which to base instruction in their
classes. Goal-Setting Meetings help students become more self-aware, parents
and students feel more accountable for meetings goals, and teachers better
focus on and recognize student progress. By putting these practices in place,
students, teachers, and parents can work together to close the achievement
gap and help students "succeed anywhere."
|
|
|
||
| © 2005 Massachusetts Charter Public School Association | design by SolsticeSun Design | |
