This issue provides a snapshot of the presentations at ASCD's 2007 Conference on Teaching and Learning, held October 19–21 in Atlanta, Ga. This year's theme was "Connecting Instruction and Assessment."
ASCD's 2007 Conference on Teaching and Learning challenged educators to discover new ways of using assessments to inform classroom instruction. The three-day professional development conference provided plenty of opportunities for reflection and critical thinking as attendees discussed issues such as student motivation, teaching strategies, and school reform.
Assessment at the Heart of Schooling
In his opening general session presentation, Jay McTighe explained the value of assessments in the learning and teaching processes and gave attendees advice on how to appropriately use assessments to gauge students' understanding of new concepts. He also warned educators not to go overboard trying to assess their students.
McTighe asked attendees to consider ways classroom assessments can enhance learning. He noted that, to support learning, assessment practices should include clear and worthy learning targets; specific, descriptive feedback; opportunities to make revisions and try again; and criterion-based achievement and improvement.
McTighe instructed attendees to use assessments as learning targets and to think of these targets in terms of desired performances of understanding. "Students should be presumed innocent of understanding until convicted by evidence," he said. Evidence of understanding requires students to explain what they have learned (i.e., support, justify, theorize, or defend) and appropriately apply the learning to new situations.
Teachers should conduct pre-assessments to gauge where students actually are before providing new knowledge, McTighe recommended. "Don't lay good knowledge on bad knowledge," he insisted. Teachers can check for student misunderstandings of content by using diagnostic assessments such as the K-W-L strategy, pre-tests, and concept maps.
To provide students with a road map to excellence, teachers should make their expectations clear. As teachers introduce content to students, they should share rubrics with criteria of what's most important for students to learn. Teachers should provide performance targets, expectations of how students will be assessed, and self-assessment guidelines. Along with these criteria, McTighe recommended, teachers should also supply multiple models of excellent work so that students have examples to compare against their own work.
Most important, the cycle of assessment should be ongoing. "We often think of assessments in terms of summary—a grade, a score. We need to think about assessment in terms of feedback. A 'B-' or 'good job' isn't feedback. Feedback allows everyone to adjust, and that's a route to good performance," said McTighe. Students need several opportunities to receive feedback and make performance adjustments before earning their final grades. "We need to teach, assess, adjust, and assess again—not teach, test, grade, and move on," he said.
Getting Off the Sidelines
Student understanding is revealed through contextualized performance, McTighe explained. Applying what students know through real-life circumstances—like purposeful writing, scientific investigation, and issues debates—is not the same as test-prep drilling. Overreliance on test preparation can stand in the way of meaningful learning and does not actually lead to better performance on the test. In fact, McTighe likened teachers' obsession with test preparation to an athletic team that concentrates only on performing "sideline drills"—practicing and testing discrete skills in a decontextualized way—rather than playing the actual game, which requires putting all the skills and knowledge together in an authentic and contextualized way.
"We need to connect assessment practices to learning goals. If what is assessed signals what is important to learn, then how it is assessed signals how it should be learned. We want kids to use knowledge in game-like situations, not just in sideline drills," he said. "For many kids in many subjects, school is an endless stream of sideline drills with no opportunity to play the game with knowledge."
McTighe closed the session by calling for multiple meaningful measures of student learning. "Any single assessment is like a snapshot; it gives us a picture of what students know and can do at a moment in time. Sound assessment is like a photo album, which requires multiple sources of evidence, collected over time."
Forging a Successful School
Pete Hall, ASCD's 2005 Outstanding Young Educator awardee, knows that making sustained change happen within a school takes time and dedication from the leadership and staff. As an elementary principal noted for turning around schools in need of improvement, Hall told attendees, "If you want to make any kind of change, you have to live it. It has to be part of your regular discourse so that it becomes an actual reality."
Educators working in struggling schools need to be prepared to ask some tough questions, and often, those questions will be pointed inward. "Over everything else, all the tools they have in their toolboxes, the difference between ineffective and effective teachers is that effective teachers reflect on their teaching in meaningful ways," said Hall. He added that ineffective teachers may work hard, "but they don't move along the continuum of self-reflection from unaware to consciousness to action to refinement. It's possible to stagnate at any of these levels: staying unaware that we need to make changes or that there are alternatives to what we're doing; being conscious that we need to try something different but thinking it won't work with our kids; or [feeling like] if you stay at the action level and don't have someone there supporting you and reminding you to keep doing better, you can slip back to the conscious stage."
Identifying collective goals helped Hall to motivate his team toward achieving them. Hall's former school, Anderson Elementary in Reno, Nev., was once a high-needs school in need of improvement. First, leadership and staff formed professional learning communities to study what had worked at 90-90-90 schools (schools with more than 90 percent poverty, more than 90 percent minorities, and more than 90 percent meeting high academic standards). Next, they determined collective goals; the school's top priorities became improving basic skills and maximizing instruction time.
"After you decide your focus," Hall explained, "it's imperative to align all your professional development, time, and energy toward your goals. We had to go from aiming our energies in all different directions to streamlining into the same direction." Hall's staff prioritized limiting school-day interruptions, using an "all hands on deck" model, doubling the literacy block by adding 90 minutes, and using a staggered schedule that kept class size down and allowed more teachers to be in the classroom at a time.
Hall's teachers also looked at the grade-level standards for their grades and gave students explicit learning objectives. They unpacked the standards so that students were brought into the learning process, demystifying standards for students and helping teachers focus on instruction.
According to Hall, principals need to set a strong example of leadership and also incorporate their staff's ideas to achieve the best results for students. "Principals, as school leaders, need to establish relationships with their staff, identify needs, and do whatever it takes to get these teachers the support, training, and resources specific to theirneeds. If I could put one phrase up about how we turned the school around, I'd say, 'We did this together.'"
Changing Expectations for Low-Expectancy Students
During his general session presentation, Robert Marzano, author of the ASCD book The Art and Science of Teaching, instructed audience members to ask themselves, "What will I do to communicate high expectations for all students?" Marzano told attendees to first focus on changing how they interact with "low-expectancy" students to increase academic performance. "Instead of focusing on the expectation up front, why not focus on the behavior up front?" he asked.
Marzano asked attendees to identify types of students they have high expectations for and types they have low expectations for, and then identify the differential treatment these two groups receive. Marzano listed the top sources of expectations for new students: cumulative folder (previous information about students), social class, physical attractiveness, race, and language skills. "Can you change the thinking behind your biases?" he asked. "This is hard, but you can change your behaviors. Become aware of the different ways you treat students and consciously alter your behavior with the kids you have low expectations for."
Marzano suggested using verbal and nonverbal messages that convey value and worth to those identified as low-expectancy students. Teachers should ask these students questions and give them more than one opportunity to get the answer right. "This doesn't mean keeping low-expectancy kids on the hook; give them a break if they're really flustered, and then go back to them and ask them what they think about small chunks of content." If students can't grab onto the larger concept or if they say, "I don't know," break the question down into smaller pieces and get responses to these smaller chunks, Marzano said.
The ABCs of Student Motivation
In his conference session, educator and author Richard Sagor unlocked the secret to motivating students.
"Motivation is a rational decision; people make a decision to engage in something or not to," Sagor said. How do we deal with the large number of young people reluctant to invest time and energy into their education? "We have to construct classrooms and schools in a way that would make these students who have chosen not to invest, to invest."
Students are motivated by their internalized feelings about what they believe will happen in the classroom. "The student getting off the bus who knows he will do well today has a rational reason to be at school—just like the student who feels unable to do anything at school has a rational reason not to want to be there, and if he is there, to not want to be engaged in what is going on," Sagor said.
Motivation has psychological factors, Sagor said, which include feelings of competence, belonging, usefulness, and potency. Educators should focus schools and classrooms on addressing these areas to dramatically increase student motivation.
"What's the first thing students do after an absence? Go to the office and go through forms. The message conveyed is that 'My being gone created a bureaucratic nightmare for you.' One school in Ohio turned this around. Instead of giving kids the sense that the school would work better without them, this school first made a personal connection with the students, conveying that the school notices and misses them when they are absent," Sagor said. By showing students they are important, educators help students feel invested in attending school and participating in their own educational experience.
- CompetenceTeachers can nurture feelings of competence by having students maintain a portfolio of their personal bests, allowing students to rate their own progress toward goals, and assessing each student based on his or her individual rate of achievement growth.
- BelongingAddressing different learning styles, building on student strengths, and using culturally inclusive curricula help to generate a sense of belonging in students.
- UsefulnessProblem-, project-, and service-based learning and cooperative learning foster feelings of usefulness in students.
- PotencyPotency—students' belief in their internalized locus of control—is supported by goal setting, celebration, and democratic, student-driven classroom management.
Sagor concluded, "The task before all of us is to treat all of the kids as though they are the folks who are worthy of doing work that will make them feel competent, belonging, useful, and potent and help them to become optimistic about their future."
Student Responsibility in Meeting Standards
"We could get teachers completely up to speed on the standards, and it wouldn't matter a hoot, if the students didn't understand their obligations." Presenter Grant Wiggins explained that for students to take responsibility for meeting standards, they must fully understand the goals they are aiming to achieve. He asserted that students can self-assess and self-adjust to meet their goals but also cautioned educators by asking, "How can students do this if only the teacher knows what the standard means?" Wiggins pointed out a common mistake is simply posting the standard on the board, as if reading the standard equals understanding what needs to be done to accomplish it. Instead, Wiggins encouraged attendees to put standards into an accessible context by clearly outlining the performance goals for students and providing regular feedback to help them understand how to make adjustments.
Learn More Online
Inservice, ASCD's community blog, highlights several sessions from the2007 Teaching and Learning Conference and also features supporting audio,video, and images from the event. Go to http://ascd.typepad.com/blog/conference_on_teaching_and_learning for all the coverage.