Our Journey With Common Assessments

Today's post is brought to you by Julie Schwartzbauer.

“[Common formative assessments provide] regular and timely feedback regarding student attainment of the most critical standards . . . [and] also foster consistent expectations and priorities within a grade level, course, and department regarding standards, instruction, and assessment. . . . Most importantly, common formative assessment results enable educators to diagnose student learning needs accurately in time to make instructional modifications.” (Ainsworth, 2007, pp. 95–96)

Our grade level PLCs have been hard at work in Appleton learning about common assessments.  Many articles and professional learning opportunities have been put in place to help build teacher expertise in creating common assessments.  We also formed a Common Assessment Committee.  The committee had three or more grade level representatives from across the district, as well as specialists and literacy coaches.  The purpose of the committee was to design sample common assessments for teachers.  The teachers were then encouraged to use the samples within their PLCs, as a starting point for developing common assessments that were directly linked to their instruction and specific to the needs of the students in their classrooms.

The following is a list of steps we used in designing a common assessment:

1. Form the group (grade level teachers, specialists)

2. Meet as a team (PLC)

3. Decide which standard(s) to measure

4. Create an assessment

• Consistent with grade level Common Core State Standards (CCSS)
• Linked directly to instruction
• Tied to the needs of the students in the teacher’s classroom

5. Develop evaluation criteria (to assess the degree of understanding or proficiency)

As a starting point, we focussed on creating samples for the standards that appeared on our report card.

Our teachers are still in the process of understanding the true purpose of common assessments, but we definitely have jumped into the work required to build expertise.