A Coherent Network of Student Assessment Contributes to Attaining the Mission of Learning for All

Effective classroom assessment requires a systemic rather than a singular approach.  Such an approach requires a change in mindset whereby assessment is not as a single test but rather as an articulate system of metrics.  A coherent system will be comprised of “valid measures of learning and be horizontally, developmentally, and vertically aligned to serve classroom, school, and district improvement’ (Herman, 2010, p. 1). 

Although a multiple choice test can be efficiently administered it cannot reliably measure the range of annual learning standards.  However, a systemic mindset encourages utilization of multiple measures that can evaluate both the depth and breadth of student learning and development.  Therefore, a systemic approach that embraces multiple and diverse forms of evaluation provides the opportunity to analyze a more thorough exhibition of student learning.  

Systemic approaches that utilize diverse evaluations allow all stakeholders a better opportunity to make decisions based on holistic data.  Diverse data analysis offers the opportunity to more reliably monitor and adjust plans for student, classroom, and school-wide improvement.  This systemic approach provides an opportunity that is not reliably possible through analysis of a solitary, end-of-year test.  The latter “simply cannot provide sufficient formative information to guide teaching and learning throughout the year (Herman, 2010, p 3).

As noted by Herman, the National Research Council (NRC, 2001), advocates for coherence that begins “with a clear specification of the goal(s) to be measured.  Next, assessment tasks are specially designed or selected to reflect the learning goal(s).  Finally, an appropriate interpretation framework is applied to student responses to reach valid conclusions about student learning—for example, a score of “proficient” on a state test or an inference about the source of a student’s misunderstandings in teachers’ formative practice” (2010, p. 3).

A systemic approach promotes coherence.  Through-course exams complement end-of-year assessments.  “More extended, performance-oriented assessments conducted during the course of instruction provide rich opportunities to assess students’ thinking and reasoning as well as their ability to apply and communicate their knowledge and skills in solving complex problems” (Herman, 2010, p. 6).  Models of effective teaching utilize performance assessments to support authentic instruction and student learning. 

An assessment system promoting a coherent network provides the opportunity to develop, implement, and utilize a data-based accountability system that supports educational reform.  Holistic data-based analysis monitors instruction, identifies areas for improvement, and adjusts implementation to optimize learning for all students.  Therefore, every student becomes prepared for post-secondary education or training that can result in a successful life.  Learning for all must be the mission.  A coherent, data-based accountability system is identified as a correlate of Effective Schools Research (Lezotte & Snyder, 2011).  Therefore, any educator that supports learning for all willingly embraces the concept of a coherent system of student assessment.  

  

To cite: 

Anderson, C.J. (October 30, 2016) A coherent network of student assessment contributes to attaining the mission of learning for all. [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/

References:

Herman, J. L. (2010). Coherence: Key to next generation assessment success (AACC Report). Los Angeles, CA: University of California.

Lezotte, L. W., & Snyder, K. M. (2011). What effective schools do: Re-envisioning the correlates. Bloomington, IN:Solution Tree Press.

 

Psychological Tools Reduce Cognitive Overload and Optimize Learning

       Psychological tools provide the most important thing a culture passes on to its members Vygotsky (1979). These tools are cognitive devices and procedures whereby we effectively communicate and explore the world around us.  They both aid and change our mental functioning.  Speech, writing, gestures, diagrams, numbers, chemical formulas, musical notation, rules, and memory techniques exemplify common psychological tools.  Eventually these social interactions become internalized as cognitive processes that are automatically invoked.  Quoting Vygotsky researchers Tudge and Scrimsher (2003), “through others we become ourselves” (p. 218).
       An effective educator creates a defined educational culture by optimizing structured learning through the utilization of strategies exhibiting high levels of success.  The first pursuit in this endeavor is to mitigate learning overload.  Learning overload prevents educators from helping students realize progress and achieve stated goals (Reason, 2010).  Citing Kennedy (2006) and Franklin (2005), Reason (2010) further notes, “We can’t alter the brain to hold more information, but we can change our approach to learning in ways that reduce overwhelm and prepare us to deal with institutional challenges more effectively” (p. 99). 
        In any learning environment, the student’s reticular activating system (RAS) impacts his or her attention and motivation.  Therefore, the RAS impacts how efficiently students address the curriculum focal points.  The effective educator recognizes this and seeks to “clearly identify the learning focal points that matter” (Reason, 2010, p. 100) as a way to mitigate stressors that overwhelms one’s perception and attention to curriculum focal points.
       Many institutes of higher education find adult learning benefits from a scheme or model for promoting critical thinking as based on the Perry Scheme (Perry, 1968).  The model is comprised of nine stages within four levels of cognitive ability: dualism, multiplicity, relativism and commitment to relativism.

1.      Dualists think in terms of black and white or right and wrong.  They perceive the need for an objective truth.  They avoid group discussions because they find them to be a waste of time.

2.      Multiplists, by contrast, believe that truth is completely subjective.  Everyone’s opinion or experience is legitimate.

3.      Relativists believe that truth is contextual, therefore what is right or wrong is relative to a particular context or frame of reference.  Since students at this level are able to evaluate the merits of a particular position based on available data, and circumstances can change at any given moment, their thinking is very fluid.

4.      Commitment to relativism is the final stage, whereby individuals are very self-aware and view knowledge as progressive and evolving.  New information is constantly being compiled, evaluated, and synthesized and therefore new knowledge replaces previous thoughts and beliefs.  Philosophically, this level relates to scientific inquiry.

       Acronyms and mnemonics are two psychological tools utilizing social interactions within an educational environment for effectively reducing neurological overload and increasing learning of desired goals.  Metaphors provide another effective metacognitive tool.  As a figure of speech providing an implied comparison, the effective educator can utilize metaphors to increase utilization of vocabulary, promote higher order thinking, and reinforce a desired commitment to relativism. 
       Effective learning environments utilize these psychological tools, thereby reducing learning overload by optimizing metacognition (Bohlin et al., 2008).  In the FAT City Workshop, Lavoie (1989) discourages the creation of instructional environments that exacerbate frustration, anxiety, and tension (FAT).  Prospective and in-service teachers are encouraged to eliminate FAT in the classrooms and optimize a learning environment approaching nirvana (LEAN).  Metaphors, acronyms, and mnemonics provide three psychological tools utilizing social interactions within an educational environment to effectively reduce cognitive overload and thereby increase the opportunity for learning.

To cite:

Anderson, C.J. (September 30, 2016) Psychological tools reduce cognitive overload and optimize
            learning  [Web log post]    Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/

References:

Bohlin, L., Durwin, C., & Reese-Weber, M. (2011). Ed psych: Modules. NY: McGraw-Hill.

 Lavoie, R. (1989) How difficult can this be? F.A.T. City--A learning disabilities workshop DVD

                Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhzh9kt8z7c
Rapaport, W.J. (2011) William Perry's scheme of intellectual and ethical development.

              Retrieved from http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/perry.positions.html

Reason, C. (2010). Leading a learning organization: The science of working with others. Bloomington,
             IN: Solution Tree Press.
Tudge, J., & Scrimsher, S. (2003). Lev S. Vygotsky on education: A cultural-historical,
                interpersonal, and individual approach to development. In B. J. Zimmerman &
                D. H. Schunk (Eds.), Educational psychology: A century of contributions
                (pp. 207–228) Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

An Effective Response to Intervention System Requires Highly Effective Teachers

Using a crosswalk between the correlates of Effective Schools Research and tenets of an effective Response to Intervention (RTI) program will allow a multidimensional team of stakeholders that includes parents or guardians, to create an efficient and effective RTI system.  Such a system promotes equity in quality within schools committed to the pursuit of learning for all.  Subsequent alignment of the district's non-negotiable goals with individual school needs and experiences (Marzano & Waters, 2009) should expand rather than limit the district's clearinghouse of research-based and success-proven strategies and interventions.  

While there is a danger to prescribing interventions in a limiting fashion, collecting and archiving RTI anthologies have the potential for providing a clearinghouse of research-based and success-proven strategies and interventions.  Promoting such a clearinghouse of identified successes ensures professional development is available to optimize access, review, and implementation of a range of interventions.  Thus, RTI can actually enrich the highly effective  teacher’s professional practice through defined autonomy.

A core competency required for effective implementation of RTI interventions is the ability to correctly collect, analyze, and utilize data.  Frequent monitoring of student progress, and adjusting as indicated by results, is a correlate of continuous school improvement within Effective Schools.  This correlate requires teacher competency in collecting data, evaluating results, and being an honest consumer of the resulting data.  

Both pre-service and in-service teachers openly admit to the difficulty of monitoring student progress to inform instructional decisions.  The inter-relationship between the identified core principles makes the pursuit of a hierarchy subjective at best and futile at worst.  The correlate of frequent monitoring and subsequent adjustment drives the core principles for implementing RTI.  The ability to collect data, evaluate results, and be an honest consumer of the resulting data promotes the correlate of frequent monitoring and subsequent adjustment.  Teacher proficiency with data must therefore become a professional competency. 

When teachers identify and prescribe an intervention, they often have difficulty accepting the need to change (adjust) if the prescribed intervention proves ineffective.  Too often the failure of the intervention is perceived a personal failure of the initial prescription, which can then delay the necessary adjustment.  For this reason, a district and school is well-advised to consider the following six ideas for successful development of an effective RTI system: 

• Encourage participation by key stakeholders during planning and implementation.
• Elicit strong administrative support in staff development, instructional integrity, and data collection.
• Provide in-depth staff development with mentoring, modeling, and coaching.
• Begin follow-up trainings at the beginning of each school year.
•  Distribute a manual outlining procedures and materials.
•  Build Problem Solving Models including RTI into school schedules and the student improvement process (Lau, Sieler, Muyskens, et al, 2006).

Additionally, Schools of Education and Alternate Route Teacher Preparation Programs need to ensure graduates are able to collect data, evaluate results, and be an honest consumer of the resulting data.  There needs to be an expectations for utilizing statistics and data analysis during coursework for prospective teachers.  Effective districts also need to complement this evolution through in-service professional development on collecting data, evaluating results, and being an honest consumer of the resulting data.

To cite:

Anderson, C.J. (August 31, 2016) aA effective response to intervention system requires highly effective

teachers.  [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/

Reference:

Edmonds, R. (1979). Effective Schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 37,

15-24.

Lau, Sieler, Muyskens, Canter, VanKeuren, & Marston (2006).  Perspectives on the use of the

            Problem-Solving Model from the viewpoint of school psychologist, administrator, and

            teacher. Psychology in the Schools, 43 (1), 117-127.

Marzano, R. & Waters, T.(2009).  District leadership that works. Bloomington, In: Solution

                Tree Press

Accreditation Standards: Promoting effective leadership and optimizing student success

Graduate programs intending to develop highly qualified educational leaders must seek to address Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) accreditation standards (2013) to identify and develop competencies that optimize educational leadership.  Teacher preparation programs must be responsive to accreditation standards, intended to promote effective leadership and optimize student success within schools (CAEP, 2013).  Following de facto consolidation into the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP, 2013), more than 900 educator preparation providers currently participate as providers currently accredited by either the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) or the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) CAEP is now the sole specialized accreditor for educator preparation.  

For the purpose of the accreditation of educator preparation providers, NCATE and TEAC are now subsidiaries of CAEP.  NCATE and TEAC maintain their recognition by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA).  Future accreditation will be under CAEP, effectively phasing out the subsidiary councils over time (CAEP, 2013).

Founded in 1997, the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving academic degree programs for professional educators that will teach and lead in schools, pre-K through grade 12.  The TEAC accreditation process forms the basis for CAEP’s Inquiry Brief Accreditation Pathway, identifying the educator preparation provider’s case that it prepares competent, caring, and qualified professional educators (TEAC, 2013.  The process requires the educator preparation provider present evidence to support its case.  The accreditation process examines and verifies the evidence (CAEP, 2013).

The standards used by the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) help frame teacher education and educational leadership programs at institutions of higher learning.  Educator preparation providers include traditional institutions of higher education, as well as alternative pathways such as residency programs (CAEP, 2013).

CAEP, NCATE, and TEAC all expect faculty to hold a terminal degree or possess exceptional expertise while modeling high quality instructional and professional practices.  The qualifications of faculty and teaching quality must align with measurable benchmarks of an effective educational program.  “Teacher quality—knowledge and effectiveness—is the number one school based factor in student achievement” (NCATE, 2003, para. 9).

To sustain success and seek improvement, faculty within educator preparation providers should systematically evaluate colleagues and collaborate to optimize professional development (NCATE, 2003; TEAC, 2003).  The mindset driving sustained success and continuous improvement should be if better is possible then good is not enough.  The following five standards and two recommendations guide the endeavor toward CAEP’s goals to raise the performance of candidates as practitioners in the nation’s P-12 schools and thereby raise the stature of the entire profession.  Pursuit of these goals requires teacher preparation programs support any claims of quality in each of the following:

Standard 1: Content and Pedagogical Knowledge

Standard 2: Clinical Partnerships and Practice

Standard 3: Candidate Quality, Recruitment, and Selectivity

Standard 4: Program Impact

Standard 5: Provider Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement

Recommendation: Annual Reporting and CAEP Monitoring

Recommendation: Levels of Accreditation Decisions (CAEP, 2013, p. 2)

Pursuit of the goals identified by the CAEP standards and recommendations require educator preparation providers willingly reflect, monitor, and adjust programs to meet increased expectation (CAEP, 2013).  The following six professional standards reflect the significant alignment between TEAC and NCATE expectations:

1.     unit governance and resources,

2.     faculty qualifications, performance, and development,

3.     candidate knowledge, skills, and dispositions,

4.     assessment system and unit evaluation,

5.     field experience and clinical practice,

6.     diversity.

The primary professional standards guide the educator preparation providers to willingly reflect, monitor, and adjust programs to meet increased expectation of the accreditation process.  Yet, teachers exhibit varying awareness of the standards (Rodenberg, 2006), so it is uncertain how TEAC, NCATE, or CAEP professional standards promote relevance to actual professional development.  Educators would benefit from increased awareness of pedagogical research and best practices that may inform their practices.  In this regard, schools and districts will need to provide high quality, research-based staff development relative to effective practices (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001).  As life-long learners, teachers need to have effective instruction that includes modeling, practice, feedback, and reinforcement (Joyce & Showers, 2002).  These opportunities can be evaluated by stakeholders in relation to school climate using the Five P structure based on Invitational Education theory (Schmidt, 2007).

In a meta-analysis of studies that examined aspects of Highly Qualified Teachers, Darling-Hammond (2004) codified five quantifiable attributes that frequently appeared to correlate teacher qualifications with student achievement.  These included:

1.     General academic and verbal abilities;

2.     Subject matter knowledge;

3.     Pedagogical knowledge as reflected by teacher education coursework or preparation experiences;

4.     Teaching experience; and

5.     Qualifications measured by teacher certification, which included most of the preceding factors.

Quality educators exhibit qualitative characteristics.  Specifically, an educator’s intuition correlates student actions to effective teacher reactions or proactive responses.  This requires teachers know about children, pedagogy, curriculum, thereby making these elements effectively, efficiently, and logically, interact (Darling-Hammond, 2004).

It remains unknown how emotional intelligence skills and behaviors in the workplace relates to intuition.  Stronge’s (2002) meta-analysis focused upon "the teacher as a person" (p. 12).  The reviewed studies identified instructional and classroom management strategies as key to teacher effectiveness, usually emphasizing the teacher's affective characteristics more than their pedagogical practice (Stronge et al., 2003). 

The measurement of teacher performance remains difficult.  Teaching candidate credentials are generally easier to observe and analyze.  Teacher dispositions identified with highly qualified teachers include collegiality, self-reflection, collaboration, interactive skills, and reflective adjustment to personal and professional practice (Miller & Davidson, 2006).  These characteristics may be essential for promoting the defined autonomy and effective collaboration evidenced within highly effective schools (Marzano & Waters, 2009).  Informal and formal assessment of these dispositions during teacher preparation and educational leadership programs will continue based on accreditation and certification requirements (CAEP, 2013; NCATE, 2010; TEAC, 2010).

References:

Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (2013). CAEP Accreditation

               Standards. Retrieved from http://caepnet.org/caep-accreditation-standards/

Darling-Hammond, L. (2004). Standards, accountability, and school reform. Teachers College Record, 

               106(6), 1047–1085. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9620.2004.00372.x

Joyce, B.R. & Showers, B. (2002). Student achievement through staff development.

               Arlington, VA: ASCD. ISBN: 0871206749

Marzano, R., Pickering, D. & Pollock, J. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: Research-based 

              strategies for increasing student achievement (first ed.).  Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision 

              and Curriculum Development.

Marzano, R. & Waters, T.(2009). District leadership that works. Bloomington, In:

               Solution Tree Press

Marzano, R. J., Waters, T., & McNulty, B. A. (2005). School leadership that works:

               From      research to results. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and

               Curriculum Development. Retrieved from:

               http://marzanoresearch.com/products/catalog.aspx?product=13

Miller, K.W. & Davidson, D.M.(2006).What makes a secondary school science and/or

               mathematics teacher “highly qualified”? Science Educator, 15 (1), 56-59.

Rodenberg, J. K. (2006). How teachers define "highly qualified" for themselves and their profession. 

                 (Order No. 3218194, University of San Diego and San Diego State University). ProQuest 

                 Dissertations and Theses, , 158-158 p. Retrieved from 

                 http://search.proquest.com/docview/304913901?accountid=7374. (304913901).

Schmidt, J. J. (2007). Elements of diversity in invitational practice and research. Journal

                of Invitational Theory & Practice, 13, 16-23. Retrieved from:

               http://www.invitationaleducation.net/pdfs/journalarchives/jitpv13.pdf

Stronge, J. H. (2002). Qualities of effective teachers. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision 

               and Curriculum Development. ISBN 0871206633

To cite:

Anderson, C.J. (July 31, 2016) Accreditation standards: Promoting effective leadership and optimizing 

                  student success  [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/