Tag Archives: assessment

Personalized Education Plan as Antidote to Pandemic Education Losses

Posted on by
Reply

Those who believe that all children are resilient and submerging them in the normalcy of school will cure the significant direct and indirect losses they suffered during our pandemic education are looking for coins under their pillow left by the tooth fairy.  Their losses will not be made whole without a clear understanding of pandemic effects and explicit actions taken to remedy those effects.  Anything less will create a bruised generation of young adults we could and should have treated better.

I look at children getting off the morning bus at school and see children who look like any children of any pre-pandemic year.  Part of my observation, I know, is that I want to see children who are wholesome and happy and well in every sense of the word.  Then, I listen to teacher observations and examine the data of students’ returned-to-school learning and I see children who are not what they should be.  They exhibit attitudes and dispositions that are getting in the way of their successful school experiences.  They have gaps in their school skills and knowledge and culture that cause them undeserved yet solvable problems. 

It is inaccurate to ascribe these observations to all children.  However, it is accurate to ascribe one or more of these to each child.  And, that is where our necessary work begins.  Our pandemic mitigations were school- and grade-wide.  We closed school for all children, attempted to provide remote instruction to all children, quarantined classes and grade levels after their return to school, and restricted access to school life and its activities for the better parts of two years.  I attempt no fault finding; the work is not backwards but forwards.  How do we help all children now?

Primary strategy: Personalized Education Plan

The primary strategy for making all children educationally whole and sound from their pandemic effects needs to be an educational and developmental assessment of each child and from that assessment individualized, small group, and whole group remedial treatments. 

Begin the strategy with PEPs for all 4K-5 children, those whose dispositional and learning are most foundational and for whom small group and large group remediation will be most efficient and effective.  Assess and know the extent of learning and dispositional gaps for each child.

  • 5K and grade 1 children lacked 4k and 5K experiences to socialize them to school success. 
  • 4K-grade 5 children lack educational stamina; remote ed taught them turn off and disengage when assignments and experiences required more than they wanted to commit.  Or, when school failed to engage with them.
  • 4-grade 5 children learned to isolate from their pandemic experience; screen time provided their socialization and remains their go to escape when in-personal interactions are required.
  • 4K through grade 3 lacked explicit instruction in phonemic development, structured language and vocabulary acquisition, and progression in reading fluency.
  • Grade 3-5 children display gaps in numeracy arithmetic skills, especially in concepts and automaticity of multiplication, division, and conceptualization of fractions.
  • 4K-grade children lost second language development, musical literacy, and cooperative teaming in physical education.

Creating a PEP for each child demonstrates a school’s commitment to post-pandemic education.  I am not calling out schools who do not take such explicit actions, but I do place them in the tooth fairy believers category.  A PEP requires time and expense to develop, time and expense to implement, collaboration among educators and parents, and a mutual understanding that without explicit strategies children will not overcome the ill effects of their pandemic education.  A PEP is a statement regarding school commitment each child’s worth and well-being.

School-wide Post-Pandemic Plans

Parallel to PEPs for all 4K-5 is the need for school-wide implementation of student dispositional remediation, social-emotional and mental health servicing, and trauma-sensitivity training. 

On their return to school, middle level children advanced grade levels without developing the social and dispositional skills required for middle level and high school success.  Children who were in 5th grade in 2019-20 were 7th graders in 2021-22.  They leap-frogged from smaller, self-contained groupings of students, elementary-trained teachers, pre-adolescent social settings into a secondary schedule of changing classes, subject-trained teachers, academic-oriented instruction, and the milieu of middle level adolescence and puberty.  They went from Earth to Mars without climate orientation.  And, their current school work shows this ill-effect of the pandemic.

Secondary children, especially, demonstrate a turn-it-off disposition in their return to school regarding school procedures and classroom requirements.  Their

  • rates of tardiness and absenteeism,
  • defiance toward cell phone rules,
  • lack of assignment completion, and
  • non-compliance with teacher direction

 are off the chart compared with pre-pandemic secondary children.  These are pandemic effects and must be treated as effects that can and must be remediated.  Children were largely non-directed and independent while in remote education.  They learned habits that are not serving them now.

Administrators and teachers must carve the time and resources from the already packed school calendar and school budgets for individual, small group, and large group treatments.  We will not achieve social and emotional wellness without making new school-wide, annual processes and systems for teaching all children these dispositions.  And, creating improved systems for identifying children who are S-E stressed and mentally unhealthy. 

Schools do not have and are not authorized to have full mental health services.  Yet, in rural school communities, especially, distances between homes and services make school new mental health centers.  We need collaboration with county health services and private mental health providers if we are to create necessary post-pandemic treatments for children.

Imagine how these children will fare in their post-secondary world if they persist in behaviors caused by the ill effects of the pandemic.  They and our community deserve our commitment to remediating the ill  effects of their pandemic education or our community and nation will be feeling these ill-effects for decades to come.

What to do?

Start with PEPs for each 4k-5 child.  Start with individual, small group, and large group strategies of remediate the pandemic effects that your assessments reveal.  Start with a commitment and investment in direct and explicit actions that will make all children educationally and developmentally better.  Start with whole school training so that all faculty and staff are attuned to how today’s children are different than yesterday’s.  Do not believe tooth fairies will make all your wishes come true.

Covid Provoked Reforms – Proficiency in Standards-based Learning

Posted on by
Reply

The status quo thrives when there are few challenges to disrupt its normal.  Newton taught us that a body at rest will remain at rest unless it is acted upon by a force.  The lack of compelling forces for change have kept much of public education in a Newtonian normal for decades if not a century.  We should not squander the forces for change that the pandemic presents.  Make plans now for stopping practices that do not work and shaping your new normals.

The grading of student work and students emerges every few years as a consistent problem for educators considering best practices.  Like a groundhog on its annual day, we examine grading looking for something new to know and do as if we want to change.  But, not liking what we see as options, we put our grading practices back into the inertial nest of ongoing poor practices.

Then, comes the pandemic.

How does a teacher apply traditional grading practices for a child whose attendance is disrupted by the pandemic and whose engagement with learning is somewhere around 50-60% of the school year?  How do we assign a value a student’s learning of a grade level or course curriculum when we only taught parts of that annual curriculum?  How do we compare a student’s academic work in 2020-21 or 2021-22 with any other student’s work prior to the pandemic?  How do we grade students who are learning the virtual curriculum of a commercial provider not our school district’s approved curriculum?

We stop the questions because they all point to the same conclusion.  Past grading practices cannot be applied in the pandemic.  We must stop applying past practices that are not valid or professionally defensible for current times.

It is time to replace A, B, C grading that conceptually is an aggregate of academic improvement and achievement, student effort, participation and attendance, and collegiality and collaboration with peers all topped with a smidgeon of extra credit or whatever the teacher adds to make the grade seem to fit the student.  No matter the teacher I have talked with over 50 years of observing grading practices, most teachers follow the Golden Rule of Grading – I grade my students as I was graded when I was a student.  There are modifications, but most practices fall within the shadow of past, personal experiences.  It is time to do better.

Educational standards are not new to educators.  Standards anchor teacher preparation and licensing.  The reauthorization of PI 34 by the Wisconsin legislature says “PI 34 restructured teacher education, educator licenses, and professional development for Wisconsin educators.  The system is based on Wisconsin Educator Standards with demonstrated knowledge, skills, and dispositions for teaching, pupil services and administration.  Initial licensing is based on an educator’s successful performance as measured against these standards.”  Teaching licensing is proficiency-based on the learning and demonstration of specified standards.

https://dpi.wi.gov/licensing/programs/rules-statute

Standards are described in state statute and by state departments of instruction of education.  State standards anchor contemporary curriculum development.  Every subject area taught in Wisconsin is supported by DPI-adopted curricular standards.  “Wisconsin Academic Standards specify what students should know and be able to do in the classroom.” 

https://dpi.wi.gov/standards

These standards provide the scaffold of student learning that creates the basis for standards-based proficiency grading.  It is valid and appropriate to align the evaluation of student learning with these curricular scaffolds.  The scaffolds are laddered by grade level and broadened at each grade and course.

The use of standards-base proficiency grading is not a newly made recommendation.  Teachers have sidled up to this idea in the past, but the pull of the Golden Rule of Grading has consistently overpowered change.  Now that the Golden Rule is broken, standards-based grading makes more and more sense.

To do this, we need to make two types of decisions.

  • What evidence demonstrates secure proficiency of a standard?
  • What aggregate level of proficiency demonstrates secure completion of a grade level or subject course?

While these may be argumentative questions, they are not difficult to answer.  The evidence demonstrating secure proficiency of a standard derives directly from unit and lesson planning.  Using older language of lesson planning, “The learner will …” describes the demonstrated outcomes of interest.  A properly constructed standards-based instruction provides the standards which will be proficiency assessed.  The evidence of completion also is in the unit design; it is in the statement of “extent and degree to which the student will demonstrate the standard”.  Standards-based proficiency grading is using the outcome statement of your standards-based curriculum.   Record keeping of the outcomes for which a student has demonstrated secure proficiency provides a grade book of achievement and growth. 

If your curriculum is not standards-based, you have foundational work to do.

A school’s instructional committee can readily collaborate to determine the extent of the checklist/grade book needed to indicate grade level/course completion.  Collaborative agreement of what demonstrates completion of a grade level or course is essential to balance student work across the curriculum.  Successful completion of one grade level or course should not be disproportionate to another. 

Teachers should thankfully welcome a standards-based proficiency design as it eliminates the problems of measuring effort and adding an extra credit to allow students improve an assigned grade.  This is defensible.  Without expecting an answer, why did we feel compelled to allow extra credit to erase the facts that student did not complete the basics of a grade level or course?  Emotion overcame reality.

The alignment of grading with the demonstration of standards-based proficiency overcomes the dilemma presented by interrupted school attendance and engagement due to covid 19.  Demonstration of learning is not clock or learning place-bound.  This design overcomes the issues of remote versus in-person.  Proficiencies are what proficiencies are – a student can or cannot demonstrate secure content knowledge or skills or dispositions about her learning.

Using standards-based proficiency grading creates a new practice that improves upon the older practices that failed the test of the pandemic.  Standards-based proficiency grading creates a best practice for our future.  We can and should create this as a new normal.

We Are Known By What We Prioritize

Posted on by
Reply

Not one.  As a school board member, I have not received one letter asking what can be done regarding depressed student proficiency scores displayed in the fall 2021 assessments.  Not one letter or phone call asking what actions our school will take to teach children the content and skills they missed while in remote education or reteach what children forgot while disconnected from instruction.  Not one person pointing at the increase of students whose assessment results fall into the significantly below proficient category this fall.

Beyond reading, ELA and math, not one communication regarding a child’s loss of learning in art, music, or foreign language.  Not a word about a child’s stagnant growth in business education, marketing, and computer science.  Learning in every school curriculum has been stymied by the pandemic, yet there is scant discussion regarding lost learning experiences.

Not one inquiry about how diminished proficiencies affect our junior and senior students’ preparation for post-secondary education, work, and military endeavors.  Without doubt, a graduate’s transcript and activity resume’ will be different in 2022 than a pre-pandemic resume’.

I grant that many children profited from their instruction in remote education.  They benefited from an optional return to in-person instruction in 2020-21 and a more complete return to in-person instruction in 2021-22.  We owe much to our teachers who labored through virtual and hybrid venues to teach their students.  Yet, every curriculum no matter how it was instructed remains behind its times in the winter of 2021.

Instead, letters, phone calls, texts and parent attendance at school board meetings demonstrating anger about masking protocols.  The demand for parental rights to choose whether a child will wear a mask overwhelms discussion of a child’s educational progress.  Am I dismayed?  No but yes. 

This observation informs us about the evolution of our culture and what we value.  We should not generalize any conclusions to the population of all parents but only to the sub-set of vocal parents.  We should not diminish our educator’s work on closing instructional and learning chasms but understand that this work is done because we, educators, know that it is the most important work before us.  It would be better if parents and school boards and teachers were all on the same page about how to repair student learning at this time of the pandemic, but we are not.

The issue of masks will resolve itself either when all school-age children have had access to the protection of vaccination or when school leaders acquiesce to the loudest voices in their community.  At that time, viral mitigation protocols will not be generalized across school districts, schools, and grade levels but will be responsive to breakouts as we ordinarily treat influenza and measles in schools.  These events will happen, and the response will be very local to those in contact with the outbreak.

The purpose of this writing is not to encourage parents to become enflamed about the status of their child’s educational progress, but to independently review what really matters and consider if their attention aligns with those matters.  For this writer, causing all children to learn with special regard for our most challenged learners is what matters.  Their challenges are not only intellectual but include all concerns that affect their total education and wellbeing.  Children today demonstrate varieties of gaps in their 4K-12 education, gaps we can close if we are able to give this teaching and learning our focused attention. We will be known by what we prioritize and how we meet our priorities.

Shifting from Extra-ordinary Connecting with Children to Extra-ordinary Instruction of Children

Posted on by
Reply

The front line of school workers will be among the quiet and unheralded heroes of 2020-21, a year of extra-ordinary schoolwork.  Their ranks include teachers who connected with at-home learners using everything from high tech virtual classrooms to low tech US mail exchange of school work, food service personnel who assured each child at home of a daily school meal(s), and school secretaries who were  the “first face” in every school, parent, and child interaction.  The pictures of bus drivers cloaked in plastic drove home the point that if a bus driver is ill the entire bus route may be left at home.  Extra-ordinary work done by extra-ordinary school staff.

The need for extra-ordinary schoolwork continues.   While we feared ill health in 20-21, we indeed suffered ill learning that school year in the learning that prepares all children for their next years of learning.  Call it lost learning or missed learning, there are curricular content and skill gaps that must be remedied while at the same time assuring completion of the 21-2 curricula of content and skills.  This requires extra-ordinary teaching skills and strategies.

Why?  Is there an urgency that compels us to make all children whole in their K-12 learning?  You bet there is.  To generalize the urgency, the compassionate memory of the world at large will not give children in school today a pass or a “that’s okay” on their lack of educational proficiency just because these children lost out on their usual instruction and learning in 2019-20 and 2020-21 and perhaps 2021-22.  The world of post-high school education and work expects children to be ready and if not, the world will penalize them.  If our children are not prepared, they will lose out.

The extra-ordinary skills and strategies we need in 21-22 are:

  • evaluation,
  • diagnosis of needs,
  • prescriptive instruction, and
  • specific assessment of implicit learning on a student-by-student basis. 

Evaluation is our collective understanding of each child’s current education proficiency levels in each of their grade level curricular studies.  This is both objective and subjective evaluation.  Not only is this an evaluation of how well a second grader reads, writes, and solves math problems, but an analysis of the content they learned at grade level – social studies, literature, science.  It includes their skills and understandings in art, music, and technology.  Without this evaluation, there will be substantive holes in student learning.  A child who did not receive direct and implicit instruction in fractions in fourth grade in the second semester of 2020 had trouble with remote math instruction in 20-21 and will have continuing trouble in 21-22.  Algebra will be a complete mystery.  The lost or inadequate instruction of those time periods must be made whole.  We need to know what was lost or inadequate in each child’s education.

The diagnosis of needs is our school-wide strategy for how to make all children whole.  The diagnosis must be school-wide and encompass the totality of a child’s curriculum.  Part of the diagnosis is identifying when and how in 21-22 or 22-23 a child receives missed or inadequate teaching in the scaffolding of curricular instruction.  Diagnosis strengthens time and effort in the “next” instruction.  Or, diagnosis determines that certain skills and content must be learned now, right now, because next learning requires a level of student proficiency.  School-wide diagnosis assures that core academics did not crowd out special subjects, like art, music, second language, and technology.  Diagnosis also generates a plan to be shared with parents so that school and home have a collaborative understanding of how a child’s education will survive the pandemic.

Prescription is a teacher’s function.  Only a classroom teacher can determine the instruction needed by each child to make them whole in their grade level proficiencies and the instruction that can be grouped or that must be individualized.  And most importantly, only a teacher provides the implicit instructional needs of our most challenged learners.  In 21-22 most school children, not just those with special education requirements, need a personalized education plan.  For some, their personalized plan may be very brief, for example, language mechanics, the reciprocal nature of ratios, and applying proper pressure to a mound of clay on a pottery wheel.  A plan must address all the child’s curricula.  Another child’s personalized plan may be more extensive, including proper pronunciation of specific phonemes, increasing sight word vocabulary, subject-predicate agreement, long division, chronology of major events in US history, sight reading music notes, and proportionality in an art drawing.  Every child requires a plan for us to make their pandemic education whole.

Instruction cannot be the same old-same old.  Whole group instruction will be less effective in meeting the myriad of student plans and individualized or small group instruction will be more effective.  Instructional aides and assistants helping in classrooms can give children the personal comment, correction, and reinforcement needed to fulfill their personal plans.  The prescriptive work required is more than a teacher alone can or should handle.  Strategies for co-teaching and sharing aides and assistants across classrooms will bring the most effective hands-on instruction to more children.  Strategies for grouping and regrouping children according to the needs of their personal plans are required.  The curricular calendar will not linear; it will be multi-layered and reflexive.

Only through re-assessments will we know when a child has filled in missing or lost learning of content and skills.  Check testing and spot-testing will be a common event each week.  Usual formative and summative assessments will be used to assure learning of the planned 21-22 curricula, but those will not include the elements of instruction from the 19-20 and 20-21 school years.  The calendar will be dotted with specific assessment of the implicit instruction in every student’s personal learning plan.

Extra-ordinary is by definition unusual.  “Extra” connotes more or something uniquely different in quantity and quality.  During the 21-22 school year, children require uniquely different amounts and kinds of instruction to bring the education of all children to the achievement levels the future will require of them.  Extra is what it will take to prevent these children from being known for their lifetime as pandemic school children.

Without Assessment, Teaching Is A Guessing Game

Posted on by
Reply

Do you step on the bathroom scale in the morning? How about in the evening, also? Do you glance at your reflection in the mirror? More than once each day? Do you check your rear view and side mirrors while driving? Do you look through the window to check the weather before venturing outdoors? How about the temperature of water in your shower? I do. We do these and many other rituals because we want and we need to know and the information we obtain is knowledge for our daily living. Information guides what we think about our “now” and informs what we need to do “next”. Information tell us to stop doing things are not working for our benefit and to start doing things that will. The option of not knowing makes life a guessing game.

Assessment is what I am talking about. Assessment is a part of life. We all do it, consciously and unconsciously, because we want information that we think is important to our living. A good working definition of the word assessment is this – assessment is evaluating or considering the nature, quality, or ability of someone or something that is of interest to you and to others. I believe, as educators, we should start at the end of this definition first. We assess because we are interested – I add, because we care. And then look at assessment as evaluating or considering the nature, quality or ability of our interest in teaching and learning.

Interest and care are huge words in the world of education. Parents enroll their children in our schools to be taught and to be cared for and to grow annually on their path toward college and career readiness. From their perspective, parents expect educators to be engaged in a decade-plus, nine-month-a-year, work-day long continuing education and care of their children. School becomes the major factor in a child’s life from age 4 to 18. In response, there is ample evidence that teachers demonstrate many of the characteristics of caregivers to their students as teachers are called not only to teach but to affect each child’s social, emotional, mental, nutritional, and physical health. Interest in and care for children in school abounds.

Why we assess. The intellectual education of children is not guess work. If teaching and learning were so happenstance as guess work, we would follow the guidance of Rousseau. We would turn all children lose in the proverbial innocence of a natural world and see what happens. To the contrary, schools adopt programs and curricula and design experiences for the education of children. Educators are constantly interested in both sides of this work –how well are the school programs, curricula and experiences causing their planned outcomes, and, how well is each child learning. Though it sounds like a bumper sticker – educators work at the education of children.

Most of our daily, adult, personal assessments are made subjectively. We don’t need exact data for safety, comfort, preference and casual decisions. We read and we listen. We look and we observe. We feel and we smell and we taste. We make estimations and approximations based upon the information we glean from our world. Detail usually does not matter, if our perception is close enough to what we expect.

Other decisions require more critical and exact information. We like meat grilled to a medium rare and know about what medium rare looks like on the exterior of the meat, but sticking a meat thermometer into the meat ensures that 120 -130 degree flavor we seek. Adding a half tsp or a whole tsp of baking powder to cookies makes a difference. We need to know if a guest in our home has a food allergy and the nature of that allergy. Pre-information guides us when downloading a movie – there is a difference between X, R, M and PG. Each of these is an assessment we make about the nature or quality of things in our world that matter to us. In these instances, the details in the information matter.

Our student learning committee learned to ask a significant question when talking about school curricula, programs and how well our children do. How do we know this? If the conversation does not include a qualitative and/or quantitative statement based upon fact, the committee knows it is hearing opinion and the committee needs to ask different and deeper questions. How we know is as important as what we know when we are talking about the education of children.

Teaching and learning are the application of cause and effect. These are not random or accidental. They are not unplanned. We teach in order to cause children to learn a vast amount information and ideas, to learn and improve a wide variety of skills, to find value in what they are able to do, and to understand how others see and value them as learning children. Teaching is a purposeful act with a beginning and an ending and knowing what the ending acts and looks like is essential. If not, children would be reading Dick and Jane books K through 12. Good teaching knows when the next teaching is required. And, that is why we ask “how do we know this?” How do we know that a child has learned and is ready for our next teaching? Just as importantly, how do we know that a child has not learned or not learned well enough and we must teach again and differently?

I understand those who chant “too much time is wasted on assessment and schools over test.” We must be certain in our management of teaching and learning that we assess properly and frequently enough to inform teaching and learning. Knowing is accrued in many ways. Proper assessment is as non-invasive as listening and watching. A teacher listening to a first grader read aloud will know as much about that child’s immediate reading abilities as any test could provide. An Algebra teacher watching a child think through and write out the steps of math problem has instant information about what a child knows and does not know well enough. A band director listening to horn players in solo or ensemble knows that these students have learned or need further instruction. We do not need large scale testing to know everything we need to know. We assess constantly everyday because we care that all children are successful learners.

I, on the other hand, worry we do not assess enough or well enough. I am not writing about testing, though testing is an important form of assessment. I repeat that proper assessment is a powerful “I care about you and your learning statement”. I observe that we diminish listening to children as they grow older. Elementary teachers listen to children read aloud. They listen to children explain their thinking aloud. Elementary teacher teach in close proximity to children as they learn. Close listening, watching and proximity are important to the monitoring and adjusting of teaching to cause student learning of knowledge, skills and dispositions. As children get older, teachers allow “space” to develop. We believe that children are embarrassed when they are required to read aloud or to explain aloud their reasoning and thinking to problem solutions. They, older children, want the product or their answer to speak for itself. “Why do I have to show my work or tell you how I found that answer if it is right?”, they complain. And, teachers give into the argument. Teaching and learning in high school classes operates with too much space between teacher and student. Without the intimacy of listening and watching and knowing, we rely upon tests to know, because know we must. We too often fail in the area of informal assessment of high school children.

In a better educational setting, all assessment would be personal and direct between teacher and child. “Tell me, show me, help me to know what you have learned and how well you have learned it.” Listening and watching are as important to knowing about the education of a senior in high school as it is a child in Kindergarten. However, time is not on our side. One-to-one assessment in a class of 25 secondary students engaged in complex and complicated learning requires too much time. Hence, whole group testing is the way we know about the quality of what large groups of children have learned.

Assessment frequency and exactitude increases when educators need incremental information. Our committee is deeply engaged in improving student phonemic coding and decoding skills within phonics-based reading instruction. Knowing which children have these skills and which do not and the degree of their skills attainment requires frequent observational and tested information. The better the assessed information, the better the instructional response to each child’s needs. Frequency and exact measures work to the benefit of children.

An unpublicized part of the assessment/testing scenario is knowing when to stop testing or to stop using a test that provides less than the required information. We are phasing out our current universal screener for EC – 3rd grade children and replacing it with an assessment that is more definitive in specific reading skills. At the same time, we are questioning the need for end of the year assessments because the intervening summer months causes this information to be out of date in informing us about beginning of the school year instruction. Instead, September and January assessment places assessment information directly in front of newly informed instruction. Frequent, exacting and wiser assessment a constant pursuit for educators.

For those who remain skeptical about school assessments, I encourage you to continue asking questions and to focus your inquiry on “How is this assessment improving my child’s immediate and future education?”. If teachers cannot provide a solid and satisfactory answer, we are not doing our job of knowing and we deserve your criticism. That is my assessment.