Assessment: Progression of Learning

A day in the life of my assessment practice!

Within the program we are constantly assessing students to see how they are adjusting to many of the hidden curriculum objectives. Can they follow a routine? Can they go to their lockers independently? Can they sit in class? Do they need first then charts? It's a constant focus of observations to determine how the students are progressing in their goals to become independent citizens. Or as independent as possible. 

I think we've moved from bench marking with Fountas and Pinnell and Mipi's to developing our own pre and post assessment to determine students functional levels. When we developed our own curriculum to focus our teaching we also developed an assessment tool to determine where the students were starting. It made more sense to start there and then to use our sliding scale (fully supported- partially supported-independent) to determine the students success. 

Let's explain the scale because I know I will often say things that I think makes perfect sense but then I see facial expressions that make me wonder if I was just trying to explain rocket science.

Because we are a life skills program (and let me throw this out there, we've been doing financial literacy since I started) and our goal is to get students to be as independent as possible we gauge all of their learning on their independence level. So let's look at our scale and some examples

Fully supported means they need an adult with them to do each step of the project or to move onto each next step. 

Let's take Student S, she is a lovely girl, loves the Blue Jays and can tell you all about the game. She is someone who for most things is fully supported. She knows our routines but when she started she required physical prompts all the time, now we have her down to verbal prompts but without those prompts my lovely little Blue Jays fan will not proceed to the next task. She will wait and ask questions consistently. 

Partially Supported is an indicator that they may need some verbal prompts but they can likely follow through on completing tasks in chunked sections.

Student L is a prime example of a partially supported student. L knows what needs to be done with his verbal instructions but struggles with some learned helplessness and will get stuck when things get tricky, so he requires an adult to pop in with him regularly during the class to help him get passed his road blocks. It is very minimal in supports and usually he doesn't get stuck to long. We've begun using a Red Yellow Green indicator with him so he can tell us he is stuck without drawing big attention to himself with his peers (he doesn't want them to think he's dumb) and it puts the responsibility on him. 

Independent is the indicator we use when a student can do things on their own and we sometimes forget they are even in the class, no I am kidding we always know when people are missing.

Student A is an excellent example for one of my more independent learners. The caveat is that he requires things to be routine and a visual schedule would be super helpful. So with our independent students, it doesn't mean they don't have supports, it just means they have supports they need to be successful without adult intervention.

Now we use these scales for our options class, this is what gets sent to our options teachers. We usually set their social emotional, personal living and community living goals based on their Individual Support Plan (ISP) that is set with the parents, if they do not have a goal in that domain it is blank. The options teachers then assess the students in their unique environment to determine if the student is not yet (full support) at the goal, they can manage the goal supported (partially supported) or they are Independent. What this does for us is allows us to see if the skills we are working on are transferring to other areas. This is so important for us and is something that we rely on our colleagues to provide for us. 

So there is the history of my Assessment practices, there is always informal assessment happening. We use the informal assessment to help us with our formative assessment in determining the appropriate supports or to determine if the supports we are using are beneficial or not. Our summative assessments generally fall in the form of our ISP goals. Here is a look at a tracking sheet we have used in the past to help us determine what we need to accomplish for the ISP goals. This one is not the completed one but we continue to work on this document all year and for those students returning it isn't surprising to see similar goals on the sheet.

I think one of my favourite things that I had recently used in my classroom was a student self assessment with our curriculum. We have written our curriculum in "I know" statements (the big ideas) followed by "I can" statements (the demonstrable proof) of the big idea. For example, I know basic number sense. The student can demonstrate this by counting to ten, identifying groups of objects, counting higher, or skip counting. Kind of depends on where they are at academically for each of our bigger items. But then we know where they need to move to next. 

If I am honest, and I try to be, assessment is something I have to focus on in the short term future to ensure I have effective practices. I don't know of the names of the people that guide my practice for assessment, it's not something I have spent a lot of time considering. I focus my assessment on assessment for learning, what can I do to ensure I can see that the student is learning, but I suppose on reflection it can be assessment of learning. I do not recall the use of assessment as learning so I do have some work ahead of me to ensure I am creating a wide array of assessments to ensure my students in the future can show their learning. 

I have plans to reach out to Vanessa and Joel for help in the assessment area since they are spending a lot of time researching and I am sure they can impart some amazing resources my way!! Thanks for reading everyone!

References

Drake, S., Reid, J., & Kolohon, W. (2014) Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment. Oxford University Press.

The Evolution of My teaching practices

According to the Teacher Quality Standards (2018) "a teacher applies a current and comprehensive repertoire of effective planning, instruction and assessment practices to meet the learning needs of every student." Instructional practices are depended on a few key factors; most importantly the student, the curriculum topic and putting it all together the strengths and values of the teacher. My growth in instructional practices has come from a long career in education and non educational careers.

I've been teaching since 2003, during this time I have not always been in a typical kindergarten to grade 12 setting. These alternate settings required that I not be the original teacher I had envisioned. Honestly, I am an auditorial learner and I loved lectures, I loved discussion type teachings and being able to reflect on those lessons afterwards. I am also a planner and I like to know and being in charge of things a little, so when I started out in education I was very much a traditionalist. Thinking back on the learning curve of my first few years of teaching I am very grateful that my first few teaching positions were not typical class lecture positions. My first position was a temporary high school physical education teacher, this ensured that I spent a lot of time building relationships with my students, and I had to allow students to lead demonstrations because even though I had a minor in physical education I was not as skilled as the students in many of our activities. I had some excellent administration and colleagues that helped me with my hesitations, and feel ok with having some lessons that failed.

That was the first time my thought of what a teaching job would look like and what reality was first changed. And because I have had many different jobs that were not in schools I have been able to try different instructional practices. Lately my guru for instructional practices is Shelley Moore, her stories, her values and strategies for building inclusive planning align perfectly with my vision on what I dream for education to become.

This is a document (also linked here) that shows part of my planning but I always start my units with the guiding questions, the students then can decide how they want to solve those questions. Depending on the group of students I may control more of the direction of the process or I set back and allow them to guide me through this process. Everyone  starts at the access points and even if they do not need help with the access point it does not hurt them to be apart of the group determining the roles of the group they are in. 

Because our program has a curriculum based on life skills to support students after graduation that our team created  we use this curriculum to help us create the individual support plans for our students. Parents have a large voice in this development and it can change much our focus in the year as we work to meet the goals of all the students. 

There is some direct teaching, especially to introduce the why to a topic, but most of the teaching is done through exploration, student lead discovery and mostly structured in Project Based Learning situations. One example of our student led projects that we use in our class is the Game of Life. This was developed based on a large section of our curriculum and the students get to choose where they start, what they do and as they finish they earn spots around the board. As the teachers we help and facilitate this learning with some direct teaching in small groups as required or by helping them determine their searches to find the information they need. It is a very successful project in our classroom and the students love it!

Moore had reintroduced me to backward design and universal design for learning. In my practice I am always using universal design for learning to help reach as many students in my classroom at one time. Universal Design for learning is a system where you plan once to meet the needs of all the students in your room. It's important that you know you students and how they learn and discover their strengths and stretches. Katz (2012) has a three block model for universal design for learning which "promotes access, participation and progress in the general education curriculum for all learners." (p. 157) I have taken the ideas of Moore and her baked potato analogy and that of universal design for learning to build student driven lesson plans, I am learning with the students as we explore life skills. This has allowed me to become more constructivist in my teaching practice. I like to watch the students bring their passions out in their projects. I also feel that there is a balance between constructivist and traditionalist practices, I have to do some direct teaching but by providing the inquiry question we can often find interesting and unique solutions that we did not think about in the beginning.

As an instructional leader in a school I think it's important to balance instructional practices to reach all learners. It's important not only to know the strengths of our students when we consider teaching practices but to also consider the strengths of our teachers. There are many times when a teacher may very effectively employ traditionalist strategies and they will reach many of their students but it is because they have a great skill set in those strategies. And then other teachers may not have the same success, but give them a Project Based Learning and they are off and running. In both cases you may need to give some coaching to support the development of new teaching skills for both types of teachers. Keeping in mind that people do well if they can, and people want to do well, we can build teacher capacity by offering supprot

References

Alberta Education. (2018). Teacher Quality Standards. https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/4596e0e5-bcad-            4e93-a1fb-dad8e2b800d6/resource/75e96af5-8fad-4807-b99a-f12e26d15d9f/download/edc-                    alberta-education-teaching-quality-standard-2018-01-17.pdf.

Katz,J. (2013) The three block model of universal design for learning (UDL): Engaging students in                 inclusive education. Canadian Journal of Education 36(1). 153-194.

Moore, S. [Five Moore Minutes]. (2019, October 17). Dr. Baked Potato: How can we scaffold                         complexity. [video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j0oL1CNXAs

What can we do with a new curriculum??

Curriculum development is something that should be always ongoing, yet more often than not we have curriculum documents that get published and then take a long time to update. Having a living document to embrace new ideas and concepts within a curriculum would make more sense then having a published document that has to be updated constantly. 

Preparing stake holders for curriculum redesign takes a balanced approach. Parents want to know what their students are learning. As a parent of a child who went through the "new" math in 2007, I can understand how teachers were frustrated when they could not help their kids at home. During this time i had to home school my son for part of the year as we were dealing with my father's passing, I hadn't had professional development in the new math process so there were many arguments about how my way was not the right way. We made it through but I am not sure my son has a great understanding of the math strategies his teacher was focused on but he successfully graduated now and uses math is his current employment. Students also want to voice their thoughts, and as they are the ones immersed in the teaching of the curriculum, hearing them out on their important issues will help improve engagement in schools. And teachers who live and breath the curriculum, who spend countless hours on professional development, and refining their pedagogy can offer insight that teachers even ten years out of the classroom will not have. Most times we have had cooperation with those in charge of creating curriculum so it is easy to have these open conversations. We are at a time when this is not exactly the case, Alberta 2021 and the new draft curriculum has not had the same level of transparency as previous editions of the curriculum. The curriculum is the guide and it will help focus teachers practice but at the end of the day teachers are going to determine how they will deliver the curriculum to their students.  

As an instructional leader we need to know the curriculum. We need to know what it is saying, what it is asking and where the problems are. But we may not know all of the curriculum, from a high school perspective it would be hard to be an expert at all levels and subjects, even in elementary and middle school. Having strategies for reading the curriculum, for breaking it down and being able to pull out those key ideas would be one of the best ways to support teachers. Working with new teachers, or teachers who are working in a new curriculum area, be it grade or subject, may need guidance for how to develop their lesson plans and how to build cohesive unit plans that will touch on the main ideas in the curriculum. As Drake, Reid and Koholon state in their structure of knowledge, the theory is the over arching idea, it has an enduring understanding which leads into the big concepts, from there it breaks down further into topics and facts. Helping teachers pick out the big ideas or enduring concepts and allowing them to explore the topics and facts that are relevant and important for their class will help teachers develop engaging curriculum,

I've been teaching in a program that does not have a curriculum. This is both a blessing and curse since I am able to pick and choose from different curriculum areas to support the needs of the students in my classroom. For a few years there wasn't any real continuity, we worked hard to build it, to have progression and I was very active in that process. We now have a curriculum we use to build life skills and functional academics for our students. It has progression and is written in student friendly language. After the curriculum was written I sat down with it and made a spreadsheet for myself, turning all the core concepts into "I know" statements that were followed with "I can" statements to show student understanding. For example the first column in this screenshot is "I know how to communicate and demonstrate my number sense" This is the Curricular competency, what we want them to know.

The I can statements that followed this theme start at I can rote count numbers 1-10, I can rote count 1-100, I can skip count by 2, 5, 10 and 25 and so on. For me this provided a map of  the big ideas and I could then combine those big ideas into larger thematic units, or interdisciplinary curriculum ideas. This was a long process and took quite a few hours but in the end it was very beneficial to my curriculum planning. As an instructional leader in my program I have shared this document with other teachers in similar programs explaining how it works. This strategy is one I learned in a course at UBC and this would be my approach to dissecting the curriculum. We now make a copy of this document and share it with our parents so they can see the topics we are covering and what their students are learning within our program. 

Our assessment guide to our parents shows Green- introduced, yellow-working on with support and Red - working on independently. If the area is white it means we have not addressed this topic yet. For our program we have four years to work with most students so by the end of grade 12 each box has some colour in it. The goal of our program is to have students as independent as possible, this helps guide our programming. 

I have spent a lot of time following Shelley Moore for my own planning and my inclusion practices. She has so many wonderful examples of ways to make curriculum more assessible to all learners. Here Moore (2019) shares a story of the time she was co-teaching with another teacher and they were trying to figure out why they were teaching Napoleon to their classroom. In the end as they checked the curriculum they could not find any specific mention of Napoleon, but because he had been in the textbook they had erroneously began planning with him in mind. Once they figured out why Napoleon was being studied they were able to take that big idea and create a unit plan that was more relevant and flexible for their students. As we are facing a new curriculum I feel as a curriculum leader I am going to have spend some time finding those big rocks and maybe sifting through some of the topics and facts that have found their way into some of the curriculum. This will lead to a new way of planning, a new way of dissecting the curriculum. Moore (2019) also shares the idea of backwards design to help us with planning out curriculum which is a framework that will allow more inclusive planning for all students. 

Being able to determine what's important in the new curriculum is going to be key. They have included three progressions, so that a teacher can see how Literacy, Numeracy and the Competencies (critical thinking, creativity and innovation, problem solving, research and managing information, communication, collaboration, citizenship, and personal growth and well being) are to be used across all grade levels. I would recommend that teachers spend some time dissecting any curriculum, and looking at it with a new lens.

Teachers are part of a professional body, we have years of experience and training to allow us to be experts in this field. We are moving to a curriculum that is more constructivist to one that is traditional. There are two areas of the new curriculum, and as an instructional leader it is my responsibility to help my fellow teachers figure out what is important to focus on. I believe that is the progressions, I believe they have got a great start to those progressions and teachers can use those areas to help them develop their curriculum.  I think the compromise is to take the progressions and implement them in the current curriculum while the government tries to figure out where they went wrong with their draft in the curricular areas.

References

Alberta Education. (2021). Alberta Draft K-6 Curriculum. https://curriculum.learnalberta.ca/curriculum/en

Drake, S., Reid, J., & Kolohon, W. (2014). Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment:           

        Engaging the 21st-century learner. Oxford University Press Canada

Moore, S. (2019, April 1) Backwards design: a great way to move forward! [video]. Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?            v=mLKHaNo98Ts&list=PLObYjR-9Y4X2Mi0-QOkjyGjyF4zsTZYRJ&index=9 

Moor, S. (2019, December 2) Napoleon schmoleon: What is the goal?  [video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?                 v=1tYsHoyZyOQ&list=PLObYjR-9Y4X123zb_hMBRKI--7X5NrkP4&index=4&t=178s