 |
| Design in Five by Nicole Dimich Vagle |
For two consecutive days at the Berrien RESA, I had the opportunity to learn along side co-workers and begin to think of ways, as educators, we can improve relevance, meaning, and current practices revolving around assessment of students. The Design in Five process is a process in which using five principles to help guide the design of your assessments. More information can be found at allthingsassessment.info.
The workshop was lead by Nicole Dimich Vagle, author of the Design in Five book. She started with a quote about the purpose of assessment, stating that “assessment is about digging deeper and figuring out what is going on in our students’ heads.” As educators, we are to examine what our students are learning, how they are learning, and what we can do to assist them in their continuous improvement. It is essential that we have assessments that allow us to identify the learning that are students are taking with them.
We also began reflecting on the feedback that we are providing students and what it stresses to them. For instance, Ms. Dimich Vagle shared with us two different ways of providing feedback. First, she showed a simple score with questions marked wrong. Next, she showed us a categorical breakdown on the questions that the student missed and what topic they were on. Universally in the room, we all saw more value in the later, seeing how it celebrates more of what the student knows and allows them to know specifics to work on to get better. The idea was that we have to provide the information that will allow our students enter into a growth mindset and move students to caring more about their learning than their specific score on a test or assignment.
 |
| Multiple choice questions may not fulfill our standards. |
We spent a significant portion of Tuesday discussing balanced assessment and what balanced assessment looks like in our classrooms. While the standardized tests provide us with significant data, little can be used with our current students. Summative tests tend to be a score in the gradebook before we open a new chapter or unit. Ms. Dimich Vagle stressed the importance of formative assessment. She also made it very clear to the room that formative assessment is only formative when we use it to inform our teaching. If we are doing formative assessment and not adapting to it, then it is not formative assessment. Realistically, formative assessment and summative assessment should come to the same result, because if it is not than “you are not assessing the right stuff.”
 |
| What are we assessing? |
Towards the end of day one, we started to dive deep into the Design in Five process, which is more cyclical than a progression of steps. We focused first on choosing the standards. Through some brief unpacking, it helped us identify ways in which we could assess these standards. For instance, when the standard asks students to explain, a multiple choice question will likely not suffice. Explain would have the students constructing a sentence at the very least. This lead to a focused discussion on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge circle.
With the discussion of Webb’s D.O.K. wheel, we started to unpack the standards into learning progression. This is really something that needs to be done by the classroom teachers, not the administration or an outside group. With the unpacking, you can start to identify what the actual learning outcomes look like. Using these examples, you can then start to design the next phase, an assessment plan.
An assessment plan is something that you could use to plan out how your assessments look, what they cover, how much of each item they cover, and what we can do to accurately assess the items. This is also helpful because it allows teachers to be purposeful and assess with fidelity when developing these items. Working within a PLC or grade level team can also assure that we are doing what is best for students in a variety of ways, such as staggering summative assessments and ensuring vertical alignment of learning targets.
On day two, we dove into creating the assessments and looking at how to assess them. The focus was on developing meaningful, quality rubrics that truly measure the student’s ability, but also focus on helping the students grow over time. Ms. Dimich Vagle focused on two big revelations when discussing rubrics. First, she was very much for universal rubrics. Universal rubrics are ones that are not tied directly to one task, but instead, focus on many tasks that you could do throughout the year. The reasoning for this is that you are able to then continually focus on all aspects, building more competency. You may be thinking, if I put all skills on there, my students will do poorly. In that argument, you are correct, but the remedy to the situation is to emphasize certain skills at certain time, but build more competency as you progress. The second focus was rubrics that celebrate what is there, not focusing on what is missing. This will help students build confidence and celebrate small success, rather than constantly keeping them down. This can be a huge step towards more of a growth mindset for our students.
The final portion of the cyclical process is determining the student investment and reporting measures. This focused on how we would measure our students’ learning and how we will critique and communicate learning. It is also a focus on what we are assessing. This is important as it is the final step before implementing the assessment.
Ideally, we should be spending time with our PLC teams collaboratively selecting what students will learn, teaching the material, gathering the evidence, and then examining the process. As educators, we should be looking back at the process and looking for ways that we can improve the process. As part of a cyclical process, we head back to the first step to begin to evaluate how we are doing with the process. This is the growth mindset for us, as educators. We continuously strive to improve educational outcomes for our students.
Comments
Post a Comment