There is a science and creative artistry to developing assessments. Great assessment systems help define an individual child or an entire school system. When done right, they become the heartbeat of solid instructional decisions and powerful tools for evaluating teacher effectiveness. When done wrong, they lead to despair and signals of defeat for student growth. Assessments tell stories of achievement, growth, and hope.
Stories are usually not linear but are created with ebbs and flows of information, excitement, challenge and reward. Assessment systems in school systems need to mirror the works of great literature. As in A Tale of Two Cities, each chapter in the assessment story must be linked together to tell a meaningful tale, full of language, aligned intentionally, providing contrast, repetition, and texture.
School systems must ask, “How can an effective assessment system create sustainable instructional change?” Answers to this question will require schools and systems to hold clear visions as to the critical nature of the connections and co-dependency that exist between instruction and assessment. School systems must design assessment systems that are comprehensive (assess all students in a tiered model), efficient (minimizes the loss of instructional time) and constant (developing an assessment cycle that promotes professional conversations). The vision of the assessment system must addresses the local, state and federal mandates and the capacity of those in the system and be clearly known and transparent to all adults and students within and without the system.
This session will explain how the Federal Way Public Schools’ (FWPS) is using data to evaluate teacher effectiveness in an urban school district. Through a process of defining High Quality Instruction, and therefore, High Quality Assessment, FWPS is using the tenets of the Cambridge program to build a comprehensive professional development plan and using student assessment data to measure “added-value.”