Okay, here's your management hat. You're in charge. How do you move 1,000
people -- divided into 24 busy, independent groups -- toward the same goal
at the same time, when the goal requires almost every member of every group
to change how they work in very significant ways?
That's the challenge facing leaders in the Jefferson County Public Schools
as they begin to implement strategies they believe can raise the achievement
of students in the district's 24 middle schools.
The JCPS leadership team accepts the need for change; KIRIS test results
and their own observations leave them little choice. And they have a plan:
They want to retrofit the middle grades instructional program around academic
standards -- a move they believe will both enrich teaching and learning
and increase classroom accountability.
For the next year or so, says Sandy Ledford, the JCPS Middle School Advocate,
the district will devote extra time, energy and money to support schools
as they begin this rebuilding process. At the top of the agenda: Providing
teachers and principals the professional development they need "to
change their curriculum, instruction, and assessment so that they make a
positive difference in student achievement."
But with so much to do across a large district, where and how do you begin?
Ledford and her middle grades team have settled on a strategy they believe
will have the most payoff in creating middle schools that are standards-centered.
They will encourage teachers to redesign their lessons around state and
district academic goals and use "authentic assessments" linked
to those goals to analyze individual student progress throughout the school
year.
To implement this strategy, the middle grades leadership team is creating
a "teacher leadership cadre" -- a pair of teachers from each middle
school who will be expected to develop and spread expert knowledge about
standards and assessment in their own buildings. At the same time, the district's
middle school principals are participating in professional development designed
to strengthen their skills as change leaders.
To prepare the "cadre" teachers for their pivotal roles in reform,
the district is providing special training in standards and authentic assessment.
The process began in February at a one-day workshop with a national expert
and continues with monthly meetings and coaching from master teacher Marcia
Lile, who recently joined Ledford's leadership team as a "Clark
Fellow".
This summer, the cadre teachers will join nearly 800 other middle school
educators at a one-day conference where they will talk about standards-based
authentic assessments they've developed as part of their study. By fall,
Ledford and her team hope that middle school teachers throughout the system
will be experimenting with standards and assessments and sharing the results
with one another.
Let's explain these terms
Just what is 'authentic assessment," other than the latest educational
jargon? Teachers have always relied on quizzes and end-of-chapter tests
to gauge student progress. But "authentic assessments" go beyond
the routine classroom testing most teachers use.
Authentic assessments stress higher order thinking rather than expecting
students to regurgitate bare facts. They ask students to show a lot more
of what they've learned than multiple-choice or short-answer tests can reveal.
And they connect student learning to real-world situations so that students
can apply their knowledge.
In schools that build their teaching and learning around academic standards,
authentic assessments are also designed to show how well students are meeting
those standards. The standards undergird both the lessons teachers teach
and the tests they create. Ideally, students know from the beginning what
standards they're expected to meet and how they will be assessed.
Many of these qualities of authentic assessment are found in the state's
testing program, KIRIS, which most teachers and principals "teach to,"
especially in the few weeks or months before the state's spring testing
period. However, if middle-school classrooms are to be truly standards-based,
this kind of assessment needs to be part of teachers' instruction and student
learning all year long.
In the past, Ledford says, "We've mostly assessed at endpoints. We're
at the end of a chapter or the end of a term, so we decide to measure what
we've learned. But that's not where we need to be. We have to be able to
track each student's progress related to standards on an ongoing basis."
Authentic assessment requires new teacher skills
Good authentic assessments, those that ask a lot of students and are tied
to standards, are not easy to construct. Teachers not only need a thorough
grasp of the academic standards themselves, they must have a fairly deep
understanding of the subject matter they're teaching, and they must acquire
the skills to create and score the assessments. They also need time to try
them out and share what they learn with their colleagues.
Ideally, as schools undertook all these changes in instruction and assessment,
every school would have an on-site expert to do research, demonstrate, coach,
and advise teachers. But financial and bureaucratic barriers make that nearly
impossible in most school districts. The Louisville schools are doing what
Ledford and others believe is the next best thing: growing their own experts
through the teacher cadre.
To assemble the leadership team, Ledford drew up some general guidelines
and asked each middle school principal to recommend two teachers. Principals
selected the cadre teachers for a variety of reasons, says Clark Fellow
Marcia Lile, who is the district's point-person on helping middle-level
teachers and schools develop and use standards and assessments.
Some principals wanted certain subjects covered, others wanted to spread
non-teaching responsibilities around; still others believed the cadre training
was a good leadership development opportunity for certain teachers. As a
result, the teacher cadre group is a mix of subject-level backgrounds, experience,
and expertise.
"We're planning to prepare the teacher cadre leaders to be a strong
influence in their schools," says Cheryl DeMarsh, director of middle
school reform projects. "It won't help immediately; it will take some
time and work, and it will look different in every school. But I hope we
have a beginning point."
Ledford acknowledges that after their first development session together
in February, some of the teacher cadre members left "confused and overwhelmed."
But most of the cadre volunteers have agreed to stick with the effort, and
some have already begun creating standards-based authentic assessments to
use in their classrooms (see Curt Matter's first
effort). A trial-and-error process is underway, DeMarsh adds, as teachers
consider and reject ideas that may sound like fun but are not firmly rooted
in standards or don't justify an in-depth assessment.
Cadre work begins in earnest this fall
By the beginning of next school year, the cadre teachers we talked to expect
they will know how to launch the assessment effort in their schools.
Vonda Drinkard, technology teacher at Iroquois, and Cheryl Schaefer, instrumental
music teacher at the school, feel they have an advantage as cadre teachers
because they work with all teachers in the building in areas where performance
is important. The faculty at Iroquois "is very cooperative," they
say, and anxious to dig deeper into performance-type assessments. Drinkard
and Schaefer are considering an all-staff presentation at the beginning
of the school year with regular follow-up. They want to make sure that teachers
integrate assessment into instruction and don't just see the effort "as
another activity I have to slot in somewhere."
Science teacher Peg Hourigan wants teachers
at Kammerer Middle School to look at what they already believe they are
doing well "and work from there." As a cadre teacher, she will
"walk the faculty through the process" of developing authentic
assessments, then hope teachers will pilot ideas together and come back
to share what they are learning.
Kym Rice, a math teacher at Newburg Middle
School, has worked through the new vocabulary she learned at development
sessions with other cadre teachers and also found the faculty at Newburg
receptive to using real-life tasks and assessments in their instruction.
She will demonstrate the idea in her classrooms and with a partner. "Teachers
are more comfortable learning something new with someone from their own
building," she believes.
The cadre teachers hope that by the end of the next school year, all teachers
will have used an authentic assessment, come together to share the results
through student work, and kept up the conversation about how standards-linked
assessments can pave the way to higher student achievement across the board.
Kammerer Principal Betty Graham paints a specific picture of what she expects
to happen because of the cadre teachers in her school. They will become
leaders at Kammerer on assessment, she says, serving as "in-house resources
who will enrich our conversations about student work because of their access
to information and expertise."
As a result, Graham believes, "I will see more meaningful assessment
that backs into more meaningful instruction." This effort, she contends,
is not asking middle-school teachers to do something more, "but helping
us do better what we already are trying to do."
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