Strategies 9 and 10
How do you think these strategies support each other in program improvement?
Both assessment reviews and examinations of student work help teachers work together to create a plan for improvement. Assessments help teachers see overall trends and pinpoint areas of need across the board. Examining student work helps determine what factors might be contributing to the data that was gathered with the assessments. For instance, a particular teacher might be struggling with how to approach certain topics, or a particular assignment is failing to fully address the learning goals, and examining student work can reveal this as a potential cause of lower student performance in an area. Each strategy helps supplement what the other fails to address, as I will outline in the next section.
What are the strengths and challenges of doing each, do you think, in your setting?
Reviewing assessment data is useful because it helps teachers spot overall trends in student performance. They can isolate areas of struggle and strengths that are fairly consistent. Assessment data helps create a "big picture" of the effects of instruction. The challenge with assessments, however, is that they do not really address causal factors like curriculum and instructional practices. That is why it is imperative for teachers to provide feedback at data meetings to help draw a more complete picture of the situation. Also, evaluating student work can help fill in these gaps.
Evaluating student work helps teachers determine more specifically how instruction should be changed. By evaluating student work, teachers can analyze both the efficacy of an assignment and its appropriateness for the targeted learning goals. Evaluation of assignments helps give teachers tools for addressing areas of struggle as identified during data review. One challenge of using this strategy is that the specificity of it may not fully address larger instructional problems, such as teachers who are not familiar with research-based instructional strategies. That is why it is so important to discuss plans for improvement and provide research-based suggestions during the meetings. Another challenge is that teachers may feel vulnerable by opening up their students' work for criticism. That is why coaches must facilitate a professional environment, and everyone must adhere to the norms that they established.
How would they help the faculty you surveyed to make change?
We currently have a pretty well-developed assessment data program at my school right now. I think that we could get better about creating action plans for areas of weakness, though. We provide student remediation, but we do not really address issues on the curricular and instructional end of things, and I think that would improve our action plans. That's why I think it would be useful for my department to evaluate student work regularly. We could analyze assignments that different teachers used to help students with the topics that are on our assessments to see where our areas of strength and weakness are and to help teachers improve their instructional approaches.
Questions for You
- Does your school use assessment review and/or evaluating student work? How is it currently being implemented at your school?
- If not, how do you think these strategies would benefit your school?
- How do you think one or both of these strategies would create a foundation of program improvement to support you in implementing the PD plan you developed?
