Shifts in Assessment and Learning

     On another "Cold Day" here in Chicago, I wonder which of the people in the cartoon above is asking that question...  To be honest, being a student and being a teacher these days is HARD.  Expectations are high for both.  Sometimes, we just have to see the reasons for getting up and facing the world.  This week's building meeting gave me that motivation, despite the frigid temps we are facing.  

     Our building meetings at Hiawatha have all been focused around looking at student work.  Sometimes we compare it to a specific standard, sometimes we sort it into categories, sometimes we just talk about the information we gained from the samples.  We have done that for reading, writing, and math on a rotating weekly basis for a few months.  This week, we were talking math and were led by the fabulous +Christina Betz.  She is our math core leader at Hiawatha, and leading the math charge towards the CCSS and utilizing workshop model.  

     Christina started the meeting with the cartoon above, really being honest as to how hard school can be, for both teachers and students.  She then talked about why we are sorting work, and how there have been some major shifts in assessment recently.

     Christina is so right!  We are currently on a DACEE committee together, led by +Bill Davini and +Sue Butler, and we are right in the middle of a major shift in D100.  We have spent quite some time talking about Standards Based Learning, and how formative assessment and feedback given regularly are what our students need to move closer to meeting the standards.  Standards based learning is about being responsive to the students WHILE they are learning.  Using Christina's words, we want to give descriptive feedback that empowers and motivates students to create their own goals and find their own success.

     Her message was very powerful and positive, and really speaks to the shift we have seen at Hiawatha in the purpose for our assessments and the collaboration we have around them.  

     I cannot state how proud I am of the Hiawatha teachers for embracing the shift.

     She then had the teams discuss whatever formative assessments they had brought.  Here are a few sneak peaks into current math instruction at Hiawatha!

     But as I was walking around, I heard some pretty amazing things being discussed by the teams.  3rd grade was talking about self assessment, and how they are starting to have their students self assess their thinking on the back of the exit slips.  I heard a first grade teacher say that she could just recycle the whole stack of assessments, because they pretty much told her how to reteach the concept so that they will understand it.  The 5th grader teachers were talking about their math responses and their rubric for their math journals.  And then I got to 4th grade....

What do you notice about these 3 fractions?  Explain below.

     The 4th grade teachers were sorting their samples using this question into 1, 2, 3, and 4.  After sorting a bunch, they started to see a few patterns in the types of answers they were getting.  After some discussion, one of the teachers said, "Maybe we didn't ask the question in the best way."  (OK, that was a paraphrase not a direct quote, but I was so giddy with excitement that I forgot to write it down.) 

     That is the point of the collaboration we are having.  By working together and looking at student work, and talking with our coworkers with clear targets in mind, we start to see ways that we can change our instruction to maximize learning.  

     After telling them how excited I was, they began to describe how they have seen a transition in their math assessments over the course of the year.  What used to be very lengthy and often time consuming pre-assessments, they are now using much shorter yet more useful formative assessments that guide their instruction.

CHILLS.  

      Building meetings like this make me want to find a big box of gold stars.  While stickers do not give the best feedback, sometimes they are just necessary.  Gold stars all around.

Christina ended her part of the meeting by saying this:

"Assessment, teaching and learning go hand in hand as each informs the others."

     I loved that statement so much I had to make a graphic for it.  Assessment, teaching and learning all go hand in hand.  Assessment guides our teaching.  Teaching guides learning and creates feedback and new learning. The learning generates new teaching.  Teaching does not necessarily mean learning has happened.  Responsive teaching is here in D100. There has been a shift, and it will do wonderful things for our students.  

Warming Up on a Cold Day with Awesome Teachers

     I don't know if you have heard about this, but it was really cold this week.  I mean REALLY cold.  In fact, the only snowman we have built at the O'Donnell house with the highly anticipated first snow of the season was this LEGO snowman.  We even built it during school, because it was so cold that we had 2 cold days.  I mean, that is REALLY cold.  

     OK, that probably isn't news to you guys from Chicago.

     When I heard the news that school was in session on Friday after being off the 2 previous days, I was a bit reluctant about it.  To be honest, I was nervous about the cold weather and sending my son to school, where he waits outside in the car line to be picked up at the end of the day (a car line that I had a feeling would be waaaaaaaaaay longer than normal due to the temps...).  I also knew that my husband would be home, because his school opted to take the third day off due to frigid temps.  But, I woke up and bundled up and drove into school, with just a little bit of the winter blues.

    Then I got to school, and the thaw began!

     I started the day in a book talk about standards based grading.  It was our first meeting to discuss On Your Mark, a book written by Thomas Guskey about the reasons to shift towards standards based grading, led by our principal +Karen Marino.  We had an honest conversation about the purposes for grading, and the reasons that it is an important shift for us.  We began talking about our current report card and its limitations.  We had an interesting discussion about I Can statements and how we use them in our classrooms, effectively and not so effectively.  It was just the beginning of the conversation, but did I mention that it is an optional book talk (the day after 2 cold days) and there were 20+ staff in attendance!!!  It really just shows the dedication that our teachers have to really understanding their students better.

     I then met with a teacher to help her get some video clips of her art project into an iMovie to show her thaumatropes to her students.  They were awesome!  Starting my day with art is always a step in the right direction.

     I then dropped off some children's books to a teacher who is looking to include some mentor text into her writing lessons.  They are starting opinion writing, so I got to look through my books and find some fun books that show strong opinion or persuade.  Nothing brings a smile to my face faster than children's literature, but a close second is a teacher looking for a good mentor text.  

     I stopped into a few classrooms and caught some great mini lessons in both reading and writing.  Our kids were off for a few days, but you could never tell by the learning I saw today!

     I had a thoughtful mini discussion about running records, and the purpose for them and the information we can get from them when they are "cold" or "warm" reads. 

     I then met with a teacher about some ways to get some partnership book clubs going, with the possibility of using some close reading signpost strategies in the process.  While we work that out, she turned the conversation to the PD +Meg Hanisch and I held on Monday at Institute Day about main idea and standard 2.  She decided to do a pre-assessment and asked me to meet with her after school to look at the results and begin to create a rubric of sorts for main idea.  "Of course!" I shouted!  (Ok, I didn't really shout out loud, but I did inside a little.  How fun!)

      I then went to talk to another teacher about one of her higher level reading groups, and some of the challenges we are having since moving to nonfiction.  We decided to use a book from Jennifer Serravallo's newly arrived assessment kit (YIPPEE!!!) with the group, to get a good sense of the information we can gain from the assessment kit.  We plan to have the group do the assessment, and use her system to discuss their answers and really look for their strengths and weaknesses.  

     On the way back to my office, I chatted with a reading specialist about the possibility of her providing some support to a teacher.  We talked about a possible observation cycle of sorts, and then discussed some data I have been analyzing that looks at some trends across 3 and 4 year periods of F&P data.  While that might not sound all that exciting to some people, I am a data junkie.   Proud to admit it.  

     I then went to meet with a teacher who wanted talk about assessments for their character unit, and the possibility of adding some close reading lenses to their current shared reading block.  We looked at a rubric she had already created, and then talked about the types of things we might like to assess for this unit, with a close eye on Standard 3.  We also have an idea for close reading that I will have to share once we actually teach it.  It is going to be so fun.  

     I then talked with a teacher who gave a PD on using formative assessments that I missed this week, and asked her to meet with me and give me a mini version of it because of the positive buzz that it has created around the building.  

     There were three brief conversations with teachers about their individual data walls, as we prepare of our IDM meetings next week.  Questions about universals, RTI, and missing data.  Oh my!

    This is when I had a piece of delicious homemade banana bread, thanks to a dear friend.  Did I mention it was homemade AND had chocolate chips in it?  

     
     I then got a text message with these photos, and the message "Super fun teamwork!"  Um... Can I be in 2nd grade again?  I want to be on their team.

     I stopped into a classroom and took a look at some books and resources left behind by a previous teacher, and found trade books from our last two reading basals and a summer school program.  It is so interesting seeing where we were then, and where we are now.  The previous teacher (ok, it was me) worked so hard to get those leveled readers purchased for her groups.  Now, our book room is filled with authentic reading materials.  

     One of our teachers then invited me to sort some formative assessments with her.  She has started sorting them, but wanted to think about how she could sort them and record them in a way to show progress over time.  While I don't know that we accomplished that goal, we did sort the samples with a lens of "problem/ solution" and had an interesting conversation about her students' responses.  I think we came up with a teaching point to add to her read aloud to help her students move to the next step.  

     I then had bus duty, where I got to meet the grandpa of one of our new Hiawathans.  What a nice man!  

     I finished the day getting to have a brief conversation with a teacher from another building, and then a longer conversation with that teacher who had done the main idea pre-assessment with her students.  We read the main idea student expectations of our CCSS rubric for standard 2, and determined some next steps for her main idea instruction.  We realized that her students are doing a fantastic job using text support and finding key details, so she will use that strength to move them along.

     So, I may have started to sound like Charlie Brown's teacher to you somewhere in the middle of that.  I have a feeling that CCSS based conversations, rubrics, pre-assessements, close reading, partner book clubs, mentor texts, work sample sorts, and book talks about standards based grading do not excite you as much as they do me.  But, I am a but of a nerd.  I embrace it.  So why bother boring you with all that?  I typically don't discuss how I spend my days, because coaching is a private thing at times.  

     I just couldn't help myself.  I just had to share those conversations with the world.  

     Did I mention that this happened the day after two cold days?!?!?  I kind of wanted to be in my slippers still, and they were ready to hit the learning targets.   

     Wow.  While half of Chicago was still frozen and not even attending school, those are the conversations that I had, with some really amazing teachers (and I am sure I missed a few in my list).  I mean, days like today make me realize how fantastic the teachers at Hiawatha really are.  Below zero temperatures do not stop them.   And I couldn't be any prouder of them.

     I just really hope the weather warms up just a little bit next week.  As warm and fuzzy as all that academic talk made me today, I really would like to stay a literacy coach and not become a snowman.      

Aaaarrgghh! Spider!: A CCSS Anchor Standard 3 Ladder Activity (Part 2)

     This is part 2 of a blog post, written to describe a series of building meeting my staff and I had in the attempt at unpacking what Standard 3 looks like in our classrooms.  The original post can be found here.

     I started the building meeting reading the story, Aaaarrgghh, Spider! to the teachers.  It is short, and they really couldn't analyze the quality of the students' work if they weren't all familiar with the text.  

     After they read the story, I went through a brief PD on open and closed sorts.   I then asked the teachers to do an open sort of the work done by students in their grade levels.  They could sort the work into any categories that they wanted.  The work began!

     After about 7-8 minutes, we came back together as a group and talked about the process.  I had walked around and listened to the groups as they sorted, and every single grade level chose different categories to sort the work into.  Some did it based on completion of work, others based on if they used text evidence or not, some on overall quality, etc.  Not one team mentioned the work common core standard.  Many of the teams disagreed on what they wanted to sort them as, and therefore didn't have categories in place at the end of the time period.

     I then passed out a rubric that I had made last year about Standard 3 and character development across the grades.  For the second sort, I asked them to use a closed sort, with the four categories below, approaching, meeting, and exceeding the grade level standard of CCSS #3.  They were to use the rubric and the work samples to categorize them.  They got to work, again!

     This time, they all had categories in place and got to sorting the work.  Some chose to sort the sample to reflect the entire page of work, and others chose a single question to focus on while sorting.   I don't think any grade level finished sorting all the samples, and I think it is fair to say that there was still some disagreement about what samples fell into below, approaching, meeting and exceeding.

     So, why do all this?  We spent 30 minutes sorting one written response to a read aloud.  It wasn't even really the best activity to sort in the first place.  Why on earth would we do that?  Well, I think the conversations showed that we do not all have the same "bar" in our minds when we talk about what is expected of the students in our classes.  To be be fair, that "bar" has changed significantly in the past few years.  It is hard for any of us to know for sure what a 2nd grader or a 4th grader should be able to do anymore.  That is why we need to talk about it.  We need to collaborate with each other, and learn these new standards together.  That is the only way that we can ensure that all the students in our building are getting the same education, no matter the room they are placed into.

     I feel like teacher time is extremely precious and limited.  I want to maximize the time we spend together so that it makes the most impact it can on student learning.  The reason I had them do the open sort first, and then the closed sort with the Common Core standard focus, is because I wanted them to see how much more we can accomplish with a clear lens in our mind.  When we collaborate with others, we all bring our own ideas to that conversation.  If we don't focus the conversation in the first place, we might spend a lot of time talking and not a lot of time getting anything done.  The standards can give us a focus that can preserve our precious time.

     Are you curious what we found to be "meeting" in the grades?  Here are some samples.

Kindergarten

1st Grade

2nd Grade

3rd Grade

4th Grade

5th Grade

     This is clearly just a beginning for our building to start to use the students' work to drive our instruction.  We have a clear shorthand in place, though, for common understanding at looking at our student work samples in a range of abilities.  In fact, in the weeks following our building meeting, our ELA plan times began to fill will conversations about the quality of student work along this continuum.  We are beginning to see where they are, and allowing that to help us move to the next step.

Yeah, Hiawatha!!!

1: Below
2: Approaching the standard
3: Meeting the standard
4: Exceeding

Aaaarrgghh! Spider!: A CCSS Anchor Standard 3 Ladder Activity (Part 1)

     October is here, and that means that I am reaching for one of my favorite books, Aaaarrgghh! Spider! by Lydia Monks.  It is the season for all things creepy and crawly, and a fun book about spiders fits that description nicely.

     Our staff has been working hard at looking at student work to start driving our instruction.  For the past few weeks, we have been using our building meetings to do gallery walks of student work across grade levels, led by our core leaders +Jane DeCaire  and +Christina Betz.  We have simply been looking at work samples (K-5) and noticing commonalities and differences through conversation with each other. Next week, we are going to be looking at reading work, but we wanted to start examining the work at our own grade level more closely to help us make some decisions about where our instruction needs to go.  Time for some formative assessment analysis!

Step 1: Pick a Text

     Formative assessment is really anything that you do with students that you can analyze and use to move your students to the next step in their development.  In order to do a whole staff PD about a possible way to analyze a formative assessment, I decided to create assessments that would walk up the Common Core ladder of expectations for Standard 3.  But what character to study?!?!?

     Spider!

     I love Aaaarrgghh! Spider!  But is my love enough to read it to all 6 grade levels in my building?  Here's why it is:

Kindergarten: Next week, they are reading the Itsy, Bitsy Spider in their nursery rhyme unit.  They 

     also have the word spider up on their October word wall.

First Grade: I had talked to one of our first grade teachers about using this book to help with her 

     Small Moment shared experience story about a bug they found in their classroom.  It can be used 

     to see how some small moments are put together to make a story.

Second Grade:  Our second grade is currently working on adding onomatopoeia and dialogue to 

     their small moment stories.  "Aaaarrgghh!" and "Off you go!" fit perfectly into those lessons.

Third Grade:  Our third grade is currently reading Charlotte's Web.  What better spider to compare 

     than Charlotte?  They even call Spider clever for making her webs, just like Charlotte!!!

Fourth Grade:  They are currently reading Tales of Despereaux, which is about a mouse who doesn't 

     have a family that supports him.  Guess who also doesn't have a family?  Spider!  

Fifth Grade:  They also just wrote a shared experience small moment story about Haunted 

     Hiawatha. Their writing samples were filled with onomatopoeia, and filled with fear (even if the  

     fear in Aaaarrgghh! Spider! is on a much friendlier level...)

Step 2: Create the Assessments

     Once I had a book in mind, I opened the Common Core rubrics I made for Standard 3 across grade levels and really thought about what would be expected of our students to do with the book based on the CCSS.  I then opened a blank Pages document and got to work.  The assessments I made focus on key components of the grade level standards, but are certainly not complete and can be measured in other ways as well.  But, for the purpose of my assessments, they reflect the work of the CCSS standards across each grade.

     Here are the assessments.

Step 3: Go into the Classrooms!

     I then went into one classroom as each grade level in my building.  Thanks, +Kara Wesolowski, +Jodi Meyer, +Margaret Daly, +Christine Flowers, +Lori Horne, and +Katie Cardelli for letting me come in to read to your class!  

     I started by walking them through the character assessment, using a character that they have been following in their read alouds.  Using No, David, Arthur, Charlotte, Desperaux, and Rob from Tiger Rising, we had a brief conversation touching on the kinds of character analysis that their standards expects by the end of the year.  I used a familiar character to set up the expectation, and then told them that they were going to do the same work using a new character.  Enter Spider!

    Once the kids were working independently on the assessment, I did leave them alone to work and their teacher and I took some time to talk about the questions I used on the assessment, and to start to look at the early responses as they came in.  This gave me some time to talk through my rationale for the assessment so that the teacher could lead the sorting for their grade level at our building meeting. I also didn't want to offer the kids too much support, because we are going to sort it into categories to help us guide our instruction.  If I provided a lot of support, it might skew the sorting and cause a child not to get the feedback or support they need.

     Here is a video of me reading the book.
(I made the video so that the staff who didn't hear me read it would be able to listen to the book before our meeting.  My kids helped me out, and the mic went in and out, so it is not Grade A quality, but it is helping me flip our meeting a bit.)

Step 4: Sorting the Work

     The whole point of doing this was to collect samples that the teams could sort.  That will be covered in Part 2, sometime after our building meeting next week!

     Stay tuned for completed work samples and thoughts about sorting student work into categories in grade level teams.  Until then, here are some pictures of our cute Hiawatha kindergartners showing us the emotions felt by Spider at three points in the book.