Concise Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Assessment and Grading

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Cassandra Erkins and Tom Schimmer. Cassie is a presenter, facilitator, coach, trainer of trainers, keynote speaker, author, and above all, a teacher who presents nationally and internationally on assessment, instruction, school improvement, and professional learning communities. Tom Shimmer is an author and speaker with expertise in assessment, grading, leadership, and behavioral support. And we are here today to talk about their new book, Concise Answers to Frequently Asked Questions About Assessment and Grading.

[00:46] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:49] SPEAKER_00:

Cassie and Tom, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thank you.

[00:51] SPEAKER_01:

Great to see you, Justin. Great to be with you.

[00:54] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm excited to talk about this book because I imagine part of the reason you wrote it is that you get a lot of questions about assessment and grading. Talk to us a little bit about how this book came together.

[01:05] SPEAKER_02:

Actually, there's five authors on the book, so I just want to acknowledge J.D. Miller, Katie White, and Nicole Dimich as well. And the five of us were looking at different questions that come up, different concerns that people have. And we were documenting them and just decided it's time to answer those in as concise a way as possible because assessment is very complex and people get frustrated and you can get a lot of mixed messages in the field. And so we did our best to kind of navigate the waters and talk about what you can look at on both sides to an issue as we tried to answer those questions.

[01:37] SPEAKER_01:

And as the title of the book indicates, they are concise answers because we know that the research and assessment is wide and deep. And we know that sometimes it's challenging to find the answers to the questions you're looking for. And as The five of us travel around and do workshops. We get inundated with questions and we want to give people a quick answer. That doesn't mean the issues are simple. That doesn't mean that you don't have to dig a little bit deeper.

[02:01]

But we wanted to provide people with two to four paragraphs of a quick answer so that people had an idea of how we would respond or what a practice might look like or the way that you might approach a situation. So that's really the intent of the book.

[02:13] SPEAKER_00:

Well, assessment was one of those topics that's so crucial to good teaching and learning. It's very well understood, very well researched, and yet also done so badly in so many cases. What are some of the biggest opportunities that come from the biggest and most widespread problems that you see with how we approach assessment in our profession? Because it's not that the research prevents us from making some of those big mistakes and from encountering some of those problems. And of course, The devil's in the details. How we assess matters a great deal.

[02:45]

What do you see as some of the biggest problems and opportunities when it comes to assessment?

[02:48] SPEAKER_01:

I think there's both opportunity and challenge because there's very little that's definitive in assessment. Most things in assessment are context dependent and they're nuanced. And there are choices that we get to make, but there's also choices we have to make. And when we make choices, we sometimes we do make the wrong choice. I know that one of my favorite expressions is experience comes from poor judgment. I made a lot of mistakes in my classroom back in the day, and I learned a lot about assessment through that.

[03:12]

So I think both the opportunity and the challenge comes from the fact that there is no definitiveness. You know, for example, we have 30 to 35 years of modern research around feedback, and yet we sit here today in 2023, and we have no definitive answer as to what strategy actually works in feedback universally. So we have to make choices. We have to watch how students respond. We have to consider our context, the nuances of what we're doing. And that's where some of the opportunity and the challenges come.

[03:38] SPEAKER_02:

Quite some time ago, Stiggins and Herrick ran some research and they looked at the curricula across North America in undergrad programs for becoming teachers. And what they discovered was, on average, less than 20% of a teacher's prep time is spent even talking about the topic of assessment. And yet we know from the work of Hattie and Marzano, master teachers spend over 80% of their day immersed in assessment activities. And we went from being way too loose, teach whatever you want. I actually walked into my first classroom. The principal said, go forth, do good work.

[04:07]

I said about what he said, whatever you want. And then we went way too tight and we went into pacing guides, which became rules rather than tools. And then we went into curriculum that you had to implement with fidelity because it was research based. And as a result, teachers kind of got lost in the middle. Like, do I write my own assessment if I'm supposed to be using this one? But it's not a perfect match to my curriculum because it's a company that works with all the different states and provinces.

[04:31]

So I don't know how to go about this work. So we really felt like there was this huge need. Teachers are struggling to figure out what's the middle between too loose and too tight.

[04:40] SPEAKER_00:

Let's start with some kind of foundations and some kind of purpose statements, if we could. What do you see as, from the teacher's perspective, the purpose of assessment? Because, you know, if I think about the apprenticeship of observation that I got as a student, and, you know, much of what we do as new teachers comes from our experience as students, probably as much as comes from our teacher education. As a student, you get the sense that assessment is just something you have to do in school. See how much everybody learned, give out grades. From the teacher's perspective and knowing more than the average high school student gets from their apprenticeship of observation, what do you see as some of the primary and central goals of education of assessment from the teacher's perspective?

[05:19] SPEAKER_02:

As we've been building the assessment center together, Tom, Nicole and I, we've actually talked a lot about assessment as an instrument to create hope, efficacy and increase achievement. And we really see it as a very powerful relationship oriented tool that teachers use to help kids grow. Grading became so critical that it actually wiped out common sense in some cases and forced our hand at just like filling boxes. And so we've lost the purpose. And our mission is to try to go back and reset and help people realize there's a bigger purpose to this work. And it really is about moving the needle on achievement, not just documenting what was and moving on.

[06:01] SPEAKER_01:

One of the things that we saw, if you look historically with the renaissance with assessment that happened in the late 90s and early 2000s, it coincided with the tech boom. And we had this onslaught of electronic grade books that really had people, unfortunately, thinking about the over quantification of learning. And so yes to everything Cassie said in terms of building relationships, focusing on not just achievement, but focusing on building hope and efficacy being that students, not in spite of our assessment practices, but through our assessment practices, students can see the pathway to success and believe that they can get there. So all of that really is an opportunity for teachers to gather evidence. And that's really what assessment is. Sometimes when I work with groups, I'll say to them, all assessment does is give you access to the information that's already in the room.

[06:47]

The students have a certain degree of understanding of what you've been teaching them. You need access to that for a couple of reasons. One is to decide instructionally, what am I going to do next? Am I ready to move forward? Do I have to reteach? Do I have to go back?

[07:01]

I need access to that information. So not every assessment has to be formal. A lot of times the most powerful assessments are informal. They are times where students are not even aware they're being assessed. They're in conversation with one another and I'm listening to them and I'm listening to their understandings and misunderstandings. Another reason to gather evidence is to decide to verify, to verify the degree to which a student's met the learning goal.

[07:23]

And that typically is the summative purpose. But the information is in the room. The degree to which a student or the students understand what you've been teaching them is in the room and you need access to that. So you can either make an instructional decision or verify the degree to which they've done that.

[07:38] SPEAKER_00:

It almost sounds like the opposite of what I think a lot of us internalized as students, that you get the sense as a kid that grading and assessment are kind of the same thing, that the purpose of assessment is to give grades and the purpose of grades is to tell you who you are and who the good students are and who the bad students are. And there's this very kind of fixed mindset, I think, that comes from that, that experience of just getting grades that that don't tell you so much about where your learning is or where you have opportunities for improvement, but that just tell you something about how good a student you are. I'm very intrigued by this idea of assessment as playing a role in students' sense of hope and efficacy. I mean, that sounds just like such an overdue reversal of that kind of the teacher's goal is to give the grades to tell the students who they are kind of mentality. As you share that message that grading can spark hope and efficacy, do you get any pushback on

[08:31]

that? Sometimes, for sure.

[08:34] SPEAKER_01:

Because the overarching question for a lot of us to answer is, is a grade a commodity that students acquire by harvesting points, or is a grade a true reflection of the degree to which a student has met the learning goal? That is a massive mindset shift for some people. We are well down the pathway of that. It's not as pervasive as it might have been 15 or 20 years ago, but we still see that there is that commodity mindset, right? And the idea that grades are a reflection of And what we know is that, and this is where hope and efficacy come in, because we know that our students are going to have an emotional reaction to the prospect of being assessed. That is unquestionable.

[09:08]

The question is, is that emotional reaction going to be productive? In other words, are they going to see assessment and grading as an opportunity to take inventory on where I am right now and think about my own next steps, or the teacher helps me guide myself toward what's next for me as a learner, or again, it's the verification and then How do I move forward? Where am I with all of that learning? So the other emotional reaction, though, is assessment is something to be feared and they shut down. And for us, when we talk about hope and efficacy, we are really trying to influence as much as possible the emotional context around assessment because we know students will react. We have some control over whether that's a productive or counterproductive response.

[09:49] SPEAKER_02:

I saw a quote yesterday from a blog artist, Dave Stewart, who wrote No Thing But a Chicken Wing. And in it, he quote, I quote, most students don't know what school is for. They're not hearing a clear and compelling rationale from most of the adults in their lives. And as a result, most students experience school as something being done to them rather than a work of love crafted for them. I couldn't put more emphasis on or punctuate that in a stronger way. I want kids to fall in love with learning.

[10:16]

And right now this heavy test and threat culture is making school be just a drag and they hate it. I want them to fall in love with science and social studies and math and language arts. And I want them to leap out of school and actually put Disney out of business because it's the most exciting place on earth to be as they think about solving world problems. And I think if we really took a look at some of the standards that we have as young as kindergarten and all the way up, They can do that work in their world today, not someday when you're 40 and not on a worksheet. How do you really bring it to life? And so one of the things that we talk about is making those summative assessments worth it.

[10:53]

You can actually change the world if you have kids do some deeper exploration, some deeper work, and you allow them into what we would call productive struggle and intellectual risk-taking. And we've done so much over-scaffolding that we've actually under-empowered learning. And then we get frustrated because these kids are unmotivated and they won't step up. And we're trying to change that paradigm.

[11:14] SPEAKER_00:

There's a very real sense that assessment can be harmful to kids. And I think we especially get that feeling when it comes to standardized assessments. You know, one can spend day after day, typically in the spring, but maybe multiple times a year taking standardized assessments that don't really have anything to do with what they're learning at that time. that are stressful, that are stressing out the teachers, maybe the teachers and the administrators are feeling a lot of pressure to get kids to perform well on those assessments. What's your take on the kind of risk or the kind of harm that can come from approaching assessment the wrong way? Because I don't want to go down the road of assessment being a bad thing in general, but I think sometimes people have a point about just kind of the pressure that we put on ourselves and on kids, especially when it comes to standardized testing.

[12:01]

You have a take on that?

[12:01] SPEAKER_01:

You know, it's an interesting atmosphere around standardized testing because I think there is a caricature of standardized testing. But large scale assessment has a place in a system as long as it's used for large scale decision making. The real crux of it is the way that schools and teachers get beat up with the data and the way that schools are and teachers are treated. it's not wrong for a jurisdiction, a state, a province to ask the question, is our system serving our constituents? And is public school, for example, is it actually the great equalizer or to what degree does zip code still factor in results? That's not a wrong question for a jurisdiction to ask, but it's when we start drilling down to the classroom level, the individual student level on large scale assessment, where we kind of lose the plot, we lose focus.

[12:43]

And the challenge is that it starts to become something we're just doing to kids as opposed to doing with them and looking at ways that that can support the program decisions that we make. So I think the challenge is that as long as the assessments are disconnected from instruction, I mean, the critique of standardized tests that are not valid, one, it's external, two, it's standardized. Those are not valid criticisms of a standardized test because it a well-developed standardized test will be better than a poorly designed classroom assessment. However, a very fair critique of standardized tests is the disconnect between the classroom and the assessment, that the teacher was not responsible for creating the assessment tool. Therefore, the assessment may have language in it, or it may approach assessment. There may be a style of questioning that the students haven't seen before.

[13:24]

Those are confounding factors that influence results. And so I think the disconnect between the classroom teacher and the standardized test is problematic. And it creates a lot of anxiety because then the data is used to beat up teachers and rank schools and affect funding and all of these things that surround the atmosphere. If the standardized test could be used for what their pure intent would be, then I think they could have a place in a balanced assessment system. But the problem is all that surrounds it.

[13:49] SPEAKER_02:

And I want to take it from the classroom perspective, all that Tom said, plus, do I really believe that all kids can learn and that it's my job to get them there? I also happen to represent the work of professional learning communities at work, and I have seen such amazing growth with kids in dire circumstances, no matter the zip code, we can get amazing levels of growth. And I find it odd that a group of writers, educational writers had to come out and say, you know, schools should focus on learning because isn't that what we were always supposed to be about? But the truth is we got into this mode of cover and record, cover and record, cover and record, not teach and support change, but just cover and record what happened. And as a result, we end up with this, what, an author I'm reading, the cult of smart, right? It's a commodity.

[14:33]

Who's getting the high stuff and who's getting the low stuff? And then that chasm just widens over time. And it's our job to put that back together again. And as Tom said earlier, the way we talk about it with kids, the way we help kids understand it, the way we put those scores in perspective, all of that changes what happens next. So we have to be so careful with how we talk about it with kids and even with teachers. I don't even know that they always understand what they're trying to accomplish with their assessment work.

[14:59] SPEAKER_00:

I want to get into some of the specifics in the book and some of the ground that you cover and the questions that you answer. If I can ask one more kind of big picture question based on some things that I've seen, and this is my chance to ask really smart people really detailed questions I've been wondering about, even if they're not 100% what the book is about. One of the things I've seen happening, especially with standardized benchmark assessments, those kinds of computer-based tests that are given multiple times per year, is I've seen a desire to look at that data from those assessments and and then adjust what we're teaching in response to it, even though we already have a curriculum with a scope and sequence. And we'll have scenarios where, oh, our students were low in this particular area. Well, we don't teach that until March. Well, let's teach it now because they were low.

[15:43]

And then we just kind of tear up the curriculum and like, I get the sense that we're kind of over responding in some cases to assessments that were not really designed to like, you're not supposed to patch the holes in students learning in October of things that they're supposed to learn in March. And I see that happening. Do you have any words of wisdom or any vocabulary to help me understand what's going on there, where we're kind of misunderstanding the purpose of those benchmark assessments?

[16:08] SPEAKER_02:

I don't know that it's an either or proposition. I think it's the genius of and. I don't want to presuppose that our scope and sequence was right from the beginning. And I think testing companies are getting better at aligning with the more important standards and making sure that we're hitting them all the time. So when I work with schools that are doing that, they really are taking a deep dive into, okay, but is this a skill that we could wait until spring? Or is it actually really important that it gets taught in the fall as it's a scaffold to get ready for what comes next in the spring?

[16:38]

So I don't see people like abandoning with reckless abandonment. I just see them really trying to figure out, do we have our own scope and sequence, right? Should we be changing it? I think that they're trying to be very thoughtful about not just messing everything up, but that we certainly have gone through chaos as we've tried to get to a place of steadiness.

[16:57] SPEAKER_01:

The clinical application of benchmark assessments in students being in situations where they're being asked questions or prompts that they haven't covered yet or haven't been taught yet. I mean, it goes right back to what Cassie and I have been talking about and what Nicole and the three of us talk about all the time, which is that hope and efficacy. Ask yourself the question, what impact does that assessment have? You might say to the student, you might be able to say to them, look, we haven't covered this yet, but it still has an impact on them. And I think we need to be more thoughtful about either creating our own benchmark assessments that actually do measure growth and measure the degree to which a student is on track, the trajectory. If you're talking about very young children, if you're talking about first grade, second grade, et cetera, even as old as second grade, birth month is going to make a big difference in how that student shows up in their learning.

[17:41]

And you could have a student that's on the proper trajectory, but they appear to be less than proficient because they are 10 months younger than the majority of the class. That evens out in middle school and is a non-factor in high school. But in the very young grade levels, proficiency and age can be conflated. And we have to be a little bit more thoughtful about, Cassie, Nicole, and I often talk about what's the purpose of the assessment. And I think sometimes we have to get clearer on what the purpose of those benchmark assessments are. So we answer the question we're seeking instead of just blindly applying a generic Benchmark assessment that a testing company has created, they produce those for mass consumption.

[18:18]

They may not be right for your school. And we have to interrogate that and know that maybe there's a section of that test or assessment that we don't do right now and be thoughtful about the application of that. So I think the art or the skill of this and why teachers and administrators need to be assessment literate. is so they can look at any sort of generic assessment that comes from a testing company and interrogate it to see if it aligns with what we're doing. Do we need to adjust language? Do we need to do the whole thing?

[18:43]

Or maybe we do sections of it because that's what our purpose is at this point. But to not know the right questions to ask of that assessment and therefore just apply it blindly.

[18:51] SPEAKER_02:

And to interrogate it is to triangulate and to look at other sources of data as well as to carefully look at alignment with your standards and the level of rigor and all of those pieces.

[19:02] SPEAKER_00:

the literacy when it comes to understanding how your curriculum assesses. I'm thinking especially of math curriculum, where you cover distinctly different topics throughout the year, hopefully in kind of an integrated way that features a lot of review and that builds on previous learning. So sometimes it makes me shake my head to see teachers getting on teachers pay teachers to get a worksheet when they get their benchmark test back he's like no your curriculum is going to get you there and your curriculum has the assessments you need to help you figure out how students are doing with what you're actually teaching right now let's zoom in a little bit to what's in the book and some of the questions that you ask because it is very question and answer focused book i wonder if we could jump into chapter three of it where you talk about formative and summative assessments and assessing behavior and critical competencies Let me ask about formative and summative assessments. One of the major distinctions that we learn in teacher education, if you have decent teacher education on assessment, is the distinction between formative and summative assessment.

[20:01]

What were some of the questions that you kept getting over and over again about formative and summative assessments that you address in the book?

[20:08] SPEAKER_01:

A lot of the questions are about what to do with the information, especially formative. And I think that the distinction that still exists today, even though, again, we have seen a lot of growth in the collective understanding of assessment, is even just referring to them in the plural turns them into things and nouns, right? An assessment is not formative unless it's used formatively. It's labeling something formative doesn't make it so. You don't just say it like formative grades are an oxymoron. So the question about is what do I do with the information?

[20:35]

You know, a lot of times it centers on should I grade it? Should I score it? What should I do? But distinction is all in how you use the information. So I gather evidence of student learning for either purpose. Assessment is assessment.

[20:47]

It's just gathering information or evidence about student learning. And you either use it formatively, which means I prioritized feedback and next steps along the trajectory of learning, or I prioritize the summative purpose. And that means I'm verifying the degree to which a student has met the learning goal. But one of the biggest misunderstandings still that exists with summative assessment is that summative assessment has to be a thing. A summative assessment or summative assessment is a moment in time. where a teacher can consider the preponderance of evidence, look at everything.

[21:15]

You can't unsee what the students have done. Look at everything and consider the degree to which the student understands the learning goal. The advantage of having a tangible, like a unit test or something like that, or some sort of project, is it gives you more recent evidence of, where the student is with the learning goal. But it doesn't have to be a thing, and it doesn't have to be a big, thick, stapled packet of paper. One of the best things I've heard, the most effective things I've heard was from a group of math teachers in Utah. And they asked me to review, and I'll be very quick with this, but they asked me to review their summative assessment on their unit on functions.

[21:46]

And they put it up on the screen and I looked at it and had three questions, three or four questions, because I asked them, what standard are you working on? And I said, you only have three questions on this unit test. Is that an adequate sample? Do you have enough evidence to judge where the students are? And the math department chair said something that I just thought was so brilliant. She said, you know, Tom, we interact with our students constantly, looking at their work and interacting with them and feedback.

[22:08]

The summative assessment is just designed to confirm what we already know. And I thought that was one of the most brilliant things I've heard in the last five years about how they approach summative assessment. Because if you're interacting with your students so frequently, you don't need a lot of evidence at the end. You just need enough to confirm what you've already suspected.

[22:27] SPEAKER_02:

And one of the things that we write about in that chapter is that they're nuanced and they're interchangeable. There are times where formative becomes summative and times where summative becomes formative. It's really, like Tom said, what you do with the data. People don't know that because they get locked into a description like this is formative and this is summative. And so thinking about that relationship, thinking about that emerging evidence, thinking about when are you going to hit it again because you can get rid of old data and replace it with new data if a child has it now. So just really opening that up.

[22:57]

We have a team of associates that work at the center and one of the teams is That comes out of Adlai Stevenson has written several books about proficiency. So Eric Twaddell and Tony Riebel and Mark Onishak and Troy Gobble, they're not talking about formative and subitive anymore. They use a three level and they talk about practice, scrimmage, game or practice, rehearsal. What is it when you're dancing like recital? And so they're saying, like, if you think about it that way, then it's a no brainer whether or not you score practice. That's just getting feedback.

[23:27]

It's in those scrimmaging moments, it's in those rehearsal moments where you start to say, hey, wait a minute, here's where you are and here's what you need to do to get ready for that bigger performance. And it just opened up the thinking for their teachers. And I think when I start sharing that in other places, they're like, okay, that makes way more sense because now we're not getting lost in the, do we grade it? Do we not grade it? What are we going to do?

[23:47] SPEAKER_00:

I think where a lot of the questions come in is regarding a formative or summative assessment. In what way do I grade this? And I think the simple way that I've always thought about that is if it's a formative assessment, it's a completion grade. And if it's a summative assessment, we actually grade for accuracy. I want to see, did you get things right? Amy and I actually initially met, but really got to know each other in college in a class where we had a quiz every day.

[24:09]

We had a five question quiz and it was multiple choice. Is it like multiple choice or true, false, which, you know, you hate as a student, oh, like 50, 50. Every day there were five questions and the quiz was graded for accuracy. You know, so if you missed one question, man, you're getting B at best. It really kept us on our toes as far as keeping up the reading and taking good notes in class the day before. But, you know, this is decades ago and certainly not the paragon of assessment.

[24:32]

Help me think a little bit more flexibly and with more nuance about that idea of completion grading for formative assessment versus accurate grading for a summative assessment. I love the practice scrimmage game way of thinking about it. Build on my understanding a little bit more there.

[24:50] SPEAKER_02:

So I am not about completion grading. I actually can't stand it. We have kids who say, I'll take the zero. Thank you very much. And that's where we're causing such a great dislike for the work. And Heidi Hayes Jacobs says, we sometimes act like doctors and we say to our students, I have a prescription for you, some practice work, and I hope you all have the same illness.

[25:08]

I think we'd get a better return on our investment if Kids could use their data. Like if kids could walk up and say, look, I have proven to you that I can skip count by my fives and tens. I am not skip counting by my twos. Don't make me keep practicing my fives and tens on this worksheet. Let me do my twos because that's where I need to be. So it's not about completion.

[25:28]

It's about need. If you're really going to be focusing on using assessment to increase achievement, you have to help kids see what they already can do. And then let them not have to focus so hard on that. Let them do what they need to do to get ready for that game or that performance.

[25:44] SPEAKER_01:

Yes, to everything Cassie said there. And I think the only nuance I would add is that a completion grade should be applied to something like responsibility or self-directedness or any type of keep it outside of the achievement grade. But if we are also trying to teach skills, habits, habits of learning, things that will be transferable in any subject area, then completing your assignment is an important skill and taking responsibility for it in general. So if you're going to quote unquote grade it, that should be handled outside of the achievement grade and handled in a way that allows us to confirm. Because if we are going to say, we can't have it both ways. We can't say, well, Tom, we teach more than just the standards.

[26:21]

We teach kids about life skills or habits of learning. But then we say, we don't have time to assess that because we're too busy teaching you. You can't have it both ways. So if we're going to say that we want to prepare kids and help them learn the habits that will help them be responsible as young adults, then we have to pay attention to those habits. But when you think about assessment, you should always have the word quality at the tip of your tongue. So I often work with groups, and I know Cassie does the same, Nicole.

[26:45]

We talk about quality over quantity, quality over completion, quality over counting. It's always looking at the quality of evidence. So a student might have completed the assignment, but if all the answers are incorrect and they have no understanding of the learning goal that was associated with that assignment, then allowing them to accrue credit For completing it, even though it's all wrong and all misguided, you have a missed opportunity there to help them grow in their learning. But the completion is an important skill. Just being responsible, being respectful, self-directedness, all of those habits of learning that we think are also important for students to learn. That's where it's applied outside the achievement grade.

[27:23] SPEAKER_02:

And my belief is that as we teach kids how to self-regulate and how to use their data, that completion piece is a teaching tool. And it is about, do I understand how to self-advocate, advocate, self-reflect, set my own goals, monitor my progress, complete the needed pieces? It's not about here's a one size fits all, everybody complete it now. So yes, and we need to rethink what we're looking for when we say completion.

[27:51] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Cassie and Tom, I love that perspective on assessment that goes beyond just taking a grade. You know, I need to have grades put in my grade book. You know, we are looking to guide the process of learning both for the student, as you just said, and for the teacher. And that reminds me of a concept that I know you talked about in this book and that we've talked about in previous interviews of instructional agility. Talk to us, if you could, a little bit about the relationship between assessment and instructional agility and what that means.

[28:17] SPEAKER_01:

The concept ultimately is to take us back to the core and the roots of the formative work that we've talked about. In the late 90s, early 2000s, we had, as I mentioned earlier, we had this renaissance with assessment, but we also had the tech boom and the over-quantification of learning. And what the three of us recognize is that we kind of lost the art of assessment. It's the granular day-to-day assessment that really is where we gain efficiency. It's instructional efficiency also that we gain around being instructionally agile. So how do I gather evidence that helps me make an instructional decision now?

[28:49]

What am I going to do in the next 10 minutes? Not what am I going to do necessarily tomorrow or next week, but how do I make instructional maneuvers on a day-to-day, almost minute-by-minute basis? We're trying to make those maneuvers. And I think teachers have to get back to using assessment as an instructional driver. It's a bit of a simple formula to follow. If you just consider three questions prior to any lesson, you can help yourself become instructionally agile.

[29:13]

The first is, What are the most common misunderstandings that typically emerge when I teach this lesson? And then the second question would be, how will I know if any of those misunderstandings are emerging? And that's the assessment part. So am I designing a hinge question in the middle of a lesson? Am I using an exit ticket? What sort of conversations am I engineering in the class?

[29:31]

And then the third question is, what will I do instructionally should one or more of those misunderstandings emerge. And if you just thought that through in advance of any lesson, you would be teaching through the lens of assessment and realize that everything students do is an indication of what's next for them as both as an individual, but also as a group of students. So those three questions, again, what are the most common misunderstandings? How will I know if any of those misunderstandings are emerging? And what will I do instructionally should those misunderstandings emerge? That can help teachers get right down to that granular level and make those instructional maneuvers on a day-to-day basis.

[30:06] SPEAKER_02:

He nailed it. I don't know what else to add to it. I love listening to Shelley Moore. She's an author out of Canada. She talks a lot. She's got a couple of TED Talks.

[30:13]

And she talks about the 7-10 split, which is that bowling analogy of the two pins at the back. And she says, you know, we aim for the middle with a one size fits all. Here's our instructional plan. You're going to get that 7-10 split. And now only your most masterful bowler who knows how to ricochet is going to get those last two pins. But if we function like masterful bowlers and we aim for the 7 and the 10, we anticipated the errors and we thought about what we were going to do.

[30:35]

We could get all the pins. So it's really about not just designing a one size. It's about thinking about the nuances and the evidence and responses that we might have. Well, one of the things that I think people are always wanting to ask, and I get it every day almost, how can I get these kids motivated? They're so disengaged. What am I going to do?

[30:55]

So our newest book, Jackpot, is about that idea of student investment. How do we get kids to step up and step in? and choose to participate and take intellectual risks and engage in deep learning. And so I love some of the things that we've done. In that particular book, what we did was much like the Learning by Doing book. We started out with scenarios that are all true about well-intentioned individual teachers or teens or schools or even districts that tried to get kids to invest but couldn't get it to happen.

[31:25]

So then we unpack why it didn't work the way they had it done and what the research says, and we offer strategies for what you could do to address it. And we have some timelines or not timelines, I'm sorry, some rubrics at the end that really talk about, you know, where are you on this journey? Because it is a journey and it's impossible. I said it before and I'll keep saying it. Education is one of those fields that is impossible to perfect, but imperative to never stop trying. So we just have to keep chipping away at it.

[31:52]

And we're trying to help people figure out what could we do to get our kids to care again.

[31:56] SPEAKER_01:

Often the inability or the feeling of not being able to have students motivated or take ownership over their learning is because of a lack of assessment literacy. When Cassie, Nicole, and I talk about our tenants, we would talk about student investment as a first among equals. We don't really believe that any of the tenants matter more, but at the same time, we know that student investment is the end game. So when we suggest and submit, and they're quite forceful in this, that Investing in your understanding of sound assessment practices is the most efficient and effective professional investment any teacher can make. We're not saying you need to become an assessment expert. What we're saying is you need to become an assessment expert so you can teach the students how to do this for themselves.

[32:35]

And it's through the assessment cycle that we talk often about the symbiotic relationship between assessment and the self-regulation of learning. You can use the assessment cycle to feed the opportunity for students to take ownership. So if teachers are struggling, and many do, and I know I did when I was in the classroom, how do I get students more involved? How do I get them more invested in their learning? It's actually through the cycle of assessment that we can feed the opportunity to set goals, to self-monitor, to infer through criteria, all of the things that we want them to do. It's actually through the assessment practices that we can do.

[33:09] SPEAKER_00:

So that book is Jackpot, Nurturing Student Investment Through Assessment. And the book that we've been discussing today is Concise Answers to Frequently Asked Questions About Assessment and Rating. Cassie and Tom, if people want to find you online and connect with you, where are some of the best places for them to go?

[33:25] SPEAKER_01:

Probably too many places. I probably have too many social media handles. But on Twitter, I'm fairly active on Twitter at Tom Schimmer. Also a shameless plug for my podcast at Tom Schimmer Pod on Twitter, Instagram as well. There's lots of places you can find me. Those are probably the two prominent places you can find me.

[33:42] SPEAKER_02:

Also on Twitter at Sea Urchins. I literally have been so running from end to end that I'm not very fast at doing all the tweets and such. And so I'm there, but I'm not very big into the social networking thing that I should be doing.

[33:58] SPEAKER_00:

Okay. And websites are good too.

[33:59] SPEAKER_02:

So if you have a website that you want to plug.

[34:03] SPEAKER_01:

We also have our allthingsassessment.info, which is a non-commercial site, nothing to sell you there, but certainly more information about our assessment tenants and lots of information about our assessment center and our team, etc. So that's the place people come.

[34:16] SPEAKER_02:

If I could add one more plug to that, that's a great reminder. We are looking for teachers who want to try things and tell their story. And so we're looking for people doing action research. We want to post more stories there of people trying different things with assessments and getting great results. And so we've got some success stories there, but we certainly would love to see some more.

[34:36] SPEAKER_00:

Cassie and Tom, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio once again. It's been a pleasure.

[34:40] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks, Justin. Great to see you again.

[34:42] SPEAKER_01:

Take care.

[34:42] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.