Leadership magazine May/June 2015 V 44 No 5 | Page 10

WestEd and the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE), in
collaboration with the California Department of Education, are currently hosting the
“Building Educator Assessment Literacy”
initiative across the state. This professional
development strengthens teacher capacity
and knowledge of Smarter Balanced Assessment performance tasks.
At a larger systems level, these partners
have joined to ensure summative performance assessments are connected to ongoing classroom instruction. Participants
experience the SBAC-released performance
tasks as learners to better understand the
academic demands of the tasks, especially
as they relate to SBACs claims and targets.
Teachers are trained to examine student
work for evidence of students’ thinking from
the performance task assessment, using
SBAC rubrics. They later translate their understanding of what students need to be successful in such tasks into classroom learning.
Project director Jessica Arnold said, “Our
theory of action is that this intensive, twoday opportunity to examine the Smarter
Balanced tasks, scoring tools, and student
work with fellow educators – in the context
of instructional implications – will inform
teacher practice.”

New ideas and collegial discussions
The training is aimed at strengthening
teachers’ understanding of the SBAC claims
and targets and how they are addressed in a
performance task. However, a greater benefit is the initiative offers ideas about implementing similar instructional tasks, and
shows how collegial discussions can build a
collective understanding of student learning.
As professional development providers, we see teachers sharing what they plan
to emphasize in their own lessons to better
support students. In ELA, they discuss how
to support students’ perseverance and annotation skills using multiple texts, and how
to guide students’ evaluation of which texts
are most useful in the tasks. In mathematics,
they share strategies about how to get students to carefully describe, defend and explain their solutions to complex math tasks.
Building Educator Assessment Literacy
is a reminder of the power of adult learn10

Leadership

ing when teachers use assessments formatively. The training provides opportunities
for leaders to expand upon the data team
structures typically focused on quantitative
scores and re-teaching of single items. Participants experience a deeper dialogue that
guides the development of future learning
tasks in a much more profound way.
As more teachers become trained in these
practices, this work has the potential to redefine what educators have known as the
“alignment of the taught and tested curriculum.” It also redefines collaboration!

Supporting adult learning
Merced County Office of Education has
taken a role supporting adult learning, as

When teacher teams use student
evidence to develop their
combined instructional response,
it increases the collective efficacy
of the whole staff and the
achievement of many students.
teachers examine student understanding of
content, question pedagogy, and negotiate
with colleagues about appropriate next steps
for students. Coaches play a critical role in
helping teachers unpack tasks, calibrate student performance using rubrics, and make
instructional decisions from patterns that
emerge (Wei, Schultz & Pecheone, 2012). Facilitation throughout the formative assessment cycle will continue to be a significant
way to enhance teacher collaboration.
John Hattie (2012) makes a case for school
leaders to create systems where there is “visible learning inside;” that is, practices that
are embedded in the school culture to support adults’ un