Personal Growth through Reflection

Educators begin every school year discussing a laundry list of things we would like to change or have meaningful impact upon. Every year we discuss ways to improve student engagement, teacher efficacy, management efficiency, student and staff attendance and many other things. Someone makes the statement and we all agree. Things need to change. Several days later the buses arrive, students enter the building and with in weeks we are all observing and often engaging in the behaviors we said we wanted to change or impact. I have often wondered how and why these recurring behaviors happens so quickly and predictably.

Last year I resolved that my team would no longer interrupt instruction to give an assessment, assign grades and keep teaching. Instead we would use assessments to drive instruction. I made a fairly long presentation to the team about assessment. We talked about what good assessment looks like. We discussed different types of assessments and data analysis including the tools we had at our disposal. We also discussed what we could do to track data and ways to help student be accountable for their performance and data. Everyone listened quietly until I was done. I made every attempt to include all team members in gathering and analyzing data and assigning it students.

We gave our first assessment and gathered for a team analysis of the data. Two of the three of us had not given the assessment. We resolved the issue and developed a new plan to meet again in a couple of days. One member could not be present and the other member still had a large group of students that had not tested. In order not to get behind on our next assessment we assigned learning objectives to build assessment items around. We continued in this manner for the next two assessments. We could not find the time to collaboratively analyze the data. So we kept getting interrupted by some campus or personal emergency. I learned that the time required to develop quality assessment items was interfering with the time needed to collaboratively analyze and plan instruction. We continued to try and get together to collaborative analyze the and use what we learn to plan to future instruction. Over the remaining time we collaboratively analyzed one assessment that we had all given so long ago that we could only use the data to plan for the final examination.

I am still determined to use assessment to drive our instruction. I also continue to look for opportunities to disrupt the time crunch and resource development required to cover the curriculum that is assigned. The research that I read discusses huge gains in low performing students and fosters student engagement yet the pedagogy remains out of our collaborative reach until we develop a quality test back. It is truly difficult to change a time-laden process or a process with lots of moving parts.