Formative Assessment in a Professional Learning Community

Betsy Moore, Todd Stanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138470903
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317924678
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The ideas and examples in this book help teachers successfully collaborate to raise student achievement through the use of formative assessments. Here, Todd Stanley and Betsy Moore, educators with over 40 years of combined experience, offer proven formative assessment strategies to teachers in a professional learning community.

Table of Contents

	Introduction: Why Use Short-Cycle Assessments in a Professional Learning Community?
1	Why Work in a Professional Learning Community (PLC)?
	What is a PLC?
	Advantages to Working in a PLC
	Disadvantages to Working in a PLC
	Different Types of PLCs
	If You Learn One Thing From This Chapter
2	How to Work Effectively in a Group
	Creating a Good Group Environment Using Norms
	All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy
	Group Building Activities
	Cancer in the Clubhouse
	Good Meetings vs. Bad Meetings
	If You Learn One Thing From this Chapter
3	Starting the SCORE Process
	What Does Everyone Know?
	Understanding the Standards
	Identifying the Level of the Standards According to Bloom’s
	Understanding the State Assessment
	Coding the Test
	If You Learn One Thing From this Chapter
4	Aligning the Curriculum
	Figuring Your Pacing Chart
	Types of Pacing Charts
	Identifying Power Standards
	Skills Needed for Success in the Content Area
	Across the Curriculum
	The State Test
	Prioritizing the Power Standards
	If You Learn One Thing From This Chapter
5	Writing Assessments
	Design Assessments to Standards
	How to Work as a Group on Short-Cycle Assessments
	The Format of the Questions
	How to Write the Questions
	The Importance of Editing
	If You Learn One Thing From This Chapter
6	Administering and Grading the Assessments
	Administering the Assessment
	Creating the Proper Environment
	Creating the Answer Key
	Anchoring
	If You Learn One Thing From This Chapter
7	Data Analysis
	Looking at the Results
	Organizing the Data
	Student Profile Graph
	Item Analysis Graph
	Non-Mastery Report
	Why Analyze as a PLC Group?
	Leaving Your Ego at the Door
	How to Set Up Your Analysis
	What Might It Mean?
	If You Learn One Thing From this Chapter
8	Adjustments in the Classroom
	Data-Based Instructional Adjustments
	How to Use the Data to Make Adjustments
	Grouping of Students
	Chances for Collaboration
	If You Learn One Thing From this Chapter
9	Keeping Up With Collaboration
	Revising the Process
	Revisiting Assessments
	Celebrate Your Success
	Classroom Visits
	Sharing Best Practices
	Forming a Critical Friends Group
	Scheduling Future Meetings for Assessments 1–4
	Meeting Even When Nothing is Wrong
	If You Learn One Thing From this Chapter
	Epilogue
	BluePrints for the Process
	References

Introduction: Why Use Short-Cycle Assessments in a Professional Learning Community?

If schools want to enhance their organizational capacity to boost student learning, they should work on building a professional community that is characterized by shared purpose, collaborative activity, and collective responsibility among staff.

—F. Newmann

This book attempts to answer two very important questions. The first question is, why use short-cycle assessments as formative assessments to improve student achievement? The quick answer is quite simple: because they work. The longer answer involves research and data, some of which has been observed first-hand in the field by the authors of this book. While working with school districts in the state of Ohio we saw remarkable improvements in student success and learning once we transformed schools to a short-cycle assessment model, taking many of them out of continuous school improvement and raising them to an effective rating. Much of this information was researched and documented by Dr. Susan Lang in a study with Miami University titled An Evaluation Study of Short-Cycle Assessments: An Instructional Process (Lang, Stanley, & Moore, 2008).

For the record, a short-cycle assessment is a formative assessment, given periodically, and designed to help the teacher shape instruction. What does this look like in practice? A teacher covers a predetermined amount of content, then creates an assessment addressing that content to determine whether students “got it” or not. You’re probably thinking this seems like what milli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents