Instruction That Measures Up

Successful Teaching in the Age of Accountability

W. James Popham

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781416607649
• eBook ISBN: 9781416616191
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

High-stakes testing. Mandated content standards and benchmarks. Public scrutiny of student and school performance. Accountability. Teachers today are challenged to provide instruction that will measure up: to the expectations of administrators, parents, and taxpayers; to their own professional standards; and, most essentially, to the needs of students.

Policy debates rage in the press, and pedagogical pundits always have a new and better solution to offer, but inside the walls of the classroom, instruction boils down to teachers deciding what they want their students to learn, planning how to promote that learning, implementing those plans, and then determining if the plans worked. And the best instructional decisions are informed by empirical research, assessment evidence, and the sound judgment of the professional educator.

In this book, W. James Popham calls on his half-century in the classroom to provide a practical, four-stage framework for guiding teachers through their most important instructional decisions: curriculum determination, instructional design, instructional monitoring, and instructional evaluation. Along the way, he emphasizes the critical ways in which assessment can and should influence instruction, advocates for a dash of curricular insurrection, and offers advice for maintaining both teaching excellence and teachers' sanity.

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Chapter 1

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Teaching Through an Assessment Lens

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Given the diverse demands on today’s teachers and the complex settings in which those demands must be satisfied, it’s easy to lose sight of the fundamental nature of teaching. Teaching exists so that students will learn the things they ought to learn. It’s just that simple.

Oh, one could certainly analyze teaching from more sophisticated perspectives. As a teacher-in-training way back when, I studied education from sociological, philosophical, and psychological vantage points. You may have done the same. I read reports from educational sociologists on how society influences a nation’s schools and discourse from educational philosophers on how schools affect a society’s culture. I read educational psychologists’ take on the differences between human learning and sub-human learning. (To this day, I can recall which food-pellet reinforcement schedules are most effective in maintaining a hungry rat’s lever-pressing behavior. I keep waiting for an opportunity to use this knowledge.) From these authors, I gained interesting insights on the nuances of schooling. However, such readings did little to allay what, as a prospective teacher, was my all-consuming concern: What would I actually do when confronted by a classroom of students? I definitely don’t intend to discount the instruction-related contributions of educational philosophers, psychologists, or sociologists, but I’m willing to bet that what most concerns teachers is what most concerned me: the week-to-week, day-to-day, and hour-to-hour instructional decisions to be made.

Teaching as Decision Making

Teachers are obliged to make all sorts of decisions on a continual basis. Some of these decisions meaningfully influence how effectively a teacher teaches; some don’t. Classroom management decisions, for example, are almost always an example of the former. If you are a teacher, you might be called on to decide if a handful of students’ off-target chatter is significant enough to warrant your intervention. Is this chatter interfering with the learning activities? Is it preventing other students from concentrating? Then, if you decide intervention is warranted, you must decide how to quell such disruptive talking. These decisions clearly will have an effect on how well all the students can learn, including those students doing the off-target chattering. Now, contrast this kind of decision with being asked to decide which of two basically interchangeable computer systems will be installed in your classroom. Your decision between Brand X or Brand Y computer is apt to have scant impact on the effectiveness of your teaching.

If someone were to analyze every single decision a teacher needs to make during a full school year, many of the most important ones would relate to how students will spend their instructional time—the time devoted to learning what they’re supposed to learn. What will the teacher ask students to do in the classroom, for homework, and for longer-term project work and research? What will the students read? What will they listen to? What activities will they engage in, and in what order? These essential decisions about the means of instruction proceed from another set of decisions about the intended outcomes of that instruction. What is it teachers want their students to learn? Which knowledge and which skills should students master? In other words, once teachers have a fix on what their students are supposed to learn, almost all subsequent decisions will revolve around how those students ought to learn it. Indeed, it is the blend of those two sets of instructional decisions that best characterizes a teacher’s general approach to education.

This book about instruction focuses on the most significant decision-occasions teachers face when determining how students should spend their instructional time. As you consider those decision-occasions, I’ll urge you to consider instructional methods through the lens of assessment. This is an uncommon way of thinking about teaching, but it’s one I advocate strongly, and the reason is simple. In education, the game has changed.

Two Game-Changers in the Instructional Arena

In almost every sphere of human activity, key events or circumstances can alter the ways people behave. We see this in sports, for example, where technical advances in equipment have a major impact on the way a particular game is played. Over the past 10 years, for example, top-level professional tennis has changed from a game of serve-and-volley, in which players serve and then position themselves close to the net, to a game of baseline rallies, with players positioning themselves in the back of the court. Experts attribute this shift in the style of play to advances in tennis racquet design and composition. With newly powerful racquets, players can now strike the ball with enough velocity to easily hit it past an opponent who rushes forward to play close to the net. These high-tech racquets have become, quite literally, game-changers.

For teachers today, two game-changers have emerged in the arena of instruction: (1) the educational accountability movement, built on external accountability tests that purport to measure the effectiveness of instruction, and (2) documentation of the instructional dividends of classroom assessment.

The First Game-Changer: Accountability Tests as the Measure of Teacher Quality

Most accountability tests are administered annually to students at specified grade levels. In many locales, students’ performances on these tests are the basis for significant decisions, including whether or not individual test-takers will be promoted to the next grade level or awarded a high school diploma. But, irrespective of a given accountability test’s link to rewards or punishments for individual students, it is realistic to regard all accountability tests as high-stakes assessments. This is because the public regards students’ test performances as a way of discerning which educators are doing a good instructional job and which educators aren’t. If you teach in a school where students’ test scores are the measure of schoolwide success or failure, then the tests involved are—for you—unquestionably high-stakes assessments.

Of course, not all teachers face an annual, score-based appraisal of their personal teaching prowess. Some teachers teach at particular grade levels or in particular content areas where these tests aren’t administered. There are no annual accountability tests in fine arts or in physical education, for example, and accountability tests are far less prevalent in social studies or world languages than they are in mathematics and language arts. But even if you’re a teacher whose students aren’t required to take an accountability test, if you teach in a tax-supported school, odds are that many of your colleagues are currently involved in some sort of accountability assessments. Moreover, it’s almost certain that most are worried about the implications of those assessments.

In many settings, an entire school can be given a label of "failing," or some euphemistic version of that negative descriptor, if even one of the school’s demographic subgroups falls below the set performance standard. And the public’s confidence in that school as a whole, and in all the school’s teachers, will take a hit. Because the success of so many educational professionals is now being determined dominantly by students’ test scores, if you’re a teacher, you simply must learn about the sorts of assessment instruments being used to distinguish between successful and unsuccessful teachers. Those assessment instruments have an impact on you. If you assume a test is a test is a test—that one educational test is pretty much like any other educational test—it’s time for an overhaul of your test-related understandings. You’ll find the beginnings of such an overhaul in the pages to come.

The Second Game-Changer: The Documented Dividends of Classroom Assessment

More than a decade’s worth of research reviews attest to the achievement-boosting payoffs of properly conceived classroom assessments. About 10 years ago, British researchers Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam published a much-cited piece in the Phi Delta Kappan (1998b) calling for teachers to employ their classroom assessments in an instructional manner. That article was a summary of a previously published, comprehensive review of empirical research focused on whether teachers’ use of classroom assessments contributed to students’ learning. In that earlier research review, Black and Wiliam (1998a) analyzed more than 680 empirical investigations, first discarding studies they deemed methodologically unsound and then focusing on the results of the remaining 250 well-designed published investigations. Black and Wiliam concluded that student learning improved when the results of classroom assessments were used in a formatively oriented way—that is, used to make instructional adjustments either in the way the teacher was teaching something or in the way students were trying to learn something.

Black and Wiliam found that the positive effects of using classroom assessment in this manner were "larger than most of those found for educational interventions" (1998a, p. 61), and this conclusion has been confirmed elsewhere (Crooks, 1988; Shute, 2007; Wiliam, 2007). The fundamental finding in all of these research reviews is that instructionally oriented classroom assessments, if effectively implemented, will improve students’ learning (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2004). This led many educators to the rational conclusion that if students’ classroom learning improved, then some evidence of this improved learning would show up on their scores on external accountability exams. The emerging body of research indicating well-designed classroom assessments will have a positive impact on students’ in-class learning, and—by logical extension—on their scores on accountability exams, is a definite game-changer and the second compelling reason for today’s teachers to infuse assessment-thought into almost all aspects of their instructional deliberations.

A Teacher’s Must-Make Instructional Decisions

If there were a way to implant a tiny electronic monitoring device inside a willing teacher’s skull, we could keep track of all the instruction-related decisions this teacher makes, hour by hour and minute by minute. If we had enough volunteers and implantation devices, as well as a sufficient supply of batteries, we could extend the research and monitor the instructional decisions made by thousands of teachers over an entire school year. And we would find all sorts of decision-making differences among those teachers, attributable to variances in individuals and in the specific instructional settings in which those individuals function. However, it would still be possible to classify their really important instructional decisions into four major categories, each focused on a critical question:

1. Curricular determination: Which curricular aims should my students pursue?
2. Instructional design: What instructional activities should I provide so my students can achieve the curricular aims I’ve chosen?
3. Instructional monitoring: Do I need to make adjustments in my ongoing instruction and, if so, what sorts of adjustments?
4. Instructional evaluation: Were my instructional activities effective and, if not, how should I modify them for future students?

In this book, we will take a close look at each of these critical decisions from both an instructional perspective and an assessment perspective. More specifically, I will ask you to consider the assessment considerations that I believe should factor into the instructional decisions a teacher needs to make. We’ll start now with a little preview, to set the stage.

Decision Set 1: Curriculum Determination

In almost every nation’s educational lexicon, the term curriculum is sure to be in the Top 10 of teachers’ most frequently uttered words. However, if you dig a bit deeper into this particular term-usage, you’d find many different meanings attached to it. And, most certainly, educators’ differing interpretations of what curriculum actually means often engender confusion. To some, curriculum consists of the learning activities taking place in a classroom. To others, the word refers to the instructional materials that teachers use—for instance, the print or electronic materials students are supposed to rely on as they learn. Still other educators use curriculum to describe the outcomes teachers try to get their students to attain—for example, the intellectual skills or bodies of knowledge that students are supposed to learn.

In keeping with this book’s instructional focus and in support of the cause of clearheadedness, I’d like to set out a single definition of curriculum that we’ll use for the remainder of the book. It’s a definition that I hope will help you think clearly about your own instructional options:

Curriculum describes the outcomes a teacher wishes students to attain.

Most often, those outcomes will consist of cognitive skills, such as when students learn to how to solve complex estimation-based word problems in mathematics. Another example of a curricular outcome would be the bodies of knowledge students are supposed to acquire, such as a collection of punctuation rules to be used when composing essays or short stories. A curricular outcome might also focus on students’ affect, for example, when teachers try to get their students to have a more positive attitude toward learning. A curriculum, then, whether it is a national curriculum or the curriculum that you choose for your very own students, consists of what it is hoped will be the consequences of instruction. That’s right: Curriculum = Ends.

So, if curriculum is the ends, it must then follow, as night follows day or as school buses run late, that Instruction = Means. At its core, teaching consists of figuring out what ends we want students to achieve, and then what means we should employ to achieve those ends. The nature of the ends to be promoted instructionally is obviously influential to one’s teaching, so teachers need to deal with curricular considerations before they do anything else.

A pause for terminology. Before proceeding further, there are a handful of other curriculum-related terms that could use some clarification. A half-century ago, educators used two descriptors to refer to things they wanted their students to learn: goals and objectives. A goal was a broad, long-term sort of curricular aspiration, one that students might take several months or even a full school year to accomplish. In contrast, an objective was a short-term outcome that students might achieve after a few weeks or, possibly, even after a single lesson.

During the last decade or two, educators came to refer to curricular outcomes as content standards. It’s not clear exactly when this new label was introduced, but it’s fairly clear why it became popular. If we educators set out to help our students master challenging outcomes, then we’re obviously directing our instruction toward "high standards." And what right-thinking person does not applaud the setting and achieving of high standards? Why, the connotations are almost as heartwarming as those associated with truth, world peace, and fudge brownies!

Typically, but not always, content standards describe the broad, long-term outcomes students are supposed to achieve. In a sense, then, most of today’s content standards are somewhat akin to yesteryear’s goals. However, because lots of content standards are stated in such broad terms that they’re difficult to interpret, in many settings we find educators employing a number of other labels to describe the sets of shorter-term, more specific curricular outcomes subsumed under each content standard. So, for example, we encounter benchmarks, expectancies, indicators, or other synonymous descriptors that attempt to clarify what achievement of the broad content standard actually entails.

Finally, a number of educators are now using the phrase curricular aim to describe an intended outcome of teachers’ instructional efforts. I’ll use that label in this book for the short-term or long-term ends educators have in mind for their students. These ends might be cognitive, psychomotor, or affective. Cognitive curricular aims, as indicated before, deal with the intellectual skills or bodies of knowledge we want students to learn. Psychomotor curricular aims focus on students’ small-muscle skills, such as keyboarding, or large-muscle skills, such as serving a volleyball. Affective curricular aims describe the attitudes, interests, or values we hope our students will acquire.

Are you, a seasoned educator, required to use the terms that are being trotted out here? Of course not! In real life, you can choose to call the curricular ends that you want your students to accomplish by whatever names you choose ("alligators," "cream puffs"). However, if you’r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Teaching Through an Assessment Lens
• Chapter 2. A Quick Dip in the Assessment Pool
• Chapter 3. Curriculum Determination
• Chapter 4. Instructional Design
• Chapter 5. Monitoring Instruction and Learning
• Chapter 6. Evaluating Instruction
• Chapter 7. Playing the New Game
• Resources
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Professional Learning Community Guide
• Copyright