Credibility Starts with Consistency with Common Assessments

The more I think about what the key elements of a competency system might be — those elements that if they working perfectly allow the system to weaken or be corrupted — the more I focus on ensuring that the system is calibrated or tuned. When a district or school puts that a student is proficient on the transcript then we need to have absolute trust that their is an agreement on what that means and that the next school or college will have a pretty darn close understanding of proficiency as well. Basically, we want our system to be credible and trusthworthy. That’s what accountability is all about.

And that’s why we need to do everything we can to build in this capacity into our districts and schools as fast as we can.  Our traditional system doesn’t expect this nor does it have the mechanisms in place to make it happen. That’s why we’ve had to turn to NAEP and state accountability assessments to tell us how we are doing helping our kids to learn.

And that’s why the webinar Ensuring Consistency When Using Common Assessments sponsored by Great Schools Partnership is so important. It’s tommorow, Wednesday May 27 from 3-4 EST.

Here’s the description: Ensuring consistency when using common assessments requires collaboration with colleagues to calibrate scoring, refine assessment tasks and scoring criteria, and collectively reflect on the results. This process ensures that there is a constant practice of evaluation and refining scoring criteria and assessment tasks and the instruction practices leading up to this. Ultimately, having more trustworthy judgments enables teachers to better align instructional strategies to student needs, provide more consistent feedback to students, and create opportunities  for deeper learning. In this webinar, we will present protocols and processes to create a system that supports teachers in the process of making consistent judgments on the quality of students’ work.

Presenters
Jon Ingram, Senior Associate, Great Schools Partnership
David Ruff, Executive Director, Great Schools Partnership
Becky Wilusz, Senior Associate, Great Schools Partnership

FYI — it’s free but registration is limited.