Develop a Monitoring Plan
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Develop a Monitoring Plan |
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Both research and common sense support the notion that we need to monitor student performance on an ongoing basis. If we are ever to know where we are, we will need to know where our students are. But that is exactly what we don't know. Try asking school staff where each of their students are on the reading comprehension indicator "drawing inferences." Which of their students is proficient? What evidence do they have that those students are proficient? What evidence do they have to identify what their students who are not proficient still need to learn. Principals may have previously developed a monitoring plan for ensuring school improvement plans were implemented. The kind of monitoring plan we are talking about here is a plan that focuses classroom teachers on monitoring their students on selected content standard indicators. This is the only way that teachers and schools can know where their students are on these indicators on an ongoing basis. In a 1998 Phi Delta Kappan article entitled, "Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment," authors Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam argue that standards can be raised only by changes in classrooms. They assert, "There is a body of firm evidence that formative assessment is an essential component of classroom work and that its development can raise standards of achievement. We know of no other way of raising standards for which such a strong prima facie case can be made." The ultimate goal for monitoring student progress is to ensure that all students are successful in attaining proficiency on state and district standards. Teachers need to teach and assess the indicators they are responsible for teaching on an ongoing basis so that they will know where their students are at any given time in relationship to those indicators. Teachers need to regularly ask these four questions:
Why start with the monitoring plan? Why can't you monitor with state or district assessment data? Why shouldn't teachers use grades for monitoring? How do you develop a monitoring plan? How will teachers record and submit the data? What are teachers expected to do with the monitoring plan data? In what areas do staff need professional development? How do you lead a discussion of the monitoring data? Resources Why start with the monitoring plan? There is no question that the monitoring plan, in and of itself, does not address staff needs of understanding the indicators, understanding what good student work looks like on the indicator, creating good observations and interpretations of student work, and analyzing the results. Some would argue that you need to provide staff development on those issues before you ask staff to monitor. However, that might delay moving forward on a data collection process that is critical to understanding where students are. Creating a school-wide expectation and requirement to monitor and submit student performance data on the indicators provides a focus for the discussion and a more urgent need to learn how best to examine the work. The discussion of student performance will naturally lead back around to a discussion of how best to assess proficiency on the indicator, what the student performance tells you about what students know and don't know, and how you can use the diagnostic information to plan instruction to support students in demonstrating proficiency on the indicator. A frequent outgrowth of the discussion is that teachers frequently uncover areas in which they need to build capacity and that self-assessment provides a stronger motivation for acquiring the appropriate skills. [top] Why can't you monitor with state or district assessment data? An annual state assessment program doesn't provide the information that teachers need to make daily instructional decisions. A state assessment program should be designed to assess the relative success or failure of schools and school systems. The consequences of making an error in the classification of a school or school system as unsuccessful are serious. The technical goal of a state assessment program is to minimize the possibility of misclassification. Since the state doesn't have an opportunity to take multiple measurements, it must minimize classification errors by strengthening the psychometric properties of the test instrument. School systems are also limited in the number of measurements they can take of students. School system assessments, at a best, are snap shots of student performance at a single point in time. They are not designed to monitor progress in real time. In addition, by the time test results are available schools have moved forward instructionally. The data may be an accurate historical view of a school's performance but they are not very useful in understanding where you are now and what you need to do to keep on track. Furthermore, schools systems may lack the expertise or staff to design psychometrically sound testing instruments. Many system use norm-referenced tests that are not specifically designed to measure the state's content standards. We seem to have the worst of both worlds: tests misaligned with the state's content standards and information that is so dated that it is of little relevance to the classroom. What is needed is a monitoring system that is aligned with the state content standards that yields timely and meaningful results for classroom teachers. Teachers can and should collect daily information about where students are in relationship to what is being taught. They can use multiple measurements that may include tests, assignments, presentations, or oral responses to questions. They need the diagnostic information to determine what they need to teach and re-teach and when they need to provide additional interventions. Because teachers can give multiple measurements to monitor students' progress, the consequences of an error in any single measurement are relatively minimal. There are many opportunities to clarify student strengths and weakness and, if necessary, correct misjudgments. [top] Why shouldn't teachers use grades for monitoring? Assigning report card grades has long been a time-consuming part of a teacher's job. To produce a grade, teachers design and grade assignments, tests, homework, and projects that they deem are important. This age old practice raises some new questions in a standards-driven educational system.
[top] How do you develop a monitoring plan? Whereas, teachers need to monitor progress on the indicators they are responsible for teaching, schools need to monitor student progress on the indicators related to their school improvement goals. Schools have to identify the student achievement data they need to collect to determine if they are making progress toward the attainment of their priority goals. If a school's goal is to meet the reading AYP target, then the school will need to collect individual student data on the content standards the state measures on reading at the indicator level. The school's monitoring plan should focus on tracking individual student progress on these indicators. In order to promote ownership, principals will want staff to collaboratively develop a monitoring plan. The staff need to divvy up the indicators in ways that make instructional sense and discuss how often data need to be collected on each indicator to determine progress. They need to set deadlines for collecting and submitting the agreed upon data. The discussion should be framed around the question, "What evidence have we collected (or should we collect) that students are learning specified indicators?" If the school district has a district curriculum, staff may wish to map the state content standard indicators against the district curriculum to determine if all standards are well covered. If there are indicators not presently being addressed, the team will need to decide who will teach and assess them and when during the school year. For indicators only addressed in the first semester, teams will need to decide how best to review them with students to ensure that students maintain proficiency. Once teachers know what indicators they are responsible for teaching and assessing and how frequently they need to submit the data, they need to determine the format for recording student performance on those indicators. A discussion among teams or departments about what opportunities they could give students to demonstrate proficiency on a specific indicator should help to broaden thinking and develop some consistency in how student performance is assessed. When the state applies a specific rubric or scoring tool to their assessment of this content area, it is important for teachers to understand the criteria used to score and be able to apply the same assessment criteria to determine whether a student is likely to demonstrate proficiency on the state assessment. Planning templates were created on the School Improvement in Maryland Web site to serve as a stimulus for discussing how best to monitor individual student progress on these indicators through an ongoing collection of classroom data as part of the regular instructional program. It is important to collect data on an ongoing basis. Some schools already collect data on a quarterly basis using a common assessment. Although quarterly assessments provide information about student performance, this strategy has a number of drawbacks: 1) it often results in teachers viewing the monitoring piece as external to their instructional program, 2) it is not frequent enough to inform instruction, and 3) it does not move staff to the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to have teachers instructing and assessing the indicators they are responsible for teaching on an ongoing basis so that they will know where their students are at any given time and will use the information to direct their instruction. It is worth emphasizing that in addition to the student performance data collected to monitor school improvement goals, teachers may also need tools to collect student performance data on all the indicators they are responsible for teaching. In a perfectly aligned system, this would replace a teacher's grade book that is also a data collection tool though rarely aligned with the content standard indicators. [top] How will teachers record and submit the data? Once teachers know what indicators they are responsible for teaching and assessing and how frequently they need to submit the data, they need to determine the format for recording student performance on those indicators. A discussion among teams or departments about how a student can demonstrate proficiency on a specific indicator should help to broaden thinking and develop some consistency in how student performance is assessed. When the state applies a specific rubric or scoring tool to their assessment of this content area, it is important for teachers to understand the criteria used to score and be able to apply the same assessment criteria to determine whether a student is likely to demonstrate proficiency on the state assessment. Planning templates were created in Maryland to serve as a stimulus for discussing how best to monitor individual student progress on these indicators through an ongoing collection of classroom data as part of the regular instructional program. After schools have identified the student data they need to collect to monitor progress, they will find it useful to create a data collection template (a table, grid, database, or spreadsheet) for staff to use in recording the data. The school must also decide in what format they want to record the data and where it should be submitted. Sample monitoring plans and grade book templates developed by Title I schools can be viewed on the School Improvement in Maryland Web site. Principals will need to determine how frequently monitoring data should be submitted and to whom. Since the ultimate goal is to have teachers regularly collecting, discussing, and using the data to inform classroom instruction, then you may want the data to be submitted every two or three weeks to the team leader for structured discussions of the data at team meetings. You will want to see that the data have been submitted, because it will be your responsibility to deal with any teacher not complying with the expectation. It is worth emphasizing that in addition to the student performance data collected to monitor school improvement goals, teachers may also need tools to collect student performance data on all the indicators they are responsible for teaching. In a perfectly aligned system, this would replace a teacher's grade book which is also a data collection tool though rarely aligned with the content standard indicators. [top] What are teachers expected to do with the monitoring plan data? The monitoring data are only useful when they are examined and used to inform instruction. Consequently, teams of teachers need to analyze and discuss the instructional implications of the data on an ongoing basis. The discussion may be focused on a number of student achievement questions:
[top] In what areas do staff need professional development? Do your teachers analyze their classroom data? Do they know how to analyze their data? What evidence do you see in your school that teachers use classroom data to inform their instructional decisions? If you answered no to any of these questions, then your staff needs professional development in these areas. Rick DuFour identified a number of staff development needs for teachers to collect and discuss the data that would focus them on what students were learning. In his article, "The Learning-Centered Principal," he describes his role in the following way: "As principal, I played an important role in initiating, facilitating, and sustaining the process of shifting our collective focus from teaching to learning. To make collaborative teams the primary engine of our school improvement efforts, teachers needed time to collaborate. Teachers, accustomed to working in isolation, needed focus and parameters as they transitioned to working in teams. They needed a process to follow and guiding questions to pursue. They needed training, resources, and support to overcome difficulties they encountered while developing common outcomes, writing common assessments, and analyzing student achievement data." [top] How do you lead a discussion of the monitoring data? One of the best ways for principals to provide clear expectations for what they want staff to do is to model the process. Leading a data dialogue effectively requires a focus, data, guiding questions, and an understanding of the collaborative inquiry process. Data-driven dialogue assists teams in making shared meaning of data, in surfacing multiple perspectives, in separating data from inference, and in making data-driven decisions. Though the data are key to the dialogue, the process of collaborative inquiry drives the results. When leading the data dialogue, you will find the Seven Norms of Collaborative Work, developed by Laura Lipton and Bruce Welman, to be helpful to the process. Lipton and Wellman also advise "allowing adequate time to explore assumptions, predictions, questions, and observations before offering explanations or solutions. In doing so, groups not only reach sounder conclusions but also build their capacity to inquire and learn together." There are a number of key questions that an examination of classroom data should address. Student performance on an assessment
[top] Resources for Monitoring Student Progress School Improvement in Maryland Web Site Develop a Monitoring Plan is a workshop for principals and school leaders to learn how to develop and present to staff a monitoring plan.  Using Classroom Data to Monitor Student Progress is a PowerPoint presentation that leads staff through the logic of how standards-based reform has created the need for teachers to monitor student progress. Identify Data to Be Used in Monitoring provides planning templates created as a stimulus for discussing how best to monitor individual student progress on selected indicators. Create data collection templates provides a tool to create a customized grade book to monitor selected indicators taught during a unit or a grading quarter. You can also download the Excel spreadsheets onto your desktop to further customize or graph data. Examining your Monitoring Data is a workshop on how to structure data dialogues to discuss, analyze and make instructional decisions based on the data collected in your monitoring plan.  What formative assessment data should we collect? These templates help teachers identify all of the indicators under each Maryland Content Standard in reading and mathematics which have been assessed on the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP). http://mdk12.org/data/course/m4w2/pr2/monitoring_plans.html School staff schools discuss what they did and learned from implementing monitoring tools in their Title I elementary schools.  Monitoring Student Progress leads schools through the process of developing and using a monitoring plan and shares experiences of schools as they implement their plans.  Online Articles How Classroom Assessments Improve Learning by Thomas R. Guskey in the February 2003 issue of Educational Leadership argues that the assessments most likely to improve student achievement are those that teachers create. Improving Teaching and Learning with Data-Based Decisions: Asking the Right Questions and Acting on the Answers by Nancy Protheroe in the Summer 2001 issue of ERS Spectrum. Assessing Student Learning-and My Teaching-Through Student Journals by physics teacher Bill Heinmiller finds the challenges of using student journals as an embedded assessment strategy are amply repaid by the benefits. Assessing Student Understanding with Interactive-Collaborative-Electronic Learning Logs by science teacher Paul Hickman describes how technology enhances communication between student research groups and their teacher. Implementing Portfolios and Student-Led Conferences middle school teacher Jennifer Williams describes an assessment strategy that caught on with teachers of all subject areas. Using Self Evaluation with Fourth Graders by Leah Poynter describes how elementary school students learn to assess their own achievement. A Snapshot of Assessment in a Standards-Based Classroom by Carol Midgett, a member of the NCTM Standards 2000 Writing Team, describes a single classroom activity to show how assessment provides guidance for the learning journey. Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in the Phi Delta Kappan argues that there is firm evidence showing that formative assessment is an essential component of classroom work and that its development can raise standards of achievement. |
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