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Welcome to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s
webinar series, Leading a Balanced Reading Assessment System.
I am Laura Adams, one of the literacy consultants
at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
- And I’m Barb Novak, the other literacy consultant
at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Thanks so much for joining this webinar.
- This is the sixth webinar in our series, and today we’re going to be focusing
on data within your literacy assessment system
that you can use for student learning objectives.
So as you recall, this is the graphic that really encompasses our series as a whole.
And today the guiding question that we’re going to be really
most closely connected to is that question number three.
What do we use the data for?
Of course, we can use our literacy assessment data for so many
different purposes, which we really alluded to and talked a little bit about
in our episode where we engaged in a process
for reviewing our literacy assessment system.
And so today we’re really focusing on a very specific purpose
for data within your system.
So our objectives today are to briefly review
the student learning objective process and to identify literacy assessment data
that would be within your system for the purpose of your SLO.
And just as a reminder, this is our graphic
that represents a balanced assessment system.
And we really talked in the first episode -- or second episode --
about how important it is to have a balanced assessment system.
One of the reasons why it’s so important to have a very comprehensive
and balanced assessment system is because, in that way,
you have all the information, or all the data points,
that you might need for any education initiatives.
So for example, if you already have a comprehensive assessment system,
you will not need to administer any new assessments for the sake
of the Educator Effectiveness System. - Yeah.
So we’re really thinking about helping you be intentional about the assessments
that you’re giving so that, when you’re faced with a new challenge
or a new requirement, you’re able to look back at your system,
find the things within your system that would already help you comply,
instead of adding in additional assessments or adding in
additional duties and responsibilities. - Absolutely.
- So we have to start with a quick definition of another acronym.
An SLO can be -- this is a really tricky acronym
because it can actually be two things.
An SLO can be a student learning objective if you’re an educator,
or it could be a school learning objective if you’re an administrator, such as a principal.
An SLO -- student learning objective or school learning objective --
is a required portion of Wisconsin’s Educator Effectiveness System.
So whether you’re working in the Danielson model and using Teachscape
or whether you’re working in another model, a student learning objective
or a school learning objective are a non-negotiable part of that model.
- And I think it’s important just to briefly mention the fact that . . .
- Oh, yes. - . . . we have a link on our website
about who the SLO process is for. Because it may not be
for every single person in a school district.
And so the link on the website is a great resource that brings you to
a very easy-to-follow flow chart that helps to identify who are the people
in a school district system that need to create an SLO.
- Yeah. I’m really glad you stopped me there.
Because I think a lot of the people that are watching this webinar are
probably literacy coaches and reading specialists, whose job's duties
as they relate to working with students and being responsible for
supervising a classroom of students are very, very different
than a classroom teacher or even, then, an interventionist.
And depending on how your job is structured,
it could be that your job doesn't fit into the Educator Effectiveness System,
and you wouldn't be writing an SLO.
This information is still good for you because I think there’s a lot of things
that you can do to support their colleagues
in setting and meeting their SLOs. - Absolutely.
- So an SLO is meant to be a rigorous, attainable goal for student learning.
An SLO is about student learning. It’s about looking at your --
looking at who your students are, what their strengths and weaknesses
are as learners, looking at the content that they are responsible for knowing,
and setting a really intentional goal of what you want to focus in on
and maybe even sometimes what specific group of students
you'd like to really focus on and really being intentional.
I feel like I should be keeping track of
how many times I’ve used that word in this webinar.
Really being intentional about what are you doing to help
move students towards that goal, and how are students responding
to the choices that you’re making as an educator.
Your SLO is written as a SMART goal.
SMART is another acronym. Specific, measurable,
attainable, results-based, and time-bound.
So when someone reads your SLO, they'll know exactly what it is
that you want students to know and be able to do,
how you’re going to measure it, and by what time or what date
students will meet that SLO.
It’s not -- an SLO -- a high-quality SLO doesn't say something like,
students will acheieve proficiency on our district’s reading assessment.
That might be the measurement tool that you use, but you’re going to be
really specific about what element of proficiency you’re targeting.
Are you looking at basic comprehension?
Are you looking at making inferences? Are you look at supporting
thinking with evidence? So you really need to be specific
about what the student learning is that’s happening.
The SLO process, as it’s outlined by
Wisconsin DPI’s educator effectiveness team, really divides into these five steps.
You start by establishing your SLO -- your goal.
Then you gather evidence of practice, engage in a mid-cycle review,
gather more evidence of practice, and then you evaluate your results
and score your SLO.
This idea that gathering evidence of practice
really breaks into two specific steps is kind of hard for me.
Because gathering evidence of practice is
really happening throughout the entire cycle.
It just means collecting data about what you’re doing as an educator
and how students are responding to it.
That’s what gathering evidence with practice means.
So there’s different kinds of data sources that you might be looking at
in each of the steps in the SLO process.
You start by establishing your SLO goal.
You'd want to look at a lot of different data sources, then.
Baseline data sources that you have available to you early in the school year
to understand who your students are as an entire group, but also how
certain subgroups or certain populations might be performing relative to standards.
So you'd want to look at your balanced assessment system and say,
what assessments do we have early in the year that provide us
with information about where students are relative to standards.
Can we desegregate those by subgroup in case we want to be able to
target a specific group of students?
Next, you’re gathering evidence of practice,
engaging in your mid-cycle review, and continuing to gather evidence.
This is really an ongoing process where you'll probably be looking at
a lot of different formative data sources.
We do have a webinar about formative assessment that you
can take a look at to better understand that idea.
But also look at your system for assessments that --
maybe benchmark assessments, maybe interim assessments,
but also formative assessment techniques.
And be thinking about what you can collect to demonstrate that evidence.
Maybe it’s a consistent observation chart that you keep
on your iPad or in a Google doc.
Maybe it’s photographs of student work. Maybe it’s audio recordings if you’re looking
at fluency or if you’re working on improving the quality of group discussion.
You can capture that formative assessment data in a lot of different ways
so that you’re able to talk about it in a PLC or talk with your supervisor
with it -- about it to really constantly be able to say, here’s what I observed,
here’s what I saw, and here’s how I adjusted my practice accordingly,
and this is what the data says as a result.
At the end of the SLO process, you do have to
evaluate your results and score your SLO.
There's a rubric that you use to score your SLO, and Laura’s going to talk in
just a little bit about one of the components of that rubric that I think is really exciting.
But at the end, you have a reflective time for yourself,
a reflective conversation with colleagues, about how did things go for that SLO.
Not just, did students meet the goal in the end, but what was that process like,
and what kind of data did you collect throughout the process?
- So as we really think about that SLO process, we can really see that
it’s really just a formal means of defining what it is educators do.
It's really all about supporting and formalizing good teaching practice.
So the important thing is that the process is as important as the outcome.
Can you document changes that you made along the way?
Can you document why you made changes, perhaps,
to your SLO goal during that mid-cycle review?
And it’s important to know that it’s okay if all of your students don't actually meet
the SLO goal as long as you can articulate why and what you did
along the way in order to help them meet that goal.
And what were the changes that you made along the way
in response to students’ needs?
So data used throughout the SLO process
needs to measure the same knowledge or skills.
And I think that that’s a really important point,
and you can read more about that at the link here, which is also a resource
posted on the site next to the webinar.
But it’s that idea that you don't always have to use the same assessment tool
or the same assessment instrument at, for example, that initial phase
where you’re gathering baseline data, that mid-cycle review, and at the end.
They could potentially be different assessment tools
as long as they measure the same knowledge or skills.
- So you could use something like PALS as your baseline data source.
You could something like -- maybe you use PALS to establish a specific subgroup
that you want to focus on, and then maybe you use some kind of a
curriculum-based measure on an ongoing basis for ongoing data collection.
Maybe at the mid-year point, you use some kind of a running record
or an informal reading inventory.
Then you go back to doing some more curriculum-based measures.
And you end the year with another administration of PALS.
As long as each of those assessments looked at the same content, knowledge,
and skills, it’s awesome to vary your assessment sources
throughout your SLO process.
I think it really gives you a more solid understanding of whether or not
students can apply that skill that you’re working on in a variety of contexts.
- Exactly. Absolutely.
And we also another resource just about local decisions within the SLO process,
which we think is very useful as a very important resource.
So we encourage you to check that out as well.
So in order to identify which kinds of literacy assessment tools you
currently have that could be used for the SLO process,
we would refer you back to that process that we discussed in our fourth webinar
in this series -- a Process for Reviewing Literacy Assessments.
And so remember, if you begin by doing a comprehensive review of all
of the different literacy assessments that you administer to students,
that will help you, I think, really to identify what data sources
that you already have that you could use for appropriate points in that process.
A balanced assessment system is very important to the SLO process.
It's important to, as Barb was saying, really rely on lots of different forms of data.
As we noted in a previous webinar just focused on formative assessment,
formative assessments really provide that critical information that educators
rely on to inform instruction from day to day,
sometimes minute-to-minute. [chuckles]
And this becomes very key data as you think about where your students are
in relationship to that SLO goal that you have established and where you are
in that mid-cycle review point and whether or not you need to
make any adjustments to your SLO or adjustments to your instruction
in order to help students reach that SLO.
- And I think the really difficult part about formative assessment in the SLO process
isn't necessarily coming up with the ideas for formative assessment.
Because I think educators are doing that all the time.
We’re constantly observing our students and making adjustments in what we do.
But really being deliberate about capturing that process -- keeping good notes --
maybe it’s not keeping detailed notes about all of your students.
Maybe it’s keeping detailed notes about the students that are in your target group.
Consistently keeping photographs or recordings of student work samples,
so that, when you sit down in a PLC to talk about how students are
responding to instruction, or you sit down with your administrator
to have that conversation, or with your coach,
you’re able to both look at those data sources.
And the data sources aren't just stored in your head.
They're somewhere physical that other people can look at them
and understand the decisions that you’re making
and maybe make some suggestions for you about what else you could try.
- I read a blog by a Wisconsin principal who was talking about writing portfolios
and how his teachers are using the student work that’s being kept
in these writing portfolios as part of their baseline data at the beginning of the
process as well as throughout the SLO process, which I thought was
just so powerful and so meaningful. - Definitely.
- So this, of course, is the template that we refer to and talked through
in our webinar about sharing a process for reviewing your literacy assessment system.
So this is the template that you would use in order to really compile all of
the information about all of the different literacy assessments that you administer.
And as a reminder, if you choose to use this template,
please make sure to save a copy.
We don't need to know what kind of literacy assessments you’re giving.
If you just work right in that template, we’ll be able to see that,
and we don't need to see that.
We also want to point out some additional resources at the resource
that you see here on the screen as well as listed next to the website.
You can find some example data sources for different points in the SLO process,
but the educator effectiveness team really wanted to communicate
that this is not an exhaustive list. So it’s not an all-encompassing list.
It just provides a very few illustrative examples.
And I also think it’s important to note this same website has information
about how, if you alter the way an assessment tool is used,
you might also be altering what kind of assessment tool it is,
which I thought was very interesting.
And the example that this website gives
is about the Measures of Academic Progress assessment.
If you administer that assessment three times a year,
then you’re using it perhaps as a benchmark or an interim assessment.
But if you’re only using it once a year,
now you’re really using it as a summative assessment.
And so I thought that was interesting.
And you had an example about PALS related to that as well.
- Yeah. We really -- I think you can really view PALS in your
balanced assessment system in a variety of different ways.
You can view it just as a screener. You can view it as a
summative assessment. You can also view it as a really powerful
formative assessment, especially if you're adding in the quick checks.
You’re getting that constant data that you can use to
immediately guide your instruction. But if you’re just collecting the data,
and you’re not actually using the data to change anything about your instruction,
it’s not really a formative assessment anymore.
So that brings us close to the end of this particular webinar episode about how to
search for pre-existing data sources within your balanced assessment system
to use within the student or school learning objective process.
At the end of each of these episodes, we’ve really tried hard to stop
and re-focus you on the important work that you do
and the reasons that that work matters.
As we’re talking about SLOs, it’s really about a lot more than
filling out paperwork or complying with a mandate or a requirement.
It’s really about thinking about who your students are,
respecting who your students are, understanding where your students
want to go during their career as a student and in their time outside of school
as well and setting an intentional goal as a teacher to do everything that you can
to help students meet those rigorous outcomes that they need to meet
and to teach students not just to be able to read and write and speak and listen,
but to also be able to get some appreciation and some joy
and some deeper understanding of themselves and others
through reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
So as always, here’s our contact information.
You can reach us by phone. You can reach us by email.
You can tweet us. You can visit our Google community.
We love to hear from you. In fact, I was just thinking that
one of the things that would make this episode even better
was if we had some sample SLOs. - Yes.
- And some reflection on the data sources that people used within those SLOs.
So if you'd like to share your SLO with us for those purposes,
just drop us an email or give us a call. We love to talk with you,
and we look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks. - Thanks for being with us.
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