Common Assessments – How to Make Them and Use Them, Ep. 173 Instructional Coaching with Ms. B

Common Assessments – How to Make Them and Use Them, Ep. 173 Buzzing with Ms. B: The Coaching Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:00

Spending time in classrooms is one of the most impactful ways we can support teachers and grow our schools. But all of that classroom work can result in tons of documentation that really goes nowhere. If you’ve got piles of sticky notes all over your desk and random collections of fonts and all of your apps, it’s time to consolidate Connect. hub.io is a platform created by coaches. For coaches. It’s designed to help you organize your notes as you meet with educators and get powerful data on your impact in their classrooms. You can also use this information to support their professional learning and growth. Connecthub.io includes great features to help you protect the coach-teacher relationship by providing different levels of account access for sharing only what you want with administrators. You can also customize reports to share specific kinds of information with your admin. This is such a great software for coaches. Check it out today at Connecthub.io to simplify your instructional coaching with a free trial. As a literacy coach at an elementary school, I spent so much time trying to find the perfect supplemental resources for my teachers. That’s why I am so excited to share a special resource with you today. decodable texts are essential for students who are working on mastering phonics and primary grades especially, I have come across the sweetest decodable books that I love and my kindergarten daughter loves them to. They’re called Express Readers. Each book has a complete storyline includes fun and funny characters like bug and duck. And the stories are engaging and increasing complexity over time as to the words and sentence structures on each page. Sticky words are identified in each book to help children with words they aren’t able to decode yet, or those with irregular spelling patterns. There’s a perfect resource for giving students at your school the practice they need and applying phonics skills, head to expressreaders.org and visit the Decodable Books page. There you can download a quick keys guide with teaching tips for each book, including teaching sticky word mapping, you can also get free sample decodable sent to your address, head to express readers.org If you’re building your phonics instruction, and you’re ready for some really great readers

Chrissy Beltran  02:11

You’re listening to buzzing with Miss B the coaching podcast where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an instructional coach, resource creator and coffee enthusiast, and I’m your host, stay tuned for practical tips and honest coaching talk that will help you coach with confidence.

Chrissy Beltran  02:35

Hey, coach, and welcome to episode 173 common assessments, creating planning and implementation. This is the last episode of season four. That is wild, we’re Episode 173, we’re getting really close to 200 episodes. And that means a couple of things. I take my little hiatus from December in January was season five, we’ll start again in February. That’s what I’ve done for the last four years the standard schedule for the podcast, November to February, nope, February to November. And it allows me to take stock, figure out how I can best support coaches and what they currently need and book some really great guests for you. Speaking of planning the next season, which will be season five, I have a survey for you at buzzing with Miss b.com slash survey. If you can complete the survey for me, it’ll give me an idea of how I can support you on the podcast. And you can enter to win a $25 gift card from Amazon. So head to buzzing with this.com/survey and complete that survey. So season five, it’s going to be exactly what you want it to be. In the meantime, you might want to go back and check out my top 10 episodes, especially if you’ve joined us later and you haven’t been listening to the podcast since the beginning. You’re gonna want to go back and check these out because they’re definitely worth a listen, you can find them at buzzing with Miss b.com slash podcast. And that’ll show you the top 10 episodes of all time for the last four years. You can also join my new Facebook group instructional coaching with Miss B and check out my monthly Facebook Lives. Each month. I go live about the podcast topic of the month. So this month, it was assessment and you can go back and watch that replay. Last month, it was coaching cycles. And you can actually join the group and tell me a little bit about what you want me to talk about in December and in January because we don’t have any topics scheduled for those months because they are their hiatus months for the podcast. So let me know what you want to listen to or talk about in instructional coaching with MS be and you will truly be one of my VIB. So let’s talk a little bit about assessments. And so in this series, we’ve talked about data we’ve talked about formative assessments with the wonderful Steven Tura. We had a coaching call about data and assessments. Now we’re going to dig into common assessments and what that looks like. There are lots of different names for assessments and they all have a slightly different meaning and connotation. So whenever I’m talking about common assessments, this is what I mean. We gave common assessments. And in that all the teachers gave them whenever I was a coach, each grade level would select the date, select the assessment, and plan a date to look at the data. We also talked about the administration procedures before they were given so that we had alignment in that, because that was a lesson we learned the first year that we really got good at common assessments that we practice all year long took takes awhile to get good at things, or to get better things or even to be comfortable with things was we need to we need to have those conversations about how are these administered because if not, when we looked at data, we were all looking at different things. And it didn’t really tell us much except this teacher, let the kids use their math charts, this teacher didn’t feel this teacher let the kids

Chrissy Beltran  05:50

read the questions aloud to the kids that when didn’t, we had to really align what assessment looked like in those grades. So then, after the assessments were given, we collected the data and looked at that data together to discuss several different dimensions. And I’m going to share about that in just a little bit some of the decisions that we made in looking at that data. So let’s get talking about the process that worked for us in creating and implementing those common assessments. We needed data, because we were making a lot of choices about what we did with our kids, what practices we were using, and how kids were doing with the way that we were teaching so we could make adjustment. And we needed data on how kids were doing with specific units. So because I was a literacy coach, we talked about looking at data by genre and by standards that fell under that genre umbrella, for the most part in reading and writing. And then I’m writing of course, we separated out standards like editing and revision skills. And in reading, we separated out like Word Study type questions, questions like context clues, you know, prefixes, suffixes. So we needed to look at data. And in a way that told us, were we preparing our kids for their end of year assessment, and where were they in relation to that, and what do they need to do between now and then to adjust. So we wanted them to look and to sort of feel like the end of the year assessment, not because we all love to give lots of tests, not even remotely for that reason. And that because I believe that the state assessment is a great way to determine whether kids have learned a lot new, actually the opposite. Because it is such a contrived and weird situation, that if we don’t give kids opportunities to practice it, they can’t demonstrate what they know on that day. It’s like if we gave a kid all year long, a crayon to show what they could draw. And then on the day of the assessment, we give them a paintbrush, we need our we need our assessments to look like our end of year assessments to help kids practice and prepare, and also to show us what they could do in that mode of testing. We wanted our data to align. So we were not surprised. I spoke to a coach last month in October, whenever we were focusing on coaching cycles, our coaching call was about coaching cycles. But she had a few questions about using PLCs to discuss data. And one of them was about how disheartened teachers can be whenever they get their data back. And it’s so disappointing. And my concern with that is and I’ve seen that happen at schools as well. That means that we don’t know how kids are doing until that big assessment comes back. And that’s a problem. We need to know how they’re doing along the way, we should really have an idea of how they’re doing every day, every lesson every week, but at least at the end of each little unit, right? So we needed to know where our kids were. And we wanted our data to align with where they were, what they were going to look at, at the end of the year. So to do this, to create our own assessments, because that’s what we had to do, we did not have assessments that were given to us that were any that were useful. We looked at our unit calendar. And then we planned out when we wanted assessments on the calendar, okay, we want the one at the end of unit two. But you know what, Unit Three covers two different genres. And we really like to break that up into smaller amounts. So at the end of these two weeks, we’re going to do a little assessment at the end of 2002 10 more days, we’re gonna do another assessment, we plan them out. We wanted the end of unit assessments to start because we needed something to see if kids were getting through getting what we were teaching in that way, and to figure out if we needed to spiral back things in order to grow their understanding. So these weren’t formative and the way like we talked to Steven tour about a couple episodes ago, we talked with him about how formative assessments are in the moment. You know, they they help you understand what’s going on and you make adjustments. This was at the end of the unit, but we didn’t look at them as summative because we found opportunities to bring that content into future units. And we used it to guide our small group and intervention and tutoring. Because I was planning reading and writing assignments. They are mostly organized by genre, and we would spiral in previously assess genres here. You’re in there to give kids practice and taking longer assessments that were like the state test. Over time, our assessments got longer, as well as to bring those kinds of genres and questions to the forefront again. So we weren’t losing that opportunity that exposure to that kind of language. We tried to start out this was I cannot recommend this enough. We started out by understanding our state assessment really well. In Texas, we do have a fair amount of documents from the State that help us dig into the test. Although the state can change whatever they want, whenever they want. And they frequently do. Some of the documents were very helpful to us. So these are some of the ones that I use the most often, the assessed curriculum guides are a document released by the state of Texas that tells you which standards are assessed in which grades. And that has changed dramatically over the last 510 years. So if you’re not sure what’s being assessed, you need to Google te a star assess curriculum guides, 2023, and the grade level you’re searching for. Because those guides, they change. And if you’re still basing your teaching, and your assessments on the curriculum from a few years ago, you might be surprised to find things that have been added over the last few years. And also the structure of the tests has changed. That was a really helpful document to me, it tells you also it told us to tell you which standard which genres were being tested, and other tests are kind of written in a different way. Another helpful document was created by a company called Lead forward. And if you have not visited Leawood lead forward, and you’re in Texas, I recommend checking them out. Lead forward also has some handy tools for other things other than the STAR test. So you can look at that as well for instruction and looking at data. But specifically, they have tons of stuff to help you understand the star and many of their tools are free. They created a frequency document that showed how often certain standards and genres had been assessed under the updated test. And I know not all states have that information. If you do have the information from the from the state, but not necessarily the frequency document, you could create your own frequency document using answer keys, if you have the answer key from the state, like the Release Test is what they’re called. So if you’ve never searched for them, just see what happens. Search for your state name, the name of your test, and released test. And then from the year of, you know, whatever your you’re looking for. In Texas, we can usually go back a few years to see the current mode of testing the current test design, basically, and then pull information from there. So I recommend looking at last three to four to five years, if you can, it just gives you a really good picture. So you can identify which standards are being most tested most frequently and kind of tally them up over the last couple of years. And so if you don’t have information, because this is why I think it’s valuable, it’s not because I want to teach you the test. I hate that phrase. It is because that is one way that the state shows us what they think is important. So if a standard is test one on an assessment, that might not be the best place to spend two weeks on. If a standard is tests across multiple genres, that means that kids have to be good at doing that in lots of ways. You may want to spend more time there. If you see it tests five, six times, context clues, for example, tested multiple times, it’s a throwaway standard in a lot of classrooms, they’re not really good at teaching it, right. They say use your context clues, because they’re like I don’t even know what that means. But if we can help kids understand what it means, and they get good at it, they can do well. And lots of questions on that test. And also just in reading, I guess it’s important skill for reading. So we want to make sure that we identify those power standards that are really important for kids to learn. And this is one piece of evidence that can help you figure out which ones are essential. So we identify the essential TEKS, or standards for the unit. And then we looked at how those standards were assessed. And this was a really helpful way that I went about doing that I thought it was really important to that we did this, I created a question document that took each standard and broke down per the state test, the way that that standard had been questioned over the past several years. For example, if a standard let’s save it, maybe using key eye or determining key ideas using details. If that standard had been assessed six times over the last four years, I pasted in the questions and the answer choices, because not all questions come from stems. And so you need to see how these answer choices are being worded into a document. And so that one document said this is the standard about key ideas. These are the four different questions for different times that it was question over the last few years or six different times. And we can look at those questions and answer choices and model our questions and answer choices after them while creating our own assessments. And we could also use it to help us make sure we were using correct academic language a variety of academic language and sentence structures when questioning and giving answer choices in closed answered questions. So for example, in a question about theme, sometimes they’re asking you for thematic statements. Sometimes they’re asking for a thematic idea, which is just a word. So we want kids to be exposed to lots of diverse and things and it gives us an idea of how to broaden out our teaching, but also how to focus it on the essentials. So we started by considering the resources that we already had. Now in reading some passages and questions and resources that we already had multiple copies of, were well aligned, and some were really not. So if you have a resource that your district gave you, or the state provides, or some other company, real estate probably is going to be pretty well, right. But some random company makes stuff to sell. It might not be super aligned to your assessment. And that’s a problem. Because then you’re having kids practice stuff, and then you’re gonna give them a paintbrush, right, and it’s not gonna match. So we want to make sure that our texts and our questions were really aligned and that our writing prompts were aligned, and that our the way that we were questioning, revision and editing questions were aligned as well. And so to be able to do that, you have to be really familiar with your state test. So for example, then our tests, whenever we were looking at our resources and deciding which ones to use as assessments, we found that motivation, reading mentoring mines, this was granted five years ago that I was really digging into building these assessments. Those are pretty useful, pretty well aligned, usually. But comico was not super well aligned. It really wasn’t, the genres were not great, the texts were not great. And the questions sometimes would question things that were not really going to be assessed in that way or assessed at all. It was just very strange. So we evaluated each of those. And we chose passages and questions and prompts that might work well for certain unit assessments. And then we rewrote questions and answer choices when necessary. And I would literally type up a question and answer choice printed out and tape it over the question. If I needed to, I would pull out passages from different websites, like, let’s think of I’m trying to think about some of the sites that have really great passages that you can grab that used to be free, some of them are starting to charge now. But let me pull up an example here.

Chrissy Beltran  17:04

I used to use let me get my links, okay, so we supply articles also from readworks.org, they were really good. And dogo news was good. We would pull those off. And I could write questions for them, modeling them after the format from the state test. So from there, I would have a little assessment builds. And I can you know, adjust the length by adding taking away questions, focusing on those power strip those power questions, standards and making sure that we’re really well aligned. And rewriting questions and answers when necessary. We coded the questions I said, Okay, this is a standard, this is the correct answer. And then I put the answer keys into an online system that we had called a where different districts have different ones, I think it was common in Texas. And I It enabled me to print bubble sheets, and I printed bubble sheets for upper grades, but primary grades, their assessments look very different, you know, I would have maybe our kinder class would read a story aloud and then the kids would complete a graphic organizer. And then we discussed how to evaluate that. So it wasn’t always bubble sheets, we tried to do it whenever with age appropriate was usually third through fifth, although I don’t know what that is. But that is what the state has decided. And then in second grade, we started bubble sheets in the spring, to give them a little bit of practice before the next year. So we ensured that we had a place to collect the data, that kids had a way to respond to their assessment equitably. And we talked about the administration of the assessment that really does require a dialogue about how assessments are given. And if you’re unsure about how to do this, you can actually grab my PLC forms. I have a special PLC forms. resource that includes how an agenda on how to talk about test administration. And so that’s one of the things that it’s necessary to go in there. So creating assessments together is one of the PLC forms, resources that you can grab at my shop buzzing with b.com, click the little magnifying glass to search for PLC forums and it will pop up. We wanted to ensure that kids who got accommodations also were given those accommodations on their assessments so we could document their effectiveness. And so that we can make sure that kids were getting the tools that they needed to be successful. We decided on those tools for a reason they had to happen. So that was a conversation that went into our dialogue about how assessments are given. After the assessment and we had a date for the assessment, we had a date to turn in the data by and after a couple of years teachers would like immediately at school, they would come bring the bubble sheets and they wanted to know how kids did. And that was the easiest way to get quick results. And then they could dig into the actual assessment during our data meeting. So we looked at data together and we tried to make it no longer than a couple of days after the assessment was given. And so this is the data process that I teach members in my course the confident literacy coach, it’s currently not open to new members but if you go to confident literacy coach.com You’ll be able to join the waitlist. So when it does open up, you will get the whole lesson on how to do data meetings with your teachers and all the downloads you need to do it basically with Start by setting a purpose for our meeting because we wanted to make sure that teachers knew why they were there. And it wasn’t just to know how kids are doing. It was to live with a plan about how to respond to that information. So that we wanted teachers to know, they’re going to walk away with what they were going to do to respond to this data, because data is information in number form. And it tells us what kids can do at that time in that format. That’s all it is, it is not telling us the whole story of the child, it is not telling us how you know how to respond, we have to figure that out. The Data is information in number form, that’s all that it is. So we set our purpose to leave with our plan for next steps. And then I provided teachers with no name data. So I would cut off the Name column, and then let teachers look at how kids did and they could see the percentage successful passing rate all of those kinds of things, and common errors, because what I loved about where is it would give you an item incorrect item analysis. And I would say the correct answer choices be 72% of kids chose B, but 21% of kids chose C. So that was obviously an answer that looked pretty appealing to kids. And we could figure out why we could talk about it, then I would have teachers actually bring their students tests, because I want them to see what kids are doing on their assessment, because that’s another clue about what kids no one can do at the time of that assessment. So I wanted them to bring it with them, look through it, and they can maybe figure out where are some of my kids going wrong? So we see a lot of kids chose answer choice B on number four, let’s look back through some of their tests. And we can figure out, you know, what, what’s going wrong? On number four, we can look at the answer the question, we can look at the answer choices, and we can look at the kids who got it wrong and figure out what happened. You know, from there, we would record percentages on a blank copy. And I would often do this in advance for teachers, because I found that it was helpful, but I would make a copy of the assessment. And on number one, I would record the percentage of kids that chose each answer choice, and then I would circle the correct answer choice. And that would tell tell the teachers, okay, this is where they went wrong. In general. This is like if if you don’t have time to have teachers do it in the session, you can do it yourself, because sometimes it’s just best to save some time. And she just really look at what it means. So we want to look at what kids did, what strategies or processes they use for each question. And then where they went wrong if they didn’t get it right, or what they did correctly that helped them figure it out. From there, we want to differentiate our plan for next steps. And the next steps organizer. In next steps planner is included in the free download at buzzing with msp.com/episode 173. You can grab that and use that to guide conversations with teachers. And it also includes a data bookmark, which is pretty cool, because there’s a lot of different questions that can help you think differently about your data. So we would want we build out our HR plan for next steps, how we’re going to support small groups, what that lesson is going to look like, what are we going to do to adjust whole group instruction? Do we need to spiral something back? We would use student names to create small groups for intervention. So we would say okay, these kids, now we have our name data. And we can look at how many, which students need to go in this small group because this leads to the areas that they struggled in. And then this I think might be the best part, although I do like that item analysis on actual copy of the test. But this one’s a good one. We’d share strengths by modeling. So what we would do is teachers who did well in something I see, okay, let’s look at standard 4.6. A. That was a tricky one didn’t even have some success in that area. Well, I had 65%. And that was better than most right. So that was considered successful. Okay. Can you share a little bit about how you introduced this to kids and what they’re expected to do in that moment when they see that question? And then we could talk about it, the teacher could even model because I would keep the little document cameras set up and the screen and everything. So they can model what they have kids do or what they did, whenever they taught that lesson, the first place that they think resulted in stronger scores in that area. That was priceless, because seeing teachers teach is so important. And it is so essential for each other and we don’t we say Oh, well, I just have them do this, I just have them do that. But whenever you see the teacher do an action, it changes everything. So I highly recommend making sure you build in time to share strengths by modeling, because this is part of the next steps plan. Now they can take that and say, Is that helpful to me? Can I use that with my small group? Or should I teach the whole group or what what do I need to do? So keep in mind, data PLCs are only purposeful when they result in changes to instruction. There is no benefit to looking at data and doing nothing with it. Nothing. There’s no benefit at all. And so many times I’ve seen data meetings where we look at data, and people are hurrying for not doing better. And that’s all that happens. There’s no change. We need to leverage the strength in our team to help them grow and move forward. That’s why it’s important to share strengths by modeling. If you are undergoing this process and you are Trying to make this happen, I want you to know, rest assured, it takes time. And we always say that, but I promise you, it took a few years until we were comfortable looking at numbers together, teachers were not super defensive. And they could hear each other and show up prepared, the tone of the meetings changed over time, not all grade levels, grade levels with higher turnover, or with very strong parties sometimes did, you know, cast a shadow over the meeting, I will say, but the majority of grade levels over time become very, very confident and, and they understand the process. And they can say, look, I can I can still remember one of my teachers holding up her assessment saying, look at this look at how my kids did on this kind of question. This is a question about grammar. And we taught using Metro sentences, that’s when we taught the skills. And that shows me that that’s an effective strategy, because I’m seeing it in my kids assessment data. Once teachers can start doing that, and make them reflect on their teaching, and make decisions and help each other. It’s beautiful. But be patient with yourself. As you’re getting there. People may push back if they’ve never been asked to do it. Over time, it will become a standard process after your first year teachers will get used to meeting with each other. And they can start to have really good conversations. If people get something out of data meetings, they’ll be more likely to value the process. So make sure they’re getting something that they can walk away with that adds to their toolbox for when they go back to their classroom. So I know I’m supposed to have a favorite thing. And right now it is the end of November. weather’s changing. It’s cozy, right? But I think that my favorite thing right now is probably watching my daughter ride her bike. I have a five year old and we did your the balanced bike. I

Chrissy Beltran  26:50

don’t know if you’ve seen balanced bikes are like little bikes, but they have no pedals and no training wheels. They’re just like little bike with no prep, no pedals. And so kids get good at like propelling it forward with their feet on the sidewalk or the road. And then they pick up their feet and they can just balance and coast and having her practice balancing and coasting with her feet up and not having to use anything to balance aside from just like her own body. It translated into writing a pedal bike. The first time I put her on a pedal bike, I didn’t put training wheels on it because I was curious to see if this whole balanced bike thing was actually going to work. And she did it and I was like what I was shocked. So she doesn’t have training wheels. She rides a little bike and it’s like the most darling thing and she just loved it. So that’s probably one of my favorite things right now is watching my five year old ride her bike and watching my two year old on her baby balanced bike that has like four wheels on it. It’s not two wheels, it’s like a little it’s just I don’t know why they call it a baby mountain bike. It’s just like a little push car thing. And just like watching her grow her skills over time by using her little feet and propelling it forward. It’s one of my favorite things the weather is a lot nicer to do that and the front of our yard faces the setting sun. So summer is not a great time to do any of that stuff in our front yard because it’s miserably hot and sweltering but now it is nice. So that’s my favorite thing. I want to make sure you grab that. That free download at buzzing with the fi.com/episode 173 to help you look at data and assessments. And remember to check out my survey buzzing with b.com slash survey. I cannot wait to hear what your thoughts are so I can plan the next season and that is going to be open till the end of December. In the meantime, I am off to celebrate the end of this fantastic season four of buzzing business be the coaching podcast and thank you coach for being a part of it. Happy coaching

Chrissy Beltran  28:53

Thank you for listening to buzzing with Miss B the coaching podcast. What more coaching ideas. Check me out at buzzing with Ms. b.com and on Instagram at buzzing with Miss B. If you love the show, share it with a coach who would love it too. Or leave me a review on iTunes. It’s free and it helps others find this show. Happy coaching!