Audio Tip to Go—Everyone is Involved in Assessment
Principal
Los Penasquitos Elementary School
Principal
Los Penasquitos Elementary School
[Assessment is] crucial … not just the assessments we give to students, but the way that we partner with students and parents on that assessment...
—Damen Lopez, Co-Principal
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Read About It
As the year begins, everyone at San Diego’s Los Penasquitos Elementary School knows what’s expected of them, because they created the expectations. The year’s assessment plan was developed collaboratively by the school staff, grade by grade. As part of that plan, even the students are expected to establish their own individual goals with help from teachers.Los Pen’s comprehensive program takes assessment to a deeper level than most plans do. While including a typical assessment calendar (three times/year) and a matrix of specific grade level skills to be assessed, the Los Pen plan builds on these, explaining why careful assessment of skills is important, how to read data and understand assessment results, how to involve students, and how to use all this to improve teaching and learning. Each of these parts, explained in separate documents, together make up the Los Pen Assessment Plan.
The details section of the plan describes what each assessment is intended to accomplish and how the teacher can use it for understanding student learning and adjusting instruction. The document then provides specifics for how teachers will use each assessment with their students, grade level by grade level, assessment by assessment, in order to involve all students in the assessment process. As examples, in Kindergarten, all families will receive a checklist of math skills students are supposed to master throughout the school year and their progress on them. In fourth and fifth grade spelling, two to three spelling inventories will be given during the year to determine spelling stages and groupings for needs-based instruction and teachers will discuss the results with students and set “next best steps” toward improvement.
Reflecting the firm belief that students must take responsibility for their own learning, the Assessment Plan includes the process and tools for helping students develop specific goals. The school year opens with whole class conversations in which students address the questions: (1) What is your goal? (2) How are you working with your teacher to achieve it? and (3) How will you know when you’ve done that? In student conferences, teachers work closely with each student to help them create a personal goal based on their assessment results. For example, a fourth grader’s goal would not be reading, but more specifically, literal comprehension. The student’s plan for demonstrating improved literal comprehension could potentially specify that the student use the strategies of highlighting and note-taking while reading the book and preparing the book report, and then meeting with the teacher to discuss use of the strategies and the book report before turning the report in. Throughout the school year, students reflect on their learning and when one goal is achieved they set a new one. The individual student goals help teachers explicitly differentiate instruction for each student.
To round out the plan, the assessment standardization section provides guidelines for proper assessment delivery, information of an accessible student database, and open sharing of data during articulation meetings, three times per year.
Staff use these documents together as a comprehensive, cohesive assessment program that focuses on the students, not the teacher, the needs of each unique student, aimed at helping all students achieve beyond their wildest dreams.
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