Ogden, IN Midwest Gathering to Push the Assessment Conversation

Our goal is to support teachers in developing expertise and fluency in the complete curriculum, instruction, and assessment cycle.

Organizational Plan

Create learning communities focused on embedding formative self-assessment (student and teacher) in instruction as a learning tool.

• contact key teachers who will buy into this, explain the action research and the model and ask for buy-in;
• ideally this would require three days of teachers...one in the summer, one in the fall, and one in the winter;
• set-up a communications system appropriate to the schools' own IT systems to maintain contact and allow for communications across districts;
• set-up a website for each learning community with links to other related learning communities
• teachers bring samples of student work for common sharing, reflection, discussion, and critiques
• identify
• Day 1 develop a vision for this process and what it will look like, convince teachers that this is worthwhile; Instruction focused - identify the standard, benchmark, how will we teach standard 1/strand1, how will we assess....

1. orient participants to the model: student-centered learning, embedded assessment, formative self-assessment,
   
2. develop ways to document motivation, self-direction, achievement, higher order thinking, creativity...

• Day 2 come together what worked, challenges, what will make it better, bring student work; identify another instructional/assessment goal
  
• Day 3 repeat process...

Set up a template that can be used to post to the web for teachers to use for planning and sharing this process.

Key questions:

- is anyone from the Midwest Region interested in attending the 2008 New England Arts Assessment Institute Aug. 5-8 Castleton State College, Vermont.... $400 - $450 plus airfare.

- can we encumber grant funds for a follow-up October Midwest SEADAE Assessment meeting?







What do we mean by arts teachers being the experts in assessment?

Let's think of dance. How is a dance student know that they've learned a dance movement?

The teacher points it out to you. You look at yourself in the mirror. Your peers let you know.
Ideally, you then know wo teacher, mirror, peers and you know when a movement is just not good enough.

You have to internalize the music. It's not your limbs dancing it comes from inside out.

Assessment for learning....

paper and pencil assesses declarative knowledge

procedural knowledge can only be assessed through performance.

Selected response can help diagnose many things
hand in your papers and redistribute them, then students begin to discuss (a positive use of selected response)
it's not graded

all of this goes into a portfolio, this is what you've done, now what do you think?

Wisconsin research project on instruction and assessment after the Propel Model

What's wrong with saying something is wrong?

Mel spoke about students preparing themselves for competitions. Students have rubrics that they use to assess their own performances.

Nancy's input:
capture the terminology
Do we want to develop a process for making teachers the experts in arts assessment? Community of learners.

How are we going to get there?

Balanced assessment:
Wisconsin: classroom, formative and summative assessment

Michigan: assessment for and of learning....

Grant Wiggins