Common Formative Assessment: A Toolkit for Professional Learning Communities at Work

With foreword by Richard and Rebecca DuFour

Teams that engage in designing, using, and responding to common formative assessments are more knowledgeable about their own standards, more assessment literate, and able to develop more strategies for helping all students learn. In this conversational guide, the authors offer tools, templates, and protocols to incorporate common formative assessments into the practices of a PLC to monitor and enhance student learning.

With Common Formative Assessment, monitor and enhance your students learning. You ll get everything you need to know to create common formative assessments and incorporate them into the practices of your professional learning community. With accessible tools and templates for teams to adjust to their own needs, this is a process that will be easy to facilitate and easy to maintain.

Benefits

• Includes strategies for how to identify and unwrap power standards to use as the basis for learning targets and common formative assessments.
• Provides protocols and reproducibles to facilitate the formative assessment process.
• Offers tools to create pacing guides and to design units for conducting and responding to assessments.
• Highlights ideas on how to encourage students to become actively involved in the assessment process.

Contents:
1. Getting Started as a Collaborative Team
2. Setting the Stage for Common Formative Assessments
3. Power Standards The Essential Outcomes
4. The Unwrapping Process Achieving Collective Clarity on Learning Targets
5. Designing Quality Common Formative Assessments
6. The Big Picture Pacing Guides and Unit Design
7. Now What? Using Data to Make a Difference
8. Getting the Most Bang for Your Assessment Buck Involving Students
9. Sustaining the Work
Appendix Tools for Teams

Kim Bailey is director of staff development and instructional support for the Capistrano Unified School District in southern California. Her leadership has been instrumental in uniting and guiding educators throughout the district s fifty-six schools in their journey to becoming professional learning communities (PLCs). In addition to her role at Capistrano, Kim works with schools and districts across the nation, providing guidance and support to move forward with their own development as PLCs. Kim is passionate about empowering teams to do the important work inherent in effective learning communities, including the development of common formative assessments, and the alignment of standards, assessment, interventions, and instruction.

Kim s education background spans over thirty years, and her work at Capistrano has won national praise. The National School Boards Association (NSBA) recognized Kim s leadership in coordinating and implementing the district s Professional Development Academies. The academies received the distinguished American School Board Journal Magna Award and the California School Boards Association Golden Bell Award. She has also taught courses in educational leadership as an adjunct faculty member at Chapman University in Orange, California, and is coauthor of Starting Strong: Surviving and Thriving as a New Teacher.

Chris Jakicic, EdD, served as principal of Woodlawn Middle School in Long Grove, Illinois, from its opening day in 1999 through the spring of 2007. Under her leadership, the staff shifted toward a collaborative culture focused on learning and implemented assessment for learning practices to shape their instructional strategies. Student motivation and performance also increased. Chris began her career teaching middle school science before serving as principal of Willow Grove Elementary in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, for nine years. Her experience as a practitioner guides her work with schools; she wants teachers to feel confident that they have the skills and the ability to make a difference for their students.

Through her work with teachers and administrators across the country, Chris emphasizes that effective teaming is the heart of PLCs. She also shares practical knowledge about how to use data conversations to interpret classroom information for effective instruction.

Chris has written articles for the Journal of Staff Development and Illinois School Research and Development Journal detailing her experiences with common assessments and PLCs. She has worked as an adjunct instructor at National-Louis University as well as Loyola University Chicago, where she earned a doctor of education.