eating Effective Teachers
Demonstrating Performance Based Assessments
Bay Area Performance Assessment (BAPA)
Project Summary
The Alameda County Office of Education (ACOE) has launched a new partnership with Envision Schools and Stanford Center for Assessment and Learning Equity (SCALE) to spread their expertise developed in four Bay Area high schools to a diverse network of elementary, middle and high schools. Teacher and school leaders are engaged in teacher action research to design, implement and demonstrate summative performance based assessments that are statistically valid and reliable, and can provide improved indicators of school performance across districts and regions.
The Bay Area Performance Assessment program is planned to design and demonstrate statistically valid and reliable summative Performance Based Assessments at the 5th, 8th and 12th grade levels. Seven schools were selected through an application process as part of the first cohort that attended a 3-day summer institute led by Envision Schools and Stanford SCALE, at the Hewlett Foundation June 22-25, 2011. The schools are: North Oakland Community Charter School in Oakland, Digital Arts and Drama Academy at Castro Valley High School, Emery Secondary School (6-12), Peralta Elementary in Oakland (K-5), Washington High School in Fremont (9-12), San Rafael High School, and CiviCorps Charter School in Oakland. These schools present their work, and provide leadership in assessment to larger networks of schools in Region 4 at two Arts Learning Leadership retreats in December 2011 and March 2012, as a local application and extension of the previous CCSESA Arts Assessment Colloquiums.
A second cohort of schools is being identified for the 2012/13 school year.
Accountability for Critical Student Outcomes through Ongoing Performance Assessments
Over the past decade, through Teacher Action Research Institute methodology, ACOE has built a network of Demonstration Schools in which teams of arts teachers and classroom teachers are using the Studio Habits of Mind (developed by researchers Hetland, Winner, Veenema, and Sheridan at the Harvard Graduate School of Education), collaboratively planning arts integrated lessons, and embedding visual and performing arts in the curriculum to meet core academic standards.
The visible and performative nature of the arts, named and assessed through the vocabulary of the Studio Habits—develop craft, observe, express, envision, engage and persist, stretch and explore, reflect and understand the professional world—provide the means to see, explain and measure how well we are preparing students with the necessary skills, habits and dispositions. Through the use of shared professional thinking frameworks, new formative and summative performance based assessments, and collaborative structures for decision making about curriculum design and next steps in instruction, we are positioned to demonstrate, share and invite others into a model for professional practice and shared accountability for strong and more equitable student outcomes.
The Studio Habits of Mind have been adapted to Science, English Language Arts, and History by AHA, an arts learning demonstration school at Berkeley High School, to promote alignment and rich conversations among the school’s faculty so that teaching and learning becomes more coherent for the students. In this way, and because the Studio Habits map onto “21st Century Skills”—critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity—practitioners are moving toward a definition of Student Habits of Mind necessary for all students to develop the skills, abilities, confidence and enthusiasm necessary to be successful in school today and prepared to participate fully, and flexibly, in the world they are growing into.
Background
The Alameda County Office of Education supports the design and development of performance based assessments through:
· Promoting teacher action research as the central component of professional development, including the design of generative teacher research questions that systematically explore what teachers most want and need to know about their students and their practice, and about which they can gather information through observations and documentation of what students say, do and make.
· Developing observation and analysis tools, based on the Studio Thinking Framework,
Teaching for Understanding Framework, Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies, and Making Learning Visible techniques, that guide teachers’ observations of and reflections about students’ work and students-at-work, to help them analyze observational data and make more valid and reliable interpretations and choices about instructional revisions.
· Developing and refining protocols for collaborative teacher observations and reflective conversations to help teachers support and serve as resources for each other in their ongoing quests to improve their students’ learning by improving their practice.
The Alameda County Office of Education’s Teacher Action Research Institute is a professional development system that supports inquiry-based action research for more responsive teaching and deeper student learning for every level of teacher and every style of learner. This system establishes school-based professional learning communities that enhance teachers’ skills in differentiating instruction to respond to every student’s diverse learning needs. The Teacher Action Research Institute, grounded in nine years of applying research-based, educational theory in classroom practice, helps districts develop a community of educators effective at engaging every student in required content through contextually relevant and meaningful application of new knowledge and skills, and assessing student learning through summative and ongoing formative assessment.
To get involved and for more information, contact:
Louise Music, Alameda County Office of Education Arts Learning Coordinator
510-670-4557
We welcome you to join our professional network!