Next week is our NTGS week of webinars. The regular SCEE webinar on Tuesday, August 14, will be on Using Classroom Assessments to Measure Student Performance in Non-Tested Grades and Subjects (NTGS), from 2:00-3:00 pm EDT. Presenters will stay on for an informal Q&A session from 3:00-3:30 pm EDT.
This webinar is the first in a series. The second webinar will be Thursday, August 16, from 12:00-1:00 pm EDT, focusing on the complexities and policy decisions around Student Learning Objectives.
In the first webinar, Jim Popham and Christopher Ruszkowski will join us as featured presenters. Jim is a nationally recognized expert in assessment practices and a widely read author. Our pre-reading for this webinar is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Misguided Evaluation of America's Teachers: What YOU Can Do to Help Fix It. You have an exciting new option this month to engage as a community of learners by helping to craft this important publication. You are invited to read the draft excerpt, generate questions, and craft input to share with Jim during the webinar by commenting on this blog.
Chris is Chief Officer of the Teacher and Leader Effectiveness Unit at the Delaware Department of Education. Chris will share perspectives and examples from Delaware about how they are making policy and implementation decisions about using achievement and growth measures in an evaluation system. As we were preparing for the webinar, he said to us, "I'm really in the weeds!"-which happily means he will share very practical challenges and solutions they have been developing in Delaware.
While I will moderate the webinar as a conversation between with Jim and Chris, we plan to cover at least four key points related to the process of measuring student growth through classroom assessments:
- Importance of pre- and post-tests
- Need for different assessments for formative and summative purposes
- Quality of assessment instruments
- Credibility of the evidence of effectiveness
The next webinar, Student Learning Objectives and Educator Evaluation, on Thursday, August 16, from noon - 1 pm EDT, will feature Scott Marion from the Center for Assessment and the Rhode Island SLO Team, including Laura Kacewicz, Jessica Brown and Jessica Delforge. Scott will discuss key claims and questions regarding SLOs. The RI state team will describe how they are using SLOs, provide some actual examples of SLOs (as well as the struggles their administrators and teachers are facing in crafting and using SLOs), and will offer some specific insights into how they are supporting the implementation of SLOs locally.
The pre-reading for this webinar is the updated paper provided by Scott, Considerations for Analyzing Educators' Contributions to Students Learning in Non-text Subjects and Grades with a Focus on Student Learning Objectives.
Scott also has provided SCEE members with two resources that will be of interest, Approaches and Considerations for Incorporating Student Performance Results from Non-Tested Grades into Educator Effectiveness Determinations and A Survey of Approaches Used to Evaluate Educators in Non-Test Grades and Subjects.
Thursday's webinar is co-sponsored with West Wind Education Policy Inc. This special series is open to all CCSSO members, as well as to EducationCounsel's Teacher and Leader Evaluation Network.
Feel free to pose questions as a comment to this blog or email circe@westwinded.com or hollyb@ccsso.org.
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