The goal of this session is to build consensus around a purpose of assessment,
and robustly develop our problem of practice.
Summary of Meeting:
The meeting was well attended by 2nd-6th grade Teachers. We broke off into two teams to discuss the following guiding questions:
How do we know our students are on track towards academic Spanish and English Proficiency grades 2-5? What questions do we have?
Which tools and practices help us learn how to make adjustments to our instruction and resources to ensure our students are accessing the curriculum grades 2-5? What questions do we have?
Which areas of Bi-Literacy are we confident that we have current tools for data collection grades 2-5? What questions do we have?
Which areas of Bi-Literacy are we concerned that we lack tools for data collection grades 2-5? What questions do we have?
Does what we measure and what we need to measure change over the continuum of biliteracy reading development? If so, how? What questions do we have?
Teams then communicated out their BIG Ideas and questions to help narrow our purpose for meeting and problem of practice. Our problems of practice from this meeting on DL Assessment are:
1. Validity. Assessments currently in place have questionable validity. Both teams raised concerns about Rigby for the limited and translated, often confusing text, raising questions about whether Rigby is a valid measure of reading processing and comprehension. We recognize the tremendous subjectivity in comprehension depending upon the teachers point of view. We also recognized that our current assessment tools are not tied to any standard in particular, making it more difficult to align to continuums etc. Comments were made about assessment cultural bias as well. Additionally, we recognized the need for balanced assessment for formative and instructional purposes, as well as summative assessment for accountability and program monitoring.
2. Monolingual Paradigms in Assessment. The team recognizes that current systems of assessment do not consider the students holistic biliteracy but in fact measures them as either Spanish or English Readers. Both teams felt very strongly that this should be a priority in our future work. We had discussions around the phenemena of languages in contact and the lack of resources that support our dispositions around the normalcy of the Bilingual phenomena in the US.
3. Oral Academic Language. The Language development of our students and their reading comprehension and processing are tightly aligned; however, we have lacked the tools and resources to understand that link. Teams mentioned assessing reading comprehension in one language with students retelling in the other. We recognize that tools that are available to us, need further discovery and professional development so that our expertise as teachers of language, literacy and content and yield maximum benefit to our learners.
4. Goals of Assessment. For further discussion, we felt the goals of assessment need more attention. The concept of Mastery was brought up and whether Mastery of micro-skills is a desired endpoint. We were all very clear that assessment for decoding and fluency in Spanish are often empty sets of data for us. We recognize a continued need for professional development on Biliteracy and Language Acquisition.
Next Steps:
This initial meeting is part of coalition building around these and additional topics that will arise. The plan is to bring a team together regularly over the next year to develop our inquiry around these Big Ideas and Problems of practice. In doing so, we will make clearer our goals for assessment in DL classrooms, and if needed, make decisions for how we'll achieve them.
A huge shout-out to Marissa Nathan for spending time with our administrators to learn about Equity Language Literacy.
