Draw a grid of 9 dots on a piece of paper.

1. Draw a grid of 9 dots on a piece of paper. • Using only 4 straight lines and not lifting your pen/pencil off the paper, draw a line through each dot.

2. Taking Out the Garbage: Assessing Your R.E.A.L. Priorities Ryan Vranesich, Principal, Melvindale High School John O’Neill, Assistant Principal, Melvindale High School Katie Lewis, Instructional Coach, Melvindale High School

3. When You Have a Problem that is difficult to Solve: • Look to the experts • Think outside of the box

4. Takeaways: • Design, instruction and assessment are inescapably intertwined. • Time constraints in instruction is a rate-limiting factor that calls us to narrow our focus in design and assessment. • Priorities for design, instruction and assessment can be achieved through objective criteria

5. Understanding the Audience • Who are you? • Design • Instruction • Assessment • All 3 • What are your assumptions? • Raise your hand if you agree with the following:

6. Local assessments are good measures of student growth.

7. Assessment design will most likely alter curriculum design and instruction.

8. In order for a test to be valid, the test-taker needs to be personally invested.

9. Each state standard/national standard is more or less equally important to the program of education and should be equally instructed and assessed.

10. Teachers will most likely be fair judges of how much time to budget for each standard to be taught.

11. Eating carrots will improve your eyesight.

12. Context: Our Journey to Arrive at these Conclusions • New Administrative team 4 years ago • Came from the teaching ranks, so we understood issues with our assessment from that perspective. • Asked by the state to choose/design valid instruments to measure students’ growth for the purposes of teacher evaluation • Looked around at all the assessment tools:

13. Assessment Tools

14. Context: Our Journey to Arrive at these Conclusions • We’ve found that we can’t pick one assessment tool to accomplish all of our goals, but we also can’t pick 10. • When we use too many assessment tools, we become data rich and information poor. • Too much instructional time is devoted to assessments that don’t provide the information we need.

15. Context: Our Journey to Arrive at these Conclusions • Not happy with the choices we were seeing we asked the experts what would be the best way to do this, and they said:

16. Context: Our Journey to Arrive at these Conclusions • Then we went around to other high schools to see what they were doing and they said:

17. Context: Our Journey to Arrive at these Conclusions • We asked our attorneys what would actually hold up in court if it came to that and they said:

18. What Should We Do? • We decided to pick our poison. • We realized that we couldn’t do them all, so we decided to control as much as we possibly could. • What assessments do we have the most control over? • local assessments

19. Old Local Assessments -- a lot of garbage in! • Content or prompts were reviewed in depth immediately before the test • Extremely content-driven (as opposed to skills-based) • Comprehensive • Therefore, each standard, regardless of priority, holds the same weight • Data rich, information poor

20. Our Problem How do we design, instruct, and assess a curriculum that is more focused on the standards that will matter most to our students throughout their life? Answer: Look to experts! Think outside box!

21. Enter the work of Larry Ainsworth Ainsworth, L. (2003). Power Standards: Identifying the Standards that Matter the Most. Advanced Learning Press. Ainsworth, L. (2013). Prioritizing the Common Core: Identifying the Specific Standards to Emphasize the Most. Lead + Learn Press. His work helped us create some guidelines for our change process:

22. Guiding Belief #1: Instruction time is limited. • Instruction time is limited even more than you think. • The demands of national and state standards exceeds time available. • This creates a time budget for instruction • This is further amplified when you have students in need of remediation

23. Instruction Time • In a 2006 case study, researchers noted that the number of actual school days in a year is limited. • “Often, allocated time is spent not only on instruction, but also on the management of student behavior, routine paperwork, interruptions, delays, special events, and other off-task, off-topic activities and interactions.” • In the elementary school, about 14% of observed time was non-instructional. • In the middle school, nearly 40% was non-instructional. • In the high school, about 29% was non-instructional.

24. Guiding Belief # 2: If everything is important, nothing is important. Carrots don’t improve your eyesight, and there are some standards that aren’t as essential as others. • High Priority English Standard: • RI.9-10.2: Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text. • Low Priority English Standard: • RI.9-10.7: Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.

25. Guiding Belief #3: Priorities should be based on objective criteria. Teachers tend to pick priorities based on: • What they love teaching--e.g. The Urban Game • What they already have lessons for • What someone else in the department is teaching Instead, we need criteria that is REAL

26. E A L R Readiness Endurance Assessment Leverage This standard provides students with knowledge and skills essential for the next course, class, or grade level. This standard provides knowledge that is useful beyond one unit of study or a single test. This standard will be assessed on upcoming state or national exams. This standard will provide students with knowledge and skills that will be of value in multiple disciplines.

27. Prioritization Process • Each department prioritized their standards using the R.E.A.L. criteria. • We asked for consensus -- not averages. • If consensus did not exist, teachers had to talk it out. • Then they had to build their pacing guides with an 140 day allowance. • We are currently building assessments and rubrics.

28. Prioritization Example

29. You Try It • For the following standards, rank each criteria using a 1-3 scale. Hold up your hand with 1, 2, or 3 fingers. • 1 means it fits the least, 3 means it fits the most. • As we go through, keep a running tally. After all 4 criteria, you should get a score out of 12. • For the purposes of this activity, think quickly, and don’t second-guess yourself too much. (In a work setting, you’d consider the criteria much more deeply.) • For the “Assessment” category, consider any test you’re most interested in -- SAT/P-SAT, M-Step, NWEA, etc.

30. Standard A: Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of how key events or ideas develop over the course of the text. R Readiness This standard provides students with knowledge and skills essential for the next course, class, or grade level.

31. Standard A: Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of how key events or ideas develop over the course of the text. E Endurance This standard provides knowledge that is useful beyond one unit of study or a single test.

32. Standard A: Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of how key events or ideas develop over the course of the text. A Assessment This standard will be assessed on upcoming state or national exams.

33. Standard A: Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of how key events or ideas develop over the course of the text. L Leverage This standard will provide students with knowledge and skills that will be of value in multiple disciplines.

34. Standard B: Growth and Change – Explain the social, political, economic, and cultural shifts taking place in the United States at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century R Readiness This standard provides students with knowledge and skills essential for the next course, class, or grade level.

35. Standard B: Growth and Change – Explain the social, political, economic, and cultural shifts taking place in the United States at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century E Endurance This standard provides knowledge that is useful beyond one unit of study or a single test.

36. Standard B: Growth and Change – Explain the social, political, economic, and cultural shifts taking place in the United States at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century A Assessment This standard will be assessed on upcoming state or national exams.

37. Standard B: Growth and Change – Explain the social, political, economic, and cultural shifts taking place in the United States at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century L Leverage This standard will provide students with knowledge and skills that will be of value in multiple disciplines.

38. Reflect Talk with the person next to you. • Which standard did you rank higher? Why? • What might the implications be if you allotted the same amount of instructional time to both standards? • What might the implications be if you allotted the same number of questions on an assessment to both standards?

39. Guiding Belief #4: The most important standards get the largest portion of our time budget. • To ensure this, we used Gantt charts for pacing guides. • Every standard is still taught, but the lowest priority standards might be taught quite simply. • Ex. Elasticity of Demand • Not every standard needs to be summatively assessed.

40. Pacing Example

41. Guiding Beliefs #5: Only a few of the highest priority standards should be assessed for student growth. • Allows us to create high quality assessments: • Triangulated • Questions are at the appropriate level of Blooms/Depth of Knowledge • Stops the DRIP • Greater buy-in from teachers

42. Possible Assessment Items - Social Studies

43. In Summation: Our model is cyclical. Instruction that is centered around district initiatives, highest priority standards get the most time Assessments designed around categorically-prioritized standards Curriculum centered around categorically-prioritized standards Assessment Instruction Design 1 2 3

44. Results: It wasn’t easy. • Moving around of subjects (Science/Math) • Statistics was added into the curriculum at each level in the Math department. • Social Studies is placing a greater emphasis on Common Core skills • Shift to a greater emphasis on non-fiction in English • Interdepartmental conversations • Common approach to close reading & writing • Vertical and horizontal alignment • Common approach to word problems and constructed response items (Science and Math) • Shift from proficiency- to skills-based assessment items

45. Future Plans • Summatively assess a few things much more deeply • But continue to formatively everything else along the way • Mine the data much better • Get a lot more information out of the data • Begin tailoring our School Improvement plans and resources to our high-priority items • This is part of our needs assessment - Team up with community/corporate partners to enhance our real-world curriculum.

46. Remember the dots? • When we need a solution to a difficult problem, we have to think outside the box. • We have to stop thinking of design, instruction, and assessment as separate. • For the best solution, the most powerful solution, we must collaborate and focus on all three simultaneously.

47. Questions?

48. References Ainsworth, L. (2003). Power Standards: Identifying the Standards that Matter the Most. Advanced Learning Press. Ainsworth, L. (2013). Prioritizing the Common Core: Identifying the Specific Standards to Emphasize the Most. Lead + Learn Press. Behar-Horenstein, Linda. (2006). Classroom Instruction and the Loss of Instructional Time: A Case Study. Education and Society. 24. 10.7459/es/24.3.06. Many, T., & Horrell, T. (2014). Prioritizing the Standards using R.E.A.L Criteria. Tepsa News.