Differentiated Assessment E-Book

Evangeline Harris Stefanakis

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 199

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

A comprehensive assessment system for working with underperforming students This book describes a comprehensive assessment system especially appropriate for multilingual and "differentiated" classrooms with large numbers of underperforming students. Drawing from Multiple Intelligences theory, the approach is specifically aimed at helping teachers understand how each student learns and how best to tailor instruction to serve individual students' needs. Although the program makes use of conventional standardized tests and disability screenings, it places special importance on two approaches in particular: Student Portfolio Assessments and Personalized Learning Profiles. * Provides detailed guidance and practical tools (including a DVD) for implementing successful portfolio and "profile" practices in the classroom * Includes real-world examples of model assessment programs from five schools * Explains how to integrate assessment into the instructional process as well as how the portfolio program can be used Formal profiles provide vital information about each student's cultural background, interests, strengths, and capabilities as well as their individual learning and language needs.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

More Praise for Differentiated Assessment

Jossey-Bass Teacher

Title Page

Copyright

About This Book

Dedication

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Part I: The Context of Learning for Today and Tomorrow

Chapter 1: Education for the 21st Century

Addressing the Landscape of Assessment Policies and Practice

To Sum Up

Chapter 2: Differentiated Instruction Starts with Differentiated Assessments

A Window into Learners' Abilities: Adolescents with Learning Challenges

The Demographic Landscape of Assessment Policies and Practice

A Differentiated Assessment System: A Sociocultural Approach

A Comprehensive Assessment System in a High School in the Bronx

To Sum Up

Part II: Case Studies of Differentiated Assessment

Chapter 3: Differentiated Assessment In Middle Schools

Case Studies in Developing Differentiated Assessment

Grant as Catalyst: A Community Designs a System of Differentiated Assessment

Leaders' Lessons: Looking at Students' Work Makes Learning Visible

Building a Collaborative Culture: Key Practices Structure Assessment Conversations

Differentiated Assessment Guides Instruction: Portfolio Rubrics as Common Criteria

Institutionalize Portfolios for Grading and Conferences: Celebrating Student Work

Leaders' Stories: Identifying the Assets of Diverse Groups of Language Learners

Teachers in Middle School Create Classroom Assessment Systems: Setting Standards

Teacher's Classroom Assessment Is Based on “Sitting Beside” the Language Learner

How Portfolios Help Teachers Become Researchers of Individuals

Profiles and Portfolios: The Window into the Learner's Mind and Potential

Reaching Every Language Learner Personally: Creating a Profile

Good Seeds Grow in Good Cultures: Teachers Create a Portfolio Culture for Learning

To Sum Up

Chapter 4: Differentiated Assessment in High Schools

Why Differentiate the Assessment? A Story of High Schools' Challenges

Differentiating Learners: Knowing the Adults and Children as a Community

Differentiated Assessment: Developing a Classroom Assessment System

Digital Portfolios Introduced as Personal Stories: Windows into the Learner's Mind

Guidelines for Classroom Assessment: Creating/Maintaining Portfolios

To Sum Up

Chapter 5: Classroom Assessment with Digital Portfolios

Differentiated Assessment: Seeing the Learner's Abilities

Making Learning Visible with Portfolios

Portfolio Assessment at New Day Academy

New Faculty Getting Started with Digital Portfolios

The Class and the Challenges

Students and Teacher at Work

To Sum Up

Part III: Seeing Students' Assets: Differentiated Assessment Guides Instruction

Chapter 6: Differentiated Assessment, Instruction, and Accommodation

Knowing Your Learner: Understand Cultural and Linguistic Assets

Knowing Your Learners: Building a Comprehensive Assessment System

Using the Student's Assets: Sociocultural Framework to Differentiate Assessment

Classroom Performance Assessments

Differentiated Instruction: Knowing Your Learners and Finding Their Strengths

Creating a Student Profile: A Teacher's Story of Differentiated Instruction

Differentiated Instruction: Knowing Individual Learners' Multiple Intelligences

To Sum Up

Chapter 7: How Differentiated Assessment Guides Instruction

Knowing Your Learners: Using Portfolios to Differentiate Assessment

Multiple Entry Points to Instruction: The Physical Environment Supports Learning

Anchor Activities and Flexible Grouping

Differentiating Instruction: Lesson and Unit Development for Secondary Students

Voices from the Field: Differentiated Instruction at the High School Level

Differentiated Curriculum: Meeting the Needs of All Learners

Implementing Differentiated Assessment and Instruction in the Classroom

To Sum Up

Appendix: DVD Table of Contents

References and Resources

INDEX

How to Use the DVD-ROM

System Requirements

Using the DVD-ROM with Windows

In Case of Trouble

More Praise for Differentiated Assessment

“A wonderful contribution for any educator who wishes to meaningfully and fairly assess our ever-growing pool of diverse children left behind. Stefanakis's insight and practical advice is useful for all students but essential for the learning different—most especially English Language learners and learning disabled students.”

—Carola Suárez-Orozco, author, Children of Immigration, professor of Applied Psychology, New York University

“Evangeline Stefanakis's latest is the best book that's been written on how to meaningfully assess diverse students' learning. Educators and policymakers alike will benefit from a close reading of this important work.”

—Tony Wagner, co-director, Change Leadership Group, Harvard Graduate School of Education, author of Change Leadership and The Global Achievement Gap

“Stefanakis demonstrates an effective way of bridging the gap between diverse students and schools, where the entire school community—administrators, teachers, students, and parents—has an opportunity to explore counternarratives for itself and for the youths' futures.”

—Maria E. Torres-Guzman, professor of Bilingual/Bicultural Education, Columbia University

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Differentiated Assessment: How to Assess the Learning Potential of Every Student. Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Jossey-Bass, an Imprint of Wiley. www.wiley.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stefanakis, Evangeline Harris.

Differentiated assessment: how to assess the learning potential of every student / Evangeline

Harris Stefanakis; foreword by Deborah Meier.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-23081-7 (pbk.); ISBN 978-0-470-90962-1 (ebk.); ISBN 978-0-470-90963-8 (ebk.); ISBN 978-0-470-90965-2 (ebk.)

1. Learning ability—Testing. 2. Remedial teaching. 3. Individualized instruction. 4. Portfolios in education. I. Title.

LB1134.S67 2011

371.26'4—dc22

2010032219

About This Book

Is using a standardized test to determine an adolescent's future really what the 21st century calls for in preparing learners to be global citizens? Does the fact that many adolescents do not test well but speak two languages, can fix a computer, and earn significant money on eBay count? Is an education system that relies on paper-and-pencil tests to make the most critical judgments about students using the best 21st-century systems to assess and teach all students?

This book describes a comprehensive assessment system especially appropriate for multilingual and differentiated classrooms with large numbers of diverse adolescent students. Drawing from Multiple Intelligences theory, the approach is specifically aimed at helping teachers and leaders understand how each student learns and how best to tailor instruction to serve individual students' needs. Although the program makes use of conventional standardized tests and disability screenings, it places special importance on two approaches in particular: Student Portfolio Assessments and Personalized Learning Profiles.

The book and its corresponding DVD:

Provide detailed guidance and practical tools for assessing a diverse array of studentsInclude real-world examples of model assessment programs from numerous schoolsExplain how to integrate assessment into the instructional processOffer downloadable forms and helpful videos to help educators implement these practices

This book is dedicated to the memory of Theodore Sizer, who asked me to document new assessments for high schools in which he felt the students deserved ways for their teachers to see their assets. His reminders offered me inspiration always.

About the Author

EVANGELINE HARRIS STEFANAKIS, Ed.D., is a Faculty Fellow in the Provost's Office in Assessment and Evaluation and an associate professor in educational leadership and development at Boston University. Previously she was an associate research scholar and faculty with the National Academy of Teaching Excellence at Teachers College Columbia University, where she was working with the International and Transcultural Studies faculty to better understand learning challenges, leadership, and team building. For eleven years, previously, she served as a faculty member at Harvard Graduate School of Education and was a senior associate at Programs in Professional Education developing training institutes for school and community leaders.

As a researcher, trainer, and program developer who links theory to practice, Dr. Harris Stefanakis is currently developing leadership programs in the United States and abroad. Her teaching and consulting experiences focus on school reform and leadership in multilingual and international settings, most recently in the United States, Greece, Norway, and China. As a researcher, frequent speaker, and writer, she focuses on understanding how best to assess and teach all learners from diverse language, learning, and cultural backgrounds.

Acknowledgments

To those learners in secondary schools whose abilities shine in assessments that show their unique profiles, projects, and performances—the students of PS 188 (the Island School); IS 131 Dr. Sun Yat Son Middle School, of New York's lower East Side; Fannie Lou Freedom High School and New Day Academy of the South Bronx.

To the leaders in New York, the stars who see “abilities” in all children—Principals Dr. Barbara Slatin and her staff of PS 188, Jane Lehrach and the IS131 faculty, Nancy Mann of Fannie Lou Freedom High School and her teams, and the entire New Day Academy community of leaders.

To my colleagues at Teachers College and the National Academy of Teaching Excellence—Dr. Maria Torres Guzman, Dr. Douglas Wood, Dr. Veronica Denes, Claire Evelyn, Joanna Zampas, Ellen Scheinbach, Ellie Drago Severson, and the advisors to New York City's high schools.

To graduate students who were my team of scholars who captured these students' work—Amber Trujillo, Lou Lahana, Lauren Karp, Ruth Lopez, and Carol (Tao) Lin, from Teachers College.

To my editorial collaborators and DVD creators: Dody Riggs for editorial support on each chapter and to almost Doctor Colby Young of Boston University, who edited and helped create all parts of the DVD, I owe so much to what you taught me about getting this work done for others. To Andrew So, who authored Chapter Five, admiration for his teaching story.

Finally, to the essential characters who remind me how children are unique, intelligent, and way ahead of me in learning and thinking, my own three children, Rianna, Nikias, and Alexandros, who inspire me every day.

Foreword

This is a book about reality-based schooling and the kind of assessment that can't be so easily manipulated as so many of the other data we are inundated with these days. Here is an approach to data that captures the real state of knowledge and skill that each student possesses and enables us to make judgments that are useful to student, family, teacher, and anyone else with the time to look and see. There is a real need for the kind of differentiation that Evangeline Harris Stefanakis writes about here. Her extraordinary work in the use of portfolios of student work as an approach to assessment and accountability is critical in order to achieve an authentic approach to the simple fact that we are all unique and the world needs our uniqueness.

I've watched over the years as she developed the work she presents in this book. We have spent many hours discussing students together as she watched them carefully to see what classroom teachers often lack the time to see: how they differ from each other, express their ideas, and respond to the classroom world. Harris Stefanakis took the idea of assessment for learning not as evidence of achievement but as a way to understand the varying ways in which such achievement displays itself and how this could be a tool for teaching and learning. It both analyzes and honors struggling students as they work and practice to achieve at a high level.

We are so accustomed to the demand for judgment that standardized tests are intended to give us that we've paid insufficient attention to the craft of diagnosis. Taking apart test scores is too often an exercise in futility. We pore over items or collections of items for meaning that they cannot offer those of us who seek to foster potential in individuals—unless that child is there to interpret for us. But the portfolios that Harris Stefanakis draws on help us see behind the work itself into the child's intention and meaning.

Too often also we see the differences among children as deficits and bemoan how they complicate our task as educators. But Harris Stefanakis quotes a New York City high school teacher who offers quite a different vision: she is discovering that “our students are the hidden treasure that we are reaching for” and that these students have too often hidden themselves as a response to timidity and safety.

This book is more important than ever before, coming at a time when we are being pushed to see children in clusters of types or categories, generally with numbers attached. New York City, like many other communities, divides its student population into groups labeled 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s based on artificial test distinctions. Sometimes 1s are tops and sometimes 4s are, but we mistakenly think that in this labeling and categorizing, we are more accurately providing a framework for our roles as adults.

In fact, we as professional educators are wasting our time with a diagnosis that leaves the child entirely aside. We need instead to confront the reality of how people learn: those students who confuse us most, who seem most unreachable, are those we need to see as whole people. Some kids obviously present themselves in ways that easily fit into curricular frames and move along a visibly upward-moving line toward success as ranked in scores. But it's those who don't who frustrate teachers and frustrate the students themselves. They need our help (as do their families) in finding the threads that are woven together into a powerful pattern. We all seek to catch a glimpse of it, and then enlarge it and treasure it.

Modern technology, Harris Stefanakis assures me, will make this task easier. As a Luddite, I take that on faith. And I have a lot of faith in her based on mutual experiences we have undergone together. So I toss my technological timidity aside and urge readers to see how she puts her skills of old-fashioned observation, documentation, and keeping track of student learning together with new-fangled technology.

Differentiated Assessment is an important book that will be useful for elementary and secondary schools, but it is aimed above all at that most critical link between them: early adolescents. If we can do a better job at this transitional moment, we may do for children's learning curves what we haven't been able to do with Wall Street. In fact, this book should be read not only by those closest to the schoolhouse but by the policymakers and business community whose impatience with school reform often misses the qualities that tomorrow's educational system needs to embody. We can't build a better tomorrow if we aren't more clearly seeing the children as they are today.

Deborah Meier

Hillsdale, New York

November 2010

Introduction

Something happens to learners when they enter middle and high school. Their learning and our teaching seem to get out of sync, and they know more about what happens outside the daily life of classrooms than about what they learn in school. Perhaps we are not seeing how smart these students really are.

It's time for us to reconsider what it means to be “smart” and how we assess students' abilities in educational settings. Are the 21st-century learning environments we call schools designed to reveal and teach to the abilities of the learners they serve? Several critical questions plague today's educators as they strive to develop programs and policies that reach and teach every child:

1. How do we educate today's diverse population of adolescents to become tomorrow's global citizens?

2. How can research on learning and teaching help update educational assessment policies and practices?

3. How do we comprehensively assess what these individuals do know and need to know?

4. How do we “differentiate assessment” to address diverse learning abilities?

5. How does differentiated assessment lead to differentiated instruction so that schools can truly leave no child behind?

These are the essential questions that guide Differentiated Assessment.

About Differentiated Assessment

The answer to these questions for leaders, educators, and parents is simple. Education for the 21st century requires classrooms that can personalize how we assess and teach all learners. We need educators who are equipped with classroom practices that include both the differentiated assessment and instruction to know more about each learner's abilities and capitalize on his or her strengths as a catalyst to learning.

This book and DVD of assessment tools, student portfolios, and resources chronicle best practices in innovation in differentiated assessment from New York public middle and high schools. Each chapter is illustrated on the accompanying DVD with cases of real students and assessment tools and strategies that support the learning of both students and their teachers.

The DVD included with this book contains PDFs and templates developed by educators and specialists from grades 7 through 12 to illustrate whole school models and classroom-based designs. These materials provide teachers with proven assessment strategies that will help tailor learning to adolescent students in middle and high schools.

Chapter One, Education for the 21st Century: Diverse Students and Learning Challenges, answers the question of how we educate today's diverse population of adolescents to become tomorrow's global citizens. It offers stories from urban classrooms and data from urban public school districts as clear evidence of the problems in current U.S. assessment policy and programs under No Child Left Behind and related legislative mandates for high-stakes testing for minority populations.

Part One of the accompanying DVD provides actual digital portfolios of diverse learners in grades 5 through 10 that demonstrate problem-solving skills evident in projects in English, math, science, and social studies, as well as other talent areas.

Chapter Two, “Differentiated Instruction Starts with Differentiated Assessments,” offers teachers and leaders tools and an assessment framework for asking the key questions:

Who are our learners?Are we finding all of our learners' abilities or deficits?

The chapter provides in-depth case studies of teachers' differentiated assessment systems that capture the assets their students bring to the learning environment. The book and DVD show how to create a Learner's Profile through units using reflective study and interviews focused on “All About Me” as an autobiographical project.

The DVD material for this chapter offers assessment tools for giving feedback and engaging students in critical dialogue on what they did well and what still needs work. These materials offer a collection of resources for defining assessment purposes, knowing your learners, examining performance assessment designs, and using multiple intelligence theory to design learner profiles to better understand individuals.

Chapter Three, “Differentiated Assessment in Middle Schools: A Window into Learners' Abilities,” describes how a school community (the Island School in New York City) created a system of differentiated assessment over three years by applying New York State standards without standardization. The DVD materials for this chapter provide tools to bring together professional learning communities of teachers who use collaborative assessment conferences to work on classroom practices. The materials can be used to design a comprehensive schoolwide assessment system. These materials guide readers through outlining a portfolio table of contents, creating a standards-based design and rubrics, and developing rubrics for English/language arts, math, social studies, and science.

Both the chapter and DVD offer strategies and tools to differentiate assessment in curriculum that involves project-based learning. Specific strategies for middle and high school communities are described, including:

Collaborative Assessment Conferences: Seeing the Details of LearningProfiles and Portfolios: The Window into Their Mind and PotentialReaching Every Language Learner Personally: Creating a Profile

Chapter Four, “Differentiated Assessment in High Schools: A Systemic Approach,” features students and teachers of the South Bronx who experiment with differentiated assessment, beginning in the area of science and eventually covering all core subject areas. The chapter provides guidelines for leaders and teachers to understand:

Differentiating Learners: Knowing Adults and Adolescents as a CommunityDigital Portfolios as Personal Stories: A Window in the Learner's MindGuidelines for Classroom Assessment: Creating and Maintaining Portfolios

In the accompanying section of the DVD, tools for a high school classroom created at Fannie Lou Freedom High School are presented, including a Multiple Intelligences Inventory, All About Me templates, checklists and work tags for reflection on assignments, and a monthly review to document learning over time.

Chapter Five, “Classroom Assessment with Digital Portfolios: A Teacher's Account,” written by Andrew So, describes how he started from the beginning to introduce differentiated assessment into his curriculum with the group of English language learners and students with disabilities that he served. Andrew, a ninth-grade teacher at New Day Academy in the Bronx, describes the planning he did, the coaching that supported his growth, his direct instruction with students, his planning tools, and samples of guidelines he used to create differentiated assessment using portfolios as comprehensive assessment for his middle or high school classrooms in English/language arts and mathematics.

Chapter Six, in Part Three of the book, combines the whole process of differentiated assessment, instruction, and accommodation. Chapter Six materials on the accompanying DVD include specific examples of how teachers and leaders use differentiated assessment to personalize instruction based on a learner's profile, samples of student work, and reflections on the process and products of learning over time. Chapter Seven, “How Differentiated Assessment Guides Instruction,” provides some voices from the field on the topic.