A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

CHAPTER 6

Part 3

School Organizational Structures

Certain school organizational structures can also serve as facilitators or barriers in teacher appropriation of new assessment tools. This is particularly true when an assessment is intended to be used regularly, to be integrated with instruction, and when successful use of an assessment requires or is enhanced by coordination among teachers. School organizational facilitators in assessment reform include:

• Time. The provision of time for teachers to work with and discuss the assessment can be crucial to the success of an assessment reform effort. This time may be either general or specific in purpose ? that is, release time and joint planning time may be provided for teachers to plan for a variety of activities, including performance assessments, or release time or time for participation in study groups may be provided with the explicit purpose of supporting the assessment reform.
• Leadership. Strong leadership for assessment reform may be embodied in a single strong leader at the school or district. Alternatively, an entire school may be quite progressive in its educational philosophy, inspiring teachers to actively pursue improved assessment practices.

Both of these two factors can provide a powerful impetus for effecting assessment reform.

Time

Our case studies demonstrate that when time is freed up for teachers to work with assessments ? to plan jointly for integrated assessments, to discuss and share experiences with other teachers, or to devote time to assessment-related research and development work ? teachers gain valuable institutional support that fosters their appropriation of new assessment methods.

Teachers gain access to time to undertake such activities in one of three ways:

• Time is legislated into the school calendar (e.g., daily, weekly, or biweekly) for teachers to devote to activities outside the classroom during times that might normally be considered class time. The message that the school values the time teachers devote to improving their skills is manifested through this institutionally supported time.
• Time is provided occasionally or intermittently. For example, a small number of release days are provided for teachers who undertake specific responsibilities for assessment development.
• Time is not provided (specific or related to the assessment). Teachers, however, often organize support activities on their own time (after school and on weekends) because they believe these activities to be valuable to their teaching and to their students. Many teachers who do not have access to institutionally provided time commit themselves to spending their own time honing their teaching skills.

Exhibit 6-12 illustrates the relationship between the way in which time is provided to teachers to work with the assessment (regularly, intermittently, or not at all) and the level of teacher appropriation of the assessment. Exhibit 6-13 summarizes the time accommodations made for teachers at each of the 16 participating schools ? excepting professional development and scoring activities ? specifically intended to accommodate their use of the new assessment (or the assessment and related reforms).

Examples of how teachers use the time provided and their testimony to how valuable institutionalized provision of time is to them are illustrated below; when appropriate, uses of time by teachers who devote their own time to furthering assessment reform (and their own appropriation of the assessment technology) are explicated as well. The uses teachers make of time fall into three broad categories:

• Development of assessment tasks and scoring rubrics;
• Teacher-initiated study and discussion groups; and
• Joint planning time.

Time to Develop Tasks and Rubrics and Score Assessments

Teachers working with the most time-intensive assessment systems testify to the importance of release time from regular teaching duties. For some teachers, this time is institutionalized through regular early release of students from class (generally once each week or every other week). Additionally, teachers at several schools have received release time to support their endeavors on behalf of assessment and associated reforms. ⁶ These teachers all suggest that this time away from the classroom is crucial to fostering their ability to develop assessment tasks and rubrics and to work with assessment systems.

For example, teachers at Ni?os Bonitos have used some of their grant money to pay for release time. They use this time to support the implementation of their electronic portfolio assessment and to develop new assessment tasks and rubrics. They have also restructured their school day so that every teacher teaches only one afternoon class, freeing up the rest of the afternoon for planning time.

Teachers at two high schools working on piloting and developing state-initiated performance assessments ? Crandall High School in Oregon and Hudson High School in New York ? provide contrasting examples of how teachers have reacted to release time or its absence. Teachers at Hudson High School felt a great need for release time but had none available to them (at least, none specifically to support assessment reform). These teachers say they have devoted numerous hours to developing performance assessments to replace segments of the New York Regents Exams. However, with the exception of some small financial compensation for time spent planning over the summer, these teachers have not received any release time or regularly scheduled joint planning time beyond what all teachers in their school and district receive. Although these teachers are very committed to the work they are doing and believe strongly that their assessments benefit their students, they say that such a labor-intensive assessment system should not be mandated, at least not in the absence of substantial support ? both in terms of professional development and time ? for teachers.

Teachers at Crandall High School also agreed to develop pilot assessments for Oregon's assessment reform efforts. However, unlike teachers at Hudson, these teachers both participated in structured activities associated with Oregon's assessment reform and also were provided with additional release time (5 days) to devote to their development work. In this case, however, the release time did not contribute to the ultimate appropriation of the assessment system. Though teachers worked hard to develop appropriate assessment tasks and to score them with the state's generic scoring rubric, most of them opted to be compensated financially for this development work rather than accept the release time (teachers had a choice between release time and compensation). Ultimately, in 1994-95, Crandall High opted out of the assessment pilot.

Time to Share Experiences and Knowledge

Several schools have institutionalized meetings among teachers that focus not on "business matters" but rather on discussions of experiences teachers are having with students ? including how they identified strengths and weaknesses in their students and how they might use or have used assessments effectively to identify students' modes of learning. In addition, in some cases, teachers have initiated their own study groups to support assessment reform.

Two schools in which these meetings take place regularly are Park Elementary and Ann Chester Elementary. At Park, all teachers who use the Primary Learning Record come together once a week to discuss their observations of children's learning and to share ideas about how best to use the assessment technique. Frequently, teachers will spend the time discussing a single child, focusing on evidence from the classroom that illustrates the child's learning style, including strengths and weaknesses, and the types of learning activities that would be well suited to the child. Teachers say that this time together looking in-depth at individual children is invaluable, in part because the in-depth analyses of individual children generally illuminates the learning of several other children at the same time, and in part because of the insights colleagues share with each other. Teachers at Park participate in these conversations both with teachers who use the PLeR (teachers who are at Park and at other schools) and schoolwide but not limited to PLeR users; these latter, schoolwide discussion periods are an institutionalized part of the Park educational program.

Teachers at both Park and Ann Chester have also initiated study groups in which teachers set reading assignments for themselves and discuss the relevance of what they read to their classrooms. Again, teachers say that the time spent in conversation with colleagues is very valuable to their ability to work with performance assessments and other reforms. In both of these two cases, teacher appropriation of new assessments is high, and in the case of Park in particular, this high level of appropriation seems clearly to be in part an effect of the extensive amount of time teachers spend communicating with one another.

Joint Planning Time

Time designated for teachers to spend planning together can be crucial, especially when assessments are designed to be integrated across subject areas or to tap cross-cutting, rather than subject-area-specific, skills. Most of the seven participant schools working with their own or national assessments have institutionalized joint planning time, sometimes in conjunction with team teaching.

Cooper Middle School provides an example of a school in which assessment reform is dependent upon teachers having regular opportunities to come together to plan instructional and assessment activities that will cut across subject areas. The school is organized into "families" ? groups of students and teachers who work together for most instruction ? and teachers who work together plan integrated activities. Teachers have 45 minutes of common planning time every day, time without which, teachers say, they could not possibly follow their restructured educational program.

Teachers at Sommerville High School who work with the College Board's Pacesetter program also found that their new approach to teaching mathematics required additional ? and joint ? planning time. The school's three Pacesetter teachers requested and obtained of their principal one additional planning period each day, a period that they could spend together to plan Pacesetter instruction. These teachers said that this extra time was very important in supporting their ability to adopt the new program of integrated curriculum, instruction, and assessment, which required teachers to dramatically modify their instructional and assessment techniques.

Several other schools have also supported education reform in general and, in some cases, assessment reform specifically, by providing teachers with extra joint planning time. At Noakes, Ni?os Bonitos, McGary, and Westgate, joint planning time is a regularly scheduled part of the school calendar (e.g., every other day at Westgate, once a week at McGary, and once every other week at Noakes and Ni?os Bonitos), and many teachers suggest that this time together outside the classroom is critical to planning ? and "appropriating" ? reforms.

Leadership

Leadership at the school level, and, in some cases, at the district level, can serve as an important facilitator of assessment reform, and of teacher appropriation of new assessments specifically. In addition, several participant schools describe the philosophy of their schools or districts as particularly "reform-minded," a philosophy that often lends administrators and teachers, at the very least, a willingness to experiment with new reforms. Exhibit 6-14 summarizes the type of leadership explicitly identified by teachers at each of the 16 participant schools. Several examples in which leadership at the school level ? either from an individual or from a shared philosophy ? clearly served as a strong impetus for assessment reform are described below.

Teachers at Ni?os Bonitos attribute their school's successful restructuring of classroom groupings and the school day, the development of language arts and mathematics scoring rubrics, and schoolwide use of portfolios to the leadership of their principal. A one-time California Principal of the Year, the principal was also selected to be a 1994-95 U.S. Department of Education Principal in Residence. Quite simply, this woman recognized frustration on the part of staff and students alike with the traditional program the school ran, required teachers to think about the kind of program that would make sense for the school's poor and multilingual population, and led the implementation of that program.

In at least two cases, leadership at the district level has inspired teachers to become active players in assessment reform. Teachers at Windermere Elementary School say that the ongoing success of their district's Sixth Grade Research Performance Assessment is largely attributable to the efforts of the district's Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction. In particular, they describe her relentless drive to push the district's 6th grade teachers to consensus when they revisit the assessment's scoring rubric each year, and they know that nobody works harder at the process than she does. Similarly, district administrators and a school principal in Harrison School District 2 spearheaded the district's literacy performance-based assessment and together developed the district's Assessment Academy. Teachers testify to the usefulness of the work these leaders carried out, commenting that they have not found it necessary to go outside the district to find the support they need to work with the new performance assessment.

Finally, teachers at some schools suggest that their schools tend to be "reform minded" and that this shared philosophy both leads them to dive into reform efforts and to be willing to invest the work necessary to discover whether or not a reform is useful or not. Teachers at both Park Elementary and Thoreau High School have long been innovators in education reform, operating programs for over 20 years that are now, in the 1990s, frequently turned to by other educators seeking models of what schools should look like.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have traced evidence in our data that point to the existence of facilitators and barriers in teacher appropriation of performance assessment technologies. Teacher appropriation of the assessment, we have argued, is a necessary prerequisite to any meaningful pedagogical change that will result in improved teaching and learning.

In sum, findings described in this section suggest that:

• Teachers who are involved in designing and implementing assessment systems are more likely to appropriate them, as a result of the sustained or focused thought teachers give to the problems of validly assessing what it is students know and can do.
• Teachers who work with assessments that are relatively loosely prescribed ? that is, assessments that leave, in all or in part, task specification, implementation and scoring procedures, and timelines to teachers' discretion ? are more likely to appropriate the assessment than are teachers who work with more tightly prescribed assessments. Again, the thought teachers devote to assessment design, here coupled with the flexibility to integrate the assessment with other teaching practices, fosters appropriation.
• Professional development opportunities support teacher appropriation of new assessments. However, some models of professional development work better than others. Specifically, collaborations with outside experts and attendance at the conferences, symposia, and institutes run by national education reform efforts more frequently provide information and experiences that teachers value and can translate into classroom practice than do more traditional train-the-trainer models of professional development. More importantly, professional development activities that focus on building teachers' capacity to work with performance-based assessment techniques have more substantial impacts than do activities that focus merely upon the mechanics and logistics of assessment administration.
• The compatibility of assessment reform with other facets of education reform or with other assessments serves as a facilitator of teacher appropriation. Teachers working with assessments that are unclearly aligned with efforts to revise curricula will typically bide their time, waiting for the whole system to become clear, before investing effort in appropriating the assessment. Similarly, performance assessments that do not compete with other elements of an assessment system are more likely to be appropriated than are performance assessments that represent no "value added" from teachers' perspective.
• Two school organizational factors ? regularly scheduled time for teachers to work with an assessment and leadership ? can also serve as powerful facilitators of teacher appropriation of assessments. Both factors communicate to teachers that the assessment reform effort is valued by the school or district and that the work teachers undertake to further that reform is valued as well.

In the next chapter, we turn to the effects performance assessments ? most apparent when teachers have appropriated them for regular use ? are having on teaching and learning in the classroom.

⁶Note again that release time provided for attendance at specific professional development activities is not included in this discussion of school organizational factors; rather the current discussion is limited to release time that is provided to support the reform but for which teachers direct their own activities.

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[Chapter 6: Cross-Case Analysis 3: Part 2 of 3] [Chapter 7: Cross-Case Analysis 4: Part 1 of 2]