Transcription
Welcome to this third and final part in the co-teaching video training series provided by our department, which now focuses on co-assessing. My name is Dr. Derrick Riddle. I'm an assistant professor here at CSU Stanislaus in the Department of Teacher Education. The purpose of this training is to provide you with an understanding of the components of co-assessing so that you may apply this framework to your own efforts at co-assessing and be able to self-assess your efficacy towards effective co-assessing. Again, I would like to thank our partners at Cal Poly; most of the ideas discussed in this training are supported by the research done by our friends there. So let's dive right in.
Co-assessing is one of the three core components of the co-teaching model. Co-teaching is comprised of co-planning, co-instructing, and co-assessing. This particular training will focus on co-assessing. Much like co-planning, there are five categorical foci of co-assessing, and they are: reflection practices, discourse, tone, stance of co-teachers, and productivity. You may notice that the last four components are identical to the last four components in the co-planning. This is true; those same core components will be repeated and needing to be focused on to ensure effective co-assessing. Please feel free to refer to the rubric while we discuss these next few slides, as well as to stop the training when prompted or when needing to review the rubric.
After co-planning a lesson and implementing it through co-instructing, the natural next step will be to reflect on how the students performed and/or how effective the instruction was delivered. However, the practice of reflection needs to be effective in order to produce further and more productive co-planning and co-instructing sessions. When analyzing student performance, you will want to ensure that your analysis is centered on clear and accurate data. Unless your student data is accurate, you may fall prey to drawing false conclusions about your student learning. Your analysis should also be focused on outcomes aligned with specified criteria, as well as deciphering the patterns and trends in the data for the whole class, specific subgroups of interest, as well as individual students. For instance, you may want to examine how the class performed and in what categories they may have excelled in and in which categories they may need improvement. You may also want to break this down further by subgroups—for example, your English language learners, your students with special needs, your gifted students, as well as your school-challenged students or students that we typically refer to as at-risk. And you may even want to go further to examine individual student scores and performance. Once this analysis is complete, you will then be in a better position to plan next steps.
You may also want to reflect on instructional effectiveness. You're going to continue to focus on clear and accurate data, but with a focus on those instructional practices that you as co-teachers enacted during the co-instruction and how that aligned with the intended outcomes, as well as how it affected students. So, for example, you may have planned a new activity to help students understand the concept you taught. During the co-assessing reflection stage, you may want to discuss how the students did in that activity or how you may have changed the approach. With this analysis of mine again, you will be in a better position to take next steps towards improved instruction.
As you engage in discourse during co-assessing, the same guiding questions as was provided in co-planning need to be considered regarding the type and amount of talking that occurred during the co-assessing session and how efficacious it was towards preparing for the next co-planning and/or co-instructing session. Again, efficacy is important to consider when reflecting on these questions. For example, when asking who does the talking, it's important to also follow up and ask, "Was it effective?" Sometimes one co-teacher may need to talk more in this session because they may have clearer analysis or insight into the assessment process, as long as both parties feel they have opportunities to contribute in meaningful ways—as that is what is important here. The same is true with the type and purpose of the talk; the context will determine the effectiveness of the co-assessing session and this sub-component. There may be times when you have to inquire more, or other situations where making statements will be needed. Finally, it's important that both co-teachers agree to the ideas and the decisions made about the next steps. Now, at this point, feel free to stop and discuss these concepts together and to self-assess your understanding.
To reiterate, your body language and intonation communicate much more than what you say as to whether you are actively engaged in the co-assessing session. So make sure to sit facing each other, close enough to hear and exchange discourse, and with an attitude that shows you are a willing participant. Not doing so may create a negative atmosphere during the co-assessing session and result in ineffective planning and instruction. Furthermore, the stance of the cooperating teacher and the teacher candidate is important to consider; it is important in considering the effectiveness of the co-assessing session. While at times one person may take a more leading role, eventually you want to move towards being active collaborators in a mutually beneficial relationship. Now, again, at this point, feel free to stop and discuss these concepts together and to self-assess your understanding.
Finally, at the end of the co-assessing session, much like the co-planning session, you will want to reflect on the productivity of the session. Now, to provide you an effective visual model of co-assessing, myself and, again, my colleague Dr. John McFarland filmed a portion of our co-assessing session to highlight some of the criterion of co-assessing. Our hope is that you will analyze and evaluate our exemplars in supporting your efforts to co-assess effectively. Here is the video.
I'm going to preface our video; Dr. McFarland and I were just talking, so you'll notice in this session that we are not necessarily in an office and we're not necessarily in a physical space; we're now in an online space, and I think it's good that we model this. So, Dr. McFarland and I have been really busy, and because of which it's been hard to connect and to have this conversation and to co-assess together. And I think this replicates truly what it's like out in the field; sometimes you're busy, you just got a lot going on, you're having to cover people's preps, or just the variety of things that happen during that prep period that makes this conversation sometimes difficult to have. So we wanted to model in this last and third training session that you can still have this conversation over the phone, via, you know, Google Hangout or Skype or whatever your medium is, and still have a productive co-assessing session in an online space. So I'm going to go ahead and pull up our data, and we've already been talking about it, and we'll just… well, get going. So Dr. McFarland, if you wanted to share some of your insights on what you thought about this data…
So yeah, based off of this, the data that we're looking at right now, we're looking at the results of the 3900 midterm, and we have three different sections here: for synthesis, professionalism, and engagement. And you’ve—we—you’ve done a great job at breaking it down between advanced, proficient, emerging, and complete. What’s already pointing out is that everyone did it, which is great.
Yeah, right. So we don't have to worry about following up with students to actually turn in their material. Yeah, so that's promising. Other thing that kind of pointed out or it just kind of jumped out at me is the synthesis piece of the assessments, and this is where it's really kind of important for all students to understand how they make those connections—are in those—that's their learning and 3902 on what they have produced on their assessments. And looking here is that the majority of them place either advanced or proficient, which is fantastic. The three that are emerging—that's where I think we could look to provide some further support for those particular students.
Or anything?
I think so too, and it's just a matter of, you know, the—the challenge that we had obviously on these classes that we had multiple evaluators, and so I think there was still some calibration issues that happen there, and not to suggest that they're not emerging or there's some concern, but also when I look at the data, just to show that it's accurate and reliable or as these three, I maybe we need to go back and look at, you know, were they emerging from the same evaluator or were they emerging from different evaluators, right, and just hone in a little bit more on maybe what those issues are before then I start figuring out how to remediate them.
Yeah, that's a good—that's a good point because, you know, if they are coming from the same evaluator, then we might want to look to perhaps even in a pull those aside and re-evaluate how great are on our own and just to kind of look at those results in comparison to what they produce with us.
Okay, so that could be…
Yeah, I mean that's something to really consider as well.
Right. And then I think, I don't know, I mean the question becomes if they truly are emergent, you know, what are some of those gaps looking back—as to again reasons why those gaps are there. At this point, I haven't had too many absenteeism issues, so I don't think that would be the case. It may just be truly I'm not quite grasping these concepts, and so my first strategy would be obviously figuring that out and honing in what those issues are and then… yeah, maybe just an office visit to sit down and have some informal conversations here in the second half of the semester about those—those pieces that they seem to be missing, which then speaks really to this assessment because I this point it would be interesting to—to do even do some data comparison to say, okay, these three students, how they've been performing in general in my class, so right if they've been acing the assessments in terms of just a basic knowledge level, that's interesting for me, you know, and then now that I've asked them to step it up a little bit and start articulating their philosophy in connection with it that they can't—again, there's—there's this is one data piece that I think I can really nuance out to see what is the issue and how can I best support them.
Mm-hmm. And it also makes me wonder what type of students they are—are they English language learners?
Yeah, because that could be another piece to the puzzle that, you know, kind of hinders on their true synthesis of that information, right? And so, you know, if that is the case, what can we do about it in—right—or to, you know, better support them, you know, with perhaps even the platform that we're actually using, making sure that we are doing those check-ins and provide even—I mean—didn't video information that kind of coincides with some of the readings that they're doing as well.
Yeah, so that could be another piece that we want to take a look at as well.
Cool. So I think those are two great pieces. I think it's funny that you mentioned the equity piece. If we're just moving ahead, you know, professionalism, we got most of them dressing professionally well for this midterm assignment, but you have this one that isn't, so then it makes me wonder, when you talk about, you know, the equity piece of it all, who's that one? And looking back at—again, I got to go back into that data and really nuance out who was—who was the one and what was going on there. Is it an equitable to say that just because, you know, maybe they were as professional addresses they could be considering their circumstances?
Three points—good. So things to think about. I think this last piece too—I'm really interested in what we can do next steps on—on engagement because engagement in this piece was—hey, you need to teach us—I mean, at this point you've had current event article opportunities where you've done a mini-teaching kind of thing for a couple minutes, getting used to teaching in front of a group. Now I've had to do it again in a midterm, maybe with a smaller group, and again in about six weeks you're gonna do it again for a final where you're doing it in front of the group again, and the engagement is still low, so it makes me wonder what can I do to ensure that these teachers are becoming more again engaging teachers, right? And, you know…
And that's a great point. And what's interesting is in that particular category of engagement, you've got—it's kind of across the board where you have split—11 advanced, 10 proficient, and 10 emerging. And now again, the redefining what emergent really means, right, is—is something that we can also look into. And again, perhaps even for the future, we might want to break down these particular categories and what does it mean to be an advanced engaged—that doesn’t mean to be proficient engaged—ryangen engaged—in what I have you. So to actually provide a more clear-cut sort of type of rubric for our students might be another piece that we want to look at for—for future clarification. Or the other thing too that we can also promote during class is, you know, always bring to the forefront like what you are seeing with—with—with me teaching and you teaching is that we are modeling good teaching practices. Yeah, and so what are we doing in order to keep you engaged—to keep it active? So certain things that we can also supplement as part of our course is to, you know, provide other types of videos, meetings, links to active engaged learning, right, and, you know, types of strategies and techniques in order to up their game themselves.
Alright. We can even consider doing small little offshoot, you know, like little openings if you will to—to our—to our classes where it's just a quick introduction to an active learning experience.
Yeah, see them saying…
Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm kind of thinking what we might want to go about route where it's just always in the background and we're trying to keep them just reiterating that idea.
Yeah, exactly. And I love—I love that too, ‘cause you're really good at—it's this idea that we are actively engaging them in class, but it's that metacognitive process that we—that again that I fail at doing at times and saying, hey, how did I just engage you? What were some of the techniques? I think ‘cause we're doing it—it's just a matter of making sure they recognize what we're doing, how we're doing it, and internalized like…
And I agree with them to make the switch between teacher from student to teacher, right?
I mean, over and—exactly. And I, on the last point too, I just—I think the rubric is another piece to that we have to continue to flush out because again that advanced descriptor was left a lasting impression, and then the efficient one was, you know, unique and creative, and then emerging was traditional and dry. And if I think about the emerging, that was very clear-cut—if you were just standing up sharing your PowerPoint, it was—it was traditional, it was dry, and that's something we can work on, but that lasting impression language between that and unique and creative maybe gets a little bit vague, and so it's—I think that's it. I think it's just coming to the idea that we can really hone in on the fact that you were traditional and dry—you know, you didn't give us time to process, you didn't do anything that really stood out—and then the other ones we can really flush out a little bit more, so…
Yeah.
Well, cool. I like it. Yeah, I think these are great next steps.