The Changing Assessment Landscape in Colorado
The Backdrop of Colorado
Coloradans are notoriously adventurous and independent and, as such, approaches to educational experiences for Colorado students are as varied and unique as the Colorado landscape. Fortunately, Colorado’s local control structure provides the opportunity for the state’s 178 school districts to make many significant decisions regarding K-12 public education; choices regarding curriculum, assessment, staffing, graduation requirements, and more can be largely customized to reflect local values, goals, and needs. Additionally, over the past 15 years, policies such as the landmark Colorado Achievement Plan for Kids (CAP4K), the Student-Centered Accountability Program, Individual Career and Academic Plan (ICAP), Graduation Guidelines, and many others have opened the door for districts and schools to establish learner-centered and equitable processes and practices. These circumstances made Colorado an ideal state in which to explore and support the use of authentic forms of student demonstrations of learning as assessment tools.
Developing New Tools
A primary function of the Colorado Department of Education is to serve as a convener and partner to educators who come together to co-create resources, guidance, and approaches to policy implementation to benefit all students, educators, and their families. Beginning in 2017, the CDE offices of Postsecondary and Workforce Readiness and Assessment engaged Colorado practitioners and leaders from K-12 education, industry, military, and higher education to create a process, resources, and recommendations in support of the development of performance assessments that students can use to demonstrate their readiness to graduate from high school should districts choose to include performance assessment in their menu of graduation options. These collaboratively-developed (student-teachers-peers) and scored demonstrations of readiness can range widely in presentation, as long as they show that a student has met content and essential skills expectations; for one student, it may mean a portfolio defense, while for another, it may be a collection of performance assessments.
With support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2Revolutions, and Envision Learning Partners, Colorado educators created a foundational framework meant to guide local education systems as they engage in developing their performance assessment systems. To further support educators as they transform assessment practices in their schools and classrooms, a professional learning community (PLC) was established.
To promote equitable and student-centered systems, Colorado educators determined that performance assessment must be designed to:
Validate student perspective and experiences
Support transference of knowledge and skills into new situations by giving students the skills to articulate what they know and can do, as well as identify their areas of strengths and challenges
Promote student agency through feedback (teacher/mentor/peer)
Be an asset-based approach to assessment for learning
Engage students in the co-creation of learning goals and success criteria
Evaluation and Future Direction
As the professional learning community engaged teachers and school leaders, the Colorado Department of Education partnered with theCenter for Assessment, Design, Research and Evaluation (CADRE) at the University of Colorado, Boulder to conductcase studies of performance assessment implementation in Colorado schools. The outcomes of this research along with what was learned from PLC members’ experiences has informed Colorado’s plans for next year’s performance assessment development and support. For the upcoming school year, there will be two key areas of focus:
Content-specific PLCs. Successful development, administration, and scoring of high-quality performance assessments is dependent on an educator’s ability to create engaging, feedback-driven learning experiences that include opportunities for students to useessential skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and self-management to access complex concepts in the content areas. Colorado educators have expressed a need for PLC support in individual content areas so that, for example, mathematics educators can ensure that the established criteria for performance assessment are backed by their instructional practices.
Supporting leaders as they build and sustain local performance assessment systems. It is critical that opportunities are created to build the capacity of school and district personnel to help them enact strategies to support this type of work. For example, school leaders need to build school-level PLCs supported by short, evaluative cycles to allow performance assessment work to gain deeper momentum and traction in classrooms. Taking a more strategic capacity-building approach at the school leader and district levels could encourage more effective and collaborative learnings on performance assessments as a school-wide initiative rather than as one that gets taken up by volunteer teachers.
As this work progresses, efforts to collect exemplar practices and performance assessment artifacts will help us to create common understandings of how the principles of high-quality performance assessment design are being implemented, what changes and improvements need to be made at the policy and practitioner levels, and how schools and districts are using their performance assessment information to support students and teachers and make programming and professional learning decisions. The gathered information and artifacts will provide the necessary evidence to establish authentic demonstrations of student achievement as a primary component of local and state assessment systems.
These are bold objectives that require educators to grapple with the delicate balance of high-quality instruction, engaging experiences for students, and actionable assessment opportunities. Even in the middle of a world-wide pandemic, these educators are establishing the criteria for the next generation of teaching and learning in Colorado by embracing policy opportunities, and employing a collaborative, generous spirit that is indicative of the Colorado way of life.