Surprise!

This week, Indiana released the most recent assessment scores. The short answer is there was not a significant difference between the prior year and this year.

However, this leads me to contemplate what school leaders anticipate about the results coming in. When I worked the Department, there was a sense of anxiety awaiting the release, but at the local level there is access and availability to leading indicators far in advance. It is important to consider how these might be used to better inform what is occurring in classrooms.

For example, if the goal is to improve instructional practices, a goal related to the summative assessment likely does not align. A better goal may be to observe certain practices in classrooms to determine if those practices are actually occurring. Additionally, the notion is often that measures need to be standardized assessments. They do not. They can be informal, but collected routinely and systematically for comparison over time.

Essentially, we need to move away from the idea that the summative data is a surprise. Two ways to do that are to 1) set goals around what we expect to occur in classrooms and 2) measure those strategies that align to that go throughout the year. Then, we don’t need to be surprised.