C reating a Transparent Mastery and Assessment System: Creating Systems of Assessments

Achieve released a new paper titled Assessment to Support Competency-Based Pathways which addresses the role of summative assessment, clarifies key assessment challenges, and provides examples and recommendations that are useful to those who wish to design and implement assessment systems to support competency-based pathways.( April 2015) Also see article by Jennifer Davis Poon.

See New Hampshire's PACE

• New Hampshire Testing Pilot Breaks the Federal Accountability Mold

See Blogs:

• Scott Marion's short paper Two Sides of the Same Coin: Competency-Based Education and Student Learning Objectives
• Needed: Partners with Assessment Expertise

• Credibility Starts with Consistency with Common Assessments

• The End of the Big Test: Moving to Competency-Based Policy

• Helping HELP: Paul Leather’s Testimony on Assessments and Accountability

• The Case for Performance Assessments in a Standards-Based Grading System

• The Role of Assessment Instruments in a Competency-Based System

• Reflections after Two Years of Performance Assessment Cohorts in New Hampshire

• Considering Competency-Based Education? Reconsider How You Assess

   

• No Laughing Matter: Productive Assessment and the Value of Taking a Pulse
• Performance Assessment for Competency Education

• Thoughts on Grain Size

• Three Steps for Personalizing Assessment

• Little Boxes: Common Assessments in the Age of Competency Education

• Counted or Not, Doing What Counts in Competency-Based Education

• Five Quick Thoughts About Accountability

• Is Mastery a 3 or a 4 or Something Far Beyond That?

• Reassessments and Retakes: A Necessary Part of a School-Wide Grading Policy

• Retake Policy: Lessons Learned from Pat Benatar

• What’s the Point of School If You Can’t Learn From Your Mistakes?

• Process-Folios: Peeking Into A Student’s Head

• Back to Basics: Assessment for Learning

• Where Things Can Go Wrong

• When Is It Competency Education? And When Is It Not?

• Assessment All the Time? Why Not?

• What Gets Measured Gets Done

• Competency-Based Learning and FLVS

• A GPS for Competency Education

• Testing Myths

• Classroom

• Pre-Assessment: A Key to the ZPD

• Understanding Formative Assessment Using the Teaching and Learning Möbius Strip

• Competencies Build Better Assessment Practices

• The Project IS the Learning!

Webinars

Great Schools Partnership:

• Developing Effective Assessment Tasks in a Proficiency-Based Learning System
• Determining Proficiency Levels and Establishing Scoring Criteria
• Ensuring Consistent With Common Assessments

A Making Master Work Webinar on Assessment

• The recording from the webinar is here.
  The presentation from the webinar is here. 
• Or watch it on youtube

 In 2011, the Proficiency-based Pathways project was launched with support from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Along with eight other schools, Casco Bay High School (Maine) with its partner Expeditionary Learning and Vergennes Union High School (Vermont) were selected to participate, sharing their learning as they further developed their models. The findings from Proficiency-based Pathways are shared in the report Making Mastery Work: A Close-Up View of Competency Education published by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.

During the webinar you will learn about the process that Casco Bay High School and Expeditionary Learning used in developing their 2.0 assessment system, the overall structure and an in depth look at the assessment tools utilized.

These tools include:

· Performance-based graduation outcomes, called Pathways to Success

· Guidelines and template used by teachers to create strong proficiency-based assessment plans. 

· Grading guides for faculty and families  

· Habits of Work assessment and related policies

· Classroom strategies for supporting students in monitoring their own progress towards mastery of learning targets

Vergennes Union High School set out to accelerate its movement toward having its set of Performance Based Graduation Requirement fully implemented for 2016. This included preparing:

· A structure to develop a set of aligned performance tasks

· The provision of time and learning opportunities to calibrate and validate the tasks

· A plan for extended learning time for middle school students

· A draft for middle school performance-based gateway requirements

 Staff from VUHS and the Center for Collaborative Education will explain the process for designing performance tasks and the implications for school capacity building.

 Speakers:

• Antonia Rudenstine, co-author Making Mastery Work: A Close-Up View of Competency Education and Director at reDesign.

• Casco Bay/EL - You can resources mentioned in the wiki here

• Derek Pierce, Principal, Casco Bay High School, Portland, Maine

• Kippy Smith, Coach, Expeditionary Learning

• Eadie Wilson-Beeler, Director of Development, Expeditionary Learning

• Vergennes Union High School/CCE

• Kristine B Kirkaldy, Vergennes Union High School, Spanish Teacher

• Matt DeBlois, Vergennes Union High School, French Teacher, World Languages Department Chair

• Sarah Thompson, Vergennes Union High School, Science Department Chair

• Laurie Gagnon, Director, Quality Performance Assessment, Center for Collaborative Education