Looking For Evidence

I was working on our district's professional development plan over the weekend and in one section, we have to expound on how we are measuring the impact of our professional development activities on improved student achievement. This of course, is the two million dollar question...how do we know that what we are doing is making a difference?!? As a district, how do we know that the resources, time, and efforts that are being allocated by the district on staff development, are finding their way to classroom practice (either by changing pedagogy or improving content knowledge)? As a teacher, how do you know that what you do on a daily basis is helping students to learn?

I realize most of you are thinking...that's easy, I have students' grades as evidence that they are learning. But does the work you take a grade on always reflect an increased understanding of knowledge? Could it be that sometimes it represents an ability to complete a task in an efficient manner, hunt for answers in a book, put into short term memory enough facts to reproduce on a quiz or test, but not necessarily a deeper understanding of a concept. So, what other evidence might we look for that would suggest that what we are doing is making a difference?



In our writing classroom, the answer is easy. It is the ongoing analysis of student writing and the explicit evidence we see of improvement of skill from one writing piece to the next. It is the recording of student reflections on themselves as developing writers and the noting of attitudinal improvements as they begin to view themselves as authors. As we pull back and look at our building from a wider lens, evidence mounts as we listen to conversations between colleagues and overhear them discussing writing traits and how they "just taught a particular lesson on voice". And last, but certainly not least, it's the wonderful response I get each month, when I ask for work for the Board of Education room, and much of what I get is student writing (even though I've never specified that it needed to be).

But what about reading? As we begin to turn our focus onto reading in the coming months and years (while still keeping the "writing plate spinning", of course), what will we look for as evidence of a growing community of readers? What is that community like now? Obviously there will be formalized measures of reading progress. There has to be. We have reached a point in our knowledge about the science behind how to teach reading and the instrumentation is available so that we can now standardize the way in which we measure how well a student is learning how to read. What other "qualitative" measures will we be looking for? Students running in to their teachers each morning to discuss the books they've read the night before? Booktalks sponsored by the library or individual classes? "Reading Rainbow-type" book blurbs on the announcements each morning? The possibilities are endless. The work is promising. What are your ideas? How do you measure your impact?



Check out the Education Oasis. It's a web site where you can find a calendar which gives you a significant event for every day of the year. A great resource for finding quick facts and interesting information to incorporate into your classroom.