- Year 2022
- NSF Noyce Award # 1852822
- First Name Corey
- Last Name Webel
- Institution University of Missouri
- Role/Position PI
- Workshop Category Track 3: Master Teaching Fellowships
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Mathematics
- Target Audience Co-PIs, Noyce Master Teachers, Other Faculty/Staff, Project PIs, School District Administrators
- Topics Developing Teacher Leaders
- Session Length 45 minutes minutes
- Additional Presenter(s)
Elizabeth Mottaz & Mary Helmuth
Goals
Participants will learn about a set of formative assessments for mathematics used across a district in Grade K – 5. They will complete and discuss assessment tasks, examine student work on those tasks, and consider the rubrics that were used to guide teachers in scoring the assessments. They will also learn about the experiences of Master Teacher Fellows involved in creating, promoting, and supporting the use of the formative assessments. Finally, we will discuss implications and challenges for using formative assessments to support changes in mathematics instruction across a district.
Evidence
The data will consist of the formative assessments themselves, scores recorded by teachers across the district, and interviews with math coaches and leaders who led grade level teams in discussing how students performed on the assessment.
Proposal
In this session we will share efforts to support the development and piloting of a set of K-5 common formative mathematics assessments across a school district with 21 elementary schools and approximately 400 teachers. The assessments were designed to shift teachers’ attention toward students’ strategies, such as invented algorithms and representations of operations, and reduce emphasis on the correctness of students’ answers or their facility with rote procedures. Twelve Master Teacher Fellows worked on writing, sharing, and endorsing the assessments, as well as leading grade level meetings where teachers shared and discussed their students’ work on the assessments. In the workshop, we will engage participants in solving some of the assessment tasks, examining student work on those tasks, considering the scoring rubrics, and discussing how teachers received and worked with the assessments. A primary discussion point will be the potential for such assessments to support shifts in norms for mathematics teaching across a district, as well as the role of Master Teacher Fellows in facilitating these shifts. We will discuss successes and challenges involved in this work and share implications for using formative assessment more generally to drive instructional change at scale.
