Nov 17, 2011 DeSoto Visit, what is advanced?, DOK

November 17, 2011

DeSoto Visit

Yesterday was our quarterly meeting of our AFL group.  These meetings are always great because we have the chance to sit and think and put our heads together about the problems we are facing.  We had about 8 teachers from DeSoto come to visit and talk about the ways they had implemented SBG in their school.  Oddly enough, they were all middle school or lower.  No high school teachers were on board.  Anyway, it was wonderful.  They solved half of my problems in the first 5 minutes.  They use an online gradebook called Pinnacle that allows not only standard based score but also formative/summative/diagnostic assignments as well as being an intuitive system that looked for patterns.  They talked a lot about the “Power Law” which is something with which I was not familiar.  I had been saying that there had to be a better way than averaging grades to report a student’s progress.  Apparently this “power law” is that way.  It weights recent progress higher than earlier assessments and looks for learning trends.  After 4 assessment hits, it looks for the trend.  Anything less than that and it defaults to average.  I was just beside myself with excitement over meeting these people who were a step ahead of me and had all these great ideas on solving the many issues I had encountered.  

Are all assessments created equal?

I was a little bit confused on their use of “levels”.  They said they entered all of the level 1 grades on the same day, all the level 2’s on the same day and so on.  I think they were referring to DOK and amount of teacher support.  But if these grades are entered as assessments, they count towards the learning trend.  Most of the CLE’s, frameworks and common cores are applied type scenarios with written expectations.  If those are the expectations, meeting them should be proficient. . . so what’s advanced look like?  If you are using DOK levels, a student might be able to get a 4 on a DOK 1 or 2 assignment but not be able to achieve that DOK 3.  We went round and round on this yesterday.  We agreed that all assessments should contain DOK’s 1-3 but the DOK 3 was the part that was necessary to achieve advanced.  Ultimately, it seems like there will have to be a set of criteria that must be met for a student to achieve an A.  They must demonstrate proficiency on all DOK 1 and 2 and achieve advanced on the applied DOK3 stuff to achieve an “A” in the course. 

The second issue we encountered also dealt with this idea of the importance of application.  One of the math teachers and I were discussing how some standards don’t seem to have that additional application level that makes “advanced” possible.  Often times those kinds of questions come from combining whole standards together.  The statement was made that then the standards should have been together from the start but I don’t know that I agree with that.  Material still has to be taught in chunks and the bigger the chunk, the more difficult it becomes to separate the material in to assessable pieces.  Thus you would end up with two types of assessments:  the DOK 1 and 2 material for which proficiency is required and also the combination application assessments which allow for the “advanced” placement.  It will be difficult to come up with a consistent  means of determining grades though. 

I thought I had this all figured out and then we brought up the question of “so what does advanced look like?” and it just all went to pot.