Assessment and CITE 6 for World Language

 - an Interview with Dr. Syna Morgan

With CITE 6 and the never-ending implementation of educational reforms, I thought I could save some trouble by getting some solid information about how the new assessment model affects me, and you, as World Language teachers. As usual, there is a ton of information floating around but very little concrete communication. To this end, I met with Dr. Syna Morgan, the System Performance Officer for Douglas County Schools. Here's the nitty gritty of our conversation...

CITE 6 is Douglas County's response to the Colorado state mandate that 50% of a teacher's salary be based on the progress of their students. Douglas County is continuing to work out the kinks of how to actually implement this massive and decidedly mucky undertaking. Teachers will be responsible for monitoring the progress of their students through assessments and reporting this progress to the district, which brings me to the questions I had specifically for World Language Teachers.

Will all World Language Teachers be using the same assessment? 

    Probably not, or at least not right away. There is a group of teachers who created an assessment using the EADMS program for Spanish 1. Rocky Heights teachers and some others are using this assessment this year. This will provided a consistent and practical method to manage and compare progress across the district. Anyone can use this same assessment and in the future may choose to create a full line of these standardized-type assessments for all the courses. This will obviously involve a lot of committees and conversations.  

   Another choice is to use a smaller scale common assessment. This could be within a school, feeder or across multiple schools; the more teachers the better. The test should be given multiple times throughout the year to show student growth. Dr. Morgan pointed out that it does not necessarily have to be given at the very beginning of the school year, a common complaint for Level 1 teachers. 

  A teacher could also choose to just use their own individual assessments, although these may be ranked low on the validity scale. 

Does the assessment need to be comprehensive and cover all of the standards? 

  No. Dr. Morgan assured me that these assessments will be considered a "snapshot" of the progress students are making, with the assumption that similar progress is being made across the skills and standards of the subject. In other words, the nightmare of common speaking assessments can be removed from the equation for now. 

If there is no consistent assessment for all WL teachers, how will you generate the CITE 6 ratings?

To allow for the myriad of ways that students learn and provide evidence of learning across the subjects, Douglas County is currently creating a variety of programs and calculators which will rate the validity of assessments and student progress. For example, a teacher chooses to use a writing prompt to assess his students' progress. He goes to the district's calculator program which will ask questions about the type and administration of the assessment to provide a rating of the assessment's quality. Assessments which are common to a group of teachers, scored by a group, authentic, performance-based etc. would receive a higher validity rating. This is only the very first step in the process. That score is combined with a different calculation of the types of assessments given throughout the course as well as, finally, the growth achieved by the students, and the school's growth as measured by CO testing. All of these scores go into yet another calculator which determines the teachers score for the CITE 6 Standard.  My takeaway was that this is unbelievably complicated and not ready at all for this year.

When will our salaries actually be affected?  

  The idea is to have teachers go through the process to rate their assessments and so on this school year but mostly as a pilot. Salaries will not be affected next year as previously promised. However, even piloting these calculators and programs could be pushed back as well. 

It was quite reassuring to speak with Dr. Morgan. She was forthright and helpful in discussing a complicated  know my school has recently put together a committee to work on CITE6 implementation, which means that there will likely be some movement in this area soon. At Mesa we put together a simple writing assessment that we give 3 times a year. There are 4 Spanish teachers, 2 French and 1 Chinese teacher who give a very open-ended writing prompt (modified for culture) with the same rubric. Dr. Morgan and I put this particular assessment through the district's calculator and it scored relatively high. Does your school already have an assessment that might serve this purpose well? What do you think about a common district-wide assessment? I'd love to hear your comments below!