In this episode, join us as we explore the power and importance of centering conversations around timely, detailed, and aligned assessment results with ⁠David Woodward, Founder of Forefront Education⁠. David will explore transforming assessment practices, and gaining practical strategies for integrating assessments into cohesive, vision-driven teams within schools. Tune in for insights on leveraging assessments to drive school improvement and enhance student growth.

Check out a ⁠demo of the Forefront platform⁠ and how it can be the starting point for school improvement!

⁠Connect with David on LinkedIn!⁠

TRANSCRIPT:

Casey (01:14):

Well, hey everybody actually, episode 77, we are talking tonight about centering class assessments in school, school improvement assesses, and I have as my guest, David Woodard. David, welcome to the show.

David (01:49):

Well, thank you very much, Casey. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah,

Casey (01:54):

We had a really great conversation recently about just what it is that we do and what it is that we know about assessments and teams, and I can't wait to hear what you have to bring to this conversation. So let's start the evening by having you share a little bit about who you are, where you're from, and this that you do in the education world.

David (02:18):

I'm here in Colorado, which is where I grew up. Went to school in Denver, public schools, proud alumni of Manual high school. I've been in education kind of my whole life. My mother was in education, my father was a school board member. I've been really immersed in education my entire life. Back in the early nineties, I started out in preschools. I was really interested in early childhood development coming straight out of college and started working with preschoolers and then eventually worked my way into elementary school where I was a classroom teacher for many years and then followed that up with becoming an instructional coach. Elementary math specialist was my leadership role here in Boulder, Colorado for a long time, all the way up until 2020 when I finally separated. But it was during that time also that I started Forefront Education, which is the company that I run right now. And we started this program back in 2009. So I was still very much involved in my work as an instructional coach and felt so many pains as an instructional leader that I really wanted to address and thought there's no better way to do this than build it myself. I got a couple of high quality computer software engineers behind me and started it, and we've been going ever since.

Casey (03:54):

Share with our audience your journey as you worked to build this company. What was that process like?

David (04:07):

One of the seminal moments that I remember was when I first came into a position as a coach, and this was back in the mid 2000s and state assessments were rolling out. The No Child Left Behind Act was in full swing, and everyone was very optimistic about the potential for data to transform our work as educators and to really help us to understand our achievement gaps, to understand how we can refine our work. There was a very large group of us at Boulder, a pretty decent sized district, and we all came together to do a big room and sat around for about three days and spent probably two days of that looking at spreadsheets of data. And we would highlight this and we would highlight that and we'd circle this.

And in the end, it was all kind of guesswork. It was frustrating because at the end we needed to set some kind of a smart goal. We have to set a goal for this thing. And we're like, "Okay, so last year you were at 53%, so let's shoot for 56% this year." But that doesn't make any sense. This is not meaningful. We're just rolling dice. We're saying why not go for 57, 56, 57, 58%? Who cares? We all had hypotheses about what might be going on, but that wasn't really in the data. It was all just guesswork after we had studied and looked at and highlighted everything. And so that was really a strong moment for me to say, this is not good enough. We've got to do better. And so that was kind of a good starting point for us.

Casey (06:26):

So our episode is all about centering classroom assessments on school improvement processes. In a recent conversation, we were talking about timely, detailed, and aligned assessments. Tell a little bit more about that.

David (06:55):

Yeah, let's start with this idea of timely. That basically means that we're getting the information back quickly. There's really nothing more immediate of course than watching your students in the classroom, but that's kind of hard data to use systemically as we try to do school improvements. So the timely data that we're talking about a lot at Forefront Education is this ability to look at classroom assessment data that's coming in on a regular basis. What I love about classroom assessment data is that it is, you've got your quizzes that happen on Tuesday, you're able to score it that night and have it ready to go for Wednesday for your planning, or it could be an end of unit assessment, something that's really very immediate, very relevant to what's going on in your classroom. This importance of timeliness is that we can respond to it quickly in terms of the misunderstandings we might be able to identify in our students, but it also means that it's relevant while we're looking at it and so that we can use it in our planning even the next day or the next week.

And when we're talking about detailed, what I mean by that is that this is not just broad scope data. This is when you're looking through their work and you're identifying that they're having troubles with capitalization of proper nouns, something that's very specific in it's information so that we can come back with something very identifiable and actionable.

The other issue is alignment, and this is a huge issue. I think oftentimes the assessments that we're using for our data-driven instruction and our data-driven efforts are not truly aligned with what we're teaching. This is another reason why I feel like classroom assessments are so important because we know that the assess that are going to be done during the unit of study that we're in are aligned with the topics of the unit of study. There's nothing more frustrating to me and to teachers when you walk into that meeting somewhere in October or November to look at interim assessments that are a broad scope assessment of math.

It's not detailed and it's not really aligned with what we're teaching. So this idea of making sure that the assessments that we're giving and the assessments that we are discussing and spending our time with to try to improve our schools and improve our instruction must be aligned with the instruction and the topics of instruction that we're working on.

Casey (10:30):

And I want to pause and insert that if you're implementing a big box curriculum with fidelity, we have to make time to adjust and modify those assessments based on either what we have taught and consider, then, how we are shifting and changing our instructional practices. And that doesn't happen enough.

David (11:33):

And I love that you said that we need to modify these assessments sometimes. We need to make sure that they're meaningful for ourselves. I mean, let's face it, some of the big box assessments or big box programs that are out there provide us with assessments that really don't give us the meaningful data that we need. Now, I think it's important to have teachers involved in the assessment decision making process at the very least. But I think oftentimes we have to modify the assessments to make sure that we're getting the information that relates to our school improvement efforts, our goals, and our ambitions for students.

Casey (13:20):

Are there other challenges that are common when schools or educators are analyzing data?

David (13:34):

I think that first challenge that we have is making sure that the assessments we are putting in front of our teams for this kind of work are really truly aligned with what we believe about education and about our students. So there's a little bit of issue there. Another challenge that needs to be faced in this process is making sure that you've got a good scoring guide or collective understanding of what proficiency should look like.

That can take some time to discuss. And if your program or assessments don't have a high quality scoring guide guide, you might have to either look for one that's coming from another district that might be using the same assessments or you might have to develop that yourself. I think one of the things that I found was a challenge, once again, going back to my own work with this, I walked in one time to a meeting and we were trying to do this. We wanted to use our assessment data to understand our students. And what I had discovered, and I probably should have been aware of this and probably been ready for it, but I wasn't, was that no one was consistent.

One teacher had a paper grade book, another one was doing it in spreadsheets, a third one portfolios. And there was no way for us to have a conversation about how our students were doing because we had no framework for discussing them. There was different scoring methodologies, there was different ideas of what proficiency looked like. So I think it's important to make sure that you've got common understandings of what proficiency looks like. And then I would say that the next challenge, which is a major challenge for most schools and districts, is the organization of data.

That's basically why we designed Forefront- to be able get to this organization of our classroom assessment information. You have to have some way to be able to quickly access and visualize the assessment information so that it can be discussed. Having those student assessment papers on the table are really a great step. Then organizing it all is a next step. I've found that over and over again that as soon as you get people to put student work samples onto the table, suddenly the conversation reboots and we're talking about kids, we're talking about real misunderstandings and understandings and how we can support them.

Casey (17:41):

This is such good information. One of the things that you shared was a challenge is something that actually can hinder a whole team from moving forward. Here's what stands out to me: this idea of people coming in with a variety of different ways that they go about approaching the work. Now in education, I do believe that there is room for autonomy, but there's also freedom within structure.

And if we don't have structures and organization, then we're actually creating this kind of internal chaos. It's almost like a quiet chaos. It's not super visible, but it's chaos for everyone and can throw the organization into overwhelm. So I love this idea of really ensuring have a common language.

Okay, so you've mentioned leaders. Let's talk the different roles in education. What role does each type of educator have in leveraging assessment data?

David (23:11):

That's a really good question, and I think it does become very different for different people in different roles. I'll start briefly at the upper levels of things. You might be a multi-school leader and I understand that the data that you might want to look at is somewhat circumspect, something that's going to be broader, the 40,000 foot view. And I recognize that that's important. We need to have ways to summarize the data for us to understand these things because we can't, as multi-school leaders get too deep into the weeds. But I do think it's important that sometimes you do take a good look at some pieces of detailed information to make sure that you're emphasizing certain things and then also guiding that messaging to the school level leaders.

When it comes down to the school level, there's the principals. I think that they kind of want to guide the work and they want to make sure that people have access to the information they need, but they don't really want to get stuck in the weeds either. But then when it comes down to those instructional coaches, the interventionists and specialists at that level, and then also the classroom teachers, this is when it comes back to that idea of information that's going to be actionable and meaningful at the classroom level.

I think oftentimes what happens is that the district level leadership that needs that broad scope data to do their work will mandate assessment systems with best intentions in mind that will give them that broad scale view. But then once it gets down to the classroom level it's not detailed, aligned, focused or timely and oftentimes not transparent.

Many assessment systems are usually not transparent. That is, you don't know what the students are doing. And so when these district level leaderships are making decisions for their own work, I think that they need to think about the work of educators and how they really need to focus on something different than that.

So what I'm advocating for is that at the school level, we make sure first and foremost, that we have good quality assessment data that's going to inform the work of the educators that are doing it on a daily basis. Your teachers in the classroom need meaningful, actionable information like we've been talking about this whole time.

And what I think we need to then figure out then is how do we take that same information and summarize it in ways that are meaningful for leadership so that we don't have to have too many redundant and expensive and time consuming assessments. When you're really thinking about educators like classroom teachers and interventionists, I think that we've got to make decisions about assessments that are going to be helpful for them. Classroom teachers need a lot of assessments. We need assessments for our grading, we need assessments for our formative assessment purposes. Of course, we need assessments for parent communication, we need assessments for feedback to the students, and all of those are going to be those classroom assessments. So that's why I feel like we need to take those assessments and put them at the center of the system so we can utilize them for all those very important things that teachers need them for, and then hopefully reutilize them for your principal and reutilize those same assessments for the district level leadership.

Casey (28:02):

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm almost imagining as you're talking more of a bottom up approach instead of a top down approach, right?

David (28:14):

Yeah, that's definitely what I think.  If we as leaders think, "okay, who is it that needs to do the work better?" Really, it's the classroom teachers, right? So we have to center them in our decision making. That's what I believe.

Casey (28:48):

Yeah, for sure. So a lot in this episode you've talked about aligning assessments to the overall vision and goals. Tell a little bit more about the importance of this and how it factors into improvement, school-wide.

David (29:07):

When I think about aligning assessments to your goals, the first thing I think of is make sure that you have devoted time to do so. Put it on the calendar right now. When are you going to talk about this as a leadership team? Let's make sure that we're doing an inventory of all the assessments.

I've seen districts go through these big box implementations and they go through and they're looking at all the unit lessons and everything else, and sometimes they don't pay attention to the assessments, and it kind of drives me nuts. How are you going to assess the efficacy of the program that you are implementing if you don't pay attention to the assessments? And assessments are super powerful.

So I think that first and foremost, if you really value certain kinds of learning, then make sure that you are choosing assessments and that you are designing assessments that align with those values. And just put time on the calendar, make sure that you're having the discussion.

Casey (31:23):

So if we're thinking about advice you might have for those who want to prioritize their approach to class assessments, what advice would you give? Where do you think they should start?

David (31:54):

I've really been fascinated over the last year with this idea of improvement science. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this term, but there's been a number of books that have come out talking about improvement science. And if we're talking about improving our schools, then I think that we need to really be really focused in those efforts. And according to improvement science, you have to identify a problem. You can't just say we've got an achievement gap- that's too broad. You need to get very, very focused in it. And so hopefully you'll get down to the point where you could say something like, we really need to improve our phonics instruction in K-two or that we really need to focus in on number sense and make sure that our students have the basic foundations of numeracy in order to build their competence.

Once you're really down to something specific and actionable, then you think about what we are going to do to change it. And then clearly the next step is to say, okay, if we want this to improve now we need to make sure that people are doing it. And secondly, we need to assess to ensure that that's happening. And so this is why classroom assessments comes back to this once again, because it's this idea that if you want students doing better in the classrooms and the lessons that we are teaching, then we need to assess those. If you want to make sure that your phonics instruction is really high quality and doing great, then you need to listen to students pronouncing those phonemes and reading those letters and making sure that we're getting that detailed information back that's going to guide the instruction and ensure that we're on track.

So I think this takes us back to this idea of detailed and timely evidence of what we're trying to improve in our schools. We want outcomes for our students, we want to improve our schools. It's why we assess. Assessment helps us to learn as educators how to do our jobs better. We learn about the curriculum that we're teaching and the methodologies of that. We learn about the content that we're teaching and how to understand that content. And we learn about writing better and we learn about reading better and we learn about the sciences. We have to learn that content. The whole idea is that we learn about the students that are in our classrooms, and so we make sure that we are bringing assessments to the center of our systems that help peers, classroom teachers, interventionists, and coaches to learn students and the way that they understand and build their knowledge.

Casey (36:01):

So I am walking with nuggets of gold, and I would be remiss if we did not end this episode with you sharing about the platform that you have and how it can benefit the people who are wanting to move in this direction.

David (36:21):

We started this project of Forefront about 15 years ago, and so we've been going for quite a while. What we're trying to do is to provide teachers with a platform for them to collect the data and put it central in our work. And so you talked a little bit about giving autonomy to teachers. My experience with teachers honestly is if you provide for them high quality tools, they're nothing but appreciative. So this doesn't necessarily feel like some kind of a mandate coming down. It feels like, "Oh my God, you just took a huge piece of chaos out of my life so that I can focus my efforts on the other things that are important."

We allow district leadership through this to put several points of data all together into a single place so we can understand each student holistically. Now, the other thing that's really, really important in the platform that I feel like was a massive problem when I was coming up is that the data stays with the child as they grow. Our first grade teachers don't start from zero. Our second grade teachers don't start from scratch. They could go back look at some of the unfinished learning from years prior if they needed to. We also give them the tools to look forward through the program as well to think about what's coming up and how students done on this topic up to now.

So Forefront is an attempt to create an organized system for us to look at the most detailed, timely, and aligned data that we have in our programs.

We also provide tools then for leaders to be able to get that 40,000 foot view to see how's the curriculum implementation going. So all of that's kind of built in there and it's beautiful software. I admit, I'm really very proud of what we've built.

Casey (39:57):

You've shown me some of it and I am blown away.

David (40:22):

And it is fun work in terms of thinking about how these programs are designed and how are they aligned with things.

Casey (41:18):

David, this has been a fantastic conversation. Do you have just one thing that you want to leave our audience with tonight?

David (41:29):

That's a good question. I mean, there is a lot of stuff, right? But I think just focus on the learning. I think that's the real thing. I really am feeling so passionate nowadays that we have to understand that we are only going to improve our classroom instruction when our teachers are allowed to learn. And it's through that learning that we will improve.

Casey (41:51):

Yep. I love it. And the classroom assessments is where we learn about our students.