Professional Learning Directly Related to the Assessment Program
Rockwood School District believes that comprehensive, on-going professional learning is central to school improvement and student success. To that end, Rockwood School District professional learning promotes continuous professional growth in a supportive environment by enhancing the knowledge and skills of all staff, with the expectation that doing so will also raise the levels of student performance.
The topics related to state and district-wide assessment which will be addressed in Rockwood professional learning offerings include:
- How to analyze data to determine strengths and weaknesses;
- How to use the results of data analysis as a means of making changes in programs, instruction, curriculum, and assessment;
- How to use achievement data (disaggregated by race/ethnicity, gender, disability, LEP, migrant, etc.) to determine changes that need to be made to improve performance of any subgroup that is lagging behind the overall student population;
- How to teach test-taking strategies to students;
- How to identify learner skills and needs for differentiation and subsequent instructional strategies to use in classrooms that will promote academic success;
- How to create classroom assessments, performance-based classroom activities/assessments and scoring guides (i.e., pre-instruction assessments, formative assessments, and summative assessments);
- How to develop strategies to monitor student performance and adjust instruction accordingly on an ongoing basis;
- How to develop and use strategies that will assess the Missouri Learning Standards not assessed by the MAP and how to monitor performance standards to be assessed locally;
- The legal requirements of reporting data as designated by IDEA (for administrators);
- How to involve students in the assessment process (i.e. goal setting and assessing their own progress towards goals set);
- How to provide specific feedback to students for improved performance.
Rockwood School District operates on the premise that high quality professional learning as it relates to student assessment will lead to higher levels of learning for all students by ensuring that instructional decisions are informed by careful analysis and assessment of student achievement data. It is Rockwood's goal to create an assessment-literate culture of educators who implement assessment for learning on a daily basis.