Leadership: Triangulating Assessment Data

 In the third module of our leadership course we are looking at pedagogical leadership and one of the sections focused on pedagogical documentation - specifically, triangulation!

If you have followed along with any of the themes of my writing on this blog over the years you will likely notice an evolution of my interest in student assessment & evaluation (heck, I took the A&E AQ course in 2013), so of course this topic stood out to me.

This is a topic that I have found many educators (including myself) have really struggled to effectively wrap their heads around. It is a topic that is easily overwhelming, but it is essentially for equitable assessment, evaluation and reporting and it is fundamental for pedagogical leadership. We can have great instructional strategies and presence, we can even be good at sharing those strategies, seeking feedback and reflecting on - but without connecting instruction with assessment (and realizing that they must go hand in hand) it is difficult to claim that we are accomplishing the ultimate goal as teachers. We must put students at the centre of our work and remember that to improve student learning we must be able to effectively assess student learning.

Triangulation informs all types of student learning. We should be using it to assess students for, as and of learning stages as well as to determine student grades at the reporting stages. By being able to collect information from our students in different ways we are better able to uncover what a student knows and understands and the depth to which they understand and can apply their learning. This is where using the achievement chart and evaluating student work using levels starts to make a lot more sense. Student achievement is found in depth, not in a number we can come up with because of "correct" answers given.

The most overwhelming part of this (that pedagogical leaders should first tackle for themselves - or at the very least be actively working on tackling) is how to do this in an effective way that does not result in an overload of data! We can't (and shouldn't) record every little observation and conversation (or even formative products for that matter) that we have with students, it would result in way too much data to use at the reporting stage. We should, however, use these opportunities to inform our instruction (identify groups of students needing help, or whole class intervention/changes in lesson plans needed), to give students descriptive feedback in conversations or during observations (depending on the age of students some of this can be recorded by the student even). And we must also be intentional about choosing observations and conversations (transparent to students) that will be included as opportunities to show assessment of learning and record that data for later use in reporting.