The Uses of Formative Assessment in School Leadership

• In Event: Roundtable Session 18.
  In Roundtable Session: The Testing, Development, and Implementation of an Online Instructional Leadership Formative Assessment Tool

Abstract

The Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) system is designed to provide formative feedback on middle and high school leadership. CALL conceives of school leadership in terms of leadership tasks. The instrument is built around five macro-tasks that are divided into 28 micro-tasks. Macro-tasks refer to general task descriptions that organize leadership work, including establishing a vision of instruction, monitoring teaching and learning, building professional learning communities, acquiring and allocating resources, and establishing a safe and effective learning environment. Micro-tasks specify macro-task into daily practices; the CALL system is based on a rubric that articulates micro-tasks across quality dimensions. The CALL formative feedback system links task descriptions to the Learning First (Kelley & Shaw, 2008) professional learning framework to provide targeted advice to school leaders. This paper discusses the ways CALL has been used by schools, districts and preparation programs over the past year, and points toward ways that CALL data can be used to improve leadership practice at scale.

Leadership Preparation. Rather than focus on the role or the position of individual leaders, CALL conceives of leadership as a practice distributed across people and structures in organizations. The system is organized around tasks that specify the work that leaders engage in to improve student achievement. One feature of a task-based instrument is that schools can reflect upon the degree to which leaders engage in the specified work and can discuss who should do the work and the structures that should be put in place to support it. Faced with the overwhelming complexity of real-life school leadership, novice leaders can be distracted by emergent crises from paying attention to establishing the conditions for school improvement. CALL tasks provide a helpful map for new leaders to orient actions toward tasks that improve learning. We discuss how CALL is being used by leadership preparation programs at UT-Austin and Hi Tech High in San Diego to support leadership learning.

School Improvement. The CALL theory of action also describes a Maslovian hierarchical relation among leadership tasks. The system begins with the assumption that school leaders need to establish safe and effective learning environments and build professional communities among adults as a condition for focusing on student learning. CALL argues that monitoring teaching and learning to generate feedback that can inform instructional improvement, for individual teachers and students and for the school as a whole, is best enabled in an environment of professional interaction and vibrant classrooms. We are in the midst of testing whether our designed hierarchy of leadership tasks is supported by data on student learning, school climate and leadership practices. When refined, the hierarchical model will help schools to identify the proximal tasks that must be completed toward improving learning for all students, and will provide information that can connect schools at similar stages of development with appropriately scaffolded paths for improvement. The paper describes how the SubDistrict 5 in the Los Angeles Unified School District and CESA 1 in Wisconsin is using CALL data to support school improvement processes.

Author

• Richard R. Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison