Assessing and Supporting Common Core Aligned English Language Arts Instruction

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Classroom Observation Manuals as Measures of Teaching Quality: Possibilities and Pitfalls

Abstract

Objective:
The Common Core standards in English language arts (CCSS-ELA) imply a kind of teaching but do not name the instructional facets that facilitate students’ meeting those standards (Hiebert & Stigler, 2017; Polikoff, 2017). Over the last five years, we have worked with Student Achievement Partners (SAP), helping teachers to develop observational measures to assess and support CCSS-ELA teaching. This paper highlights what we learned using these tools in Washington DC Public Schools (DCPS). In so doing, we emphasize the incompatibility between the vision of instruction embedded in, if not articulated by, the CCSSS-ELA and rubrics designed to measure and promote instructional quality.

Framework:
We work from an expansive definition of instructional quality that includes the ways teachers support students in classroom interactions (Pianta & Hamre, 2009), as well as how teachers within a school coordinate learning experiences across grade levels (Johnson, 2015). It also includes the tasks and texts a teacher selects, and whether curricular resources align with grade-level expectations (Remillard & Heck, 2014; Walkowiak et al., 2014).

Data and Methods:
We adapted SAP’s Instructional Practice Guides (IPGs), a set of coaching rubrics designed to support “Common Core aligned instruction,” into standardized observation tools that could be used reliably at scale. The resulting product, the Instructional Practice Research Tool (IPRT), focuses on how teachers help students meaning-making of complex texts, focusing on the text-based questions that help students revise misunderstandings and develop stronger text-based understandings (Hillocks, 2010; Reznitskaya et al., 2009). We observed 611 lessons from 71 ELA teachers in 24 DCPS schools from 2016-2018. We then used multivariate regression to analyze the relationship between IPRT scores and teacher value-added (Kane & Staiger, 2012).

Results:
On average, teachers in this sample moderately engage in CCSS-ELA aligned instructional practices (see Table 1 for the dimensions of teaching and descriptive statistics). Teachers with VAM scores in the highest quintile had the highest average IPRT scores, and significantly higher scores than those in the lowest quintile (β=0.873(0.26), p=.003; see Figure 1). We also found assumptions embedded in approaches to classroom observation that limited insight into the broader domain of instructional quality we aimed to capture. These include: 1) an individual lesson is the appropriate unit of analysis, 2) individual teachers are “quality purveyors”; and 3) instructional quality is a function of visible classroom interactions.

Significance:
We suggest several shifts to systems that support standards-aligned teaching, broadly defined. First, observe teachers across an instructional unit, rather than during individual lessons spaced over time. Second, conduct observations across teachers working in different grades to ensure instructional experiences are appropriately sequenced across years (Engel, Claessens, & Finch, 2013;). Such approaches would emphasize sequences as essential in supporting students in meeting new standards and help break down the “egg crate” model of teaching (Johnson, 2015). We also advocate for collecting and analyzing instructional materials to capture less visible, but still vital, aspects of instructional quality that likely influence the degree to which students meet the ambitious goals outlined in the CCSS-ELA (Kloser et al., 2017).

Author

• Julie Jackson Cohen, University of Virginia