Interview a principal, assessment coordinator, or individual of similar rank and position in your school or district. This person should have a leadership role related to continuous school improvement. If you are not currently teaching, reach out to someone at a local school. Ask the following questions: What practices are currently in place to support continuous school improvement? What role does authentic assessment play in continuous school improvement practices? How does technology support assessment in continuous school improvement practices? Submit a paper including the name of the individual interviewed, position, professional contact information (including email address), school and/or district, and responses. Include a reflective portion in which you make connections between what you learned and the required studies. Submission Content Submission Content I had a discussion with Todd Nitz, the principal of Rockford Lutheran Schools, regarding the following three questions. Todd Nitz is my direct supervisor and handles all meetings, as well as shares information with the staff. His email is tnitz@rockfordlutheran.org. This is particularly important as our current counselor will be retiring, and someone else will be taking their place. What practices are currently in place to support continuous school improvement? There are different levels currently in place to create a culture of continuous school improvement. 1) As a private school, we go through an accreditation process every 5 years which forces us to analyze ourself based on prescribed categories which are basically the nationally accepted marks of quality schools. We do survey’s of our constituents and attempt to self-evalute. We meet in committees to look over those results and then seek out correlating data which would prove or disprove. Where we find ourselves in need of growth, we write out a plan for improvement including an expected timeline. A group of outside educators then come in to verify those results and offer further recommendations for improvement. 2) We have three inservice/workshops organized and hosted during the school year bringing in outside speakers to offer new knowledge and strengthen existing skills. 3) Teachers are sent to subject specific conferences to spark new ideas and sharpen existing ones. 4) Departments and grade levels meet and discuss current practices and what could be tried in the future to improve pedagogy. 5) An instructional coach hired to meet with select teachers and work with them to improve instruction. Administrators observing classes and offering support to teachers. 6) Teachers collecting survey feedback from students on what worked for students in the classroom. Areas that did not happen this current school year but we seek to include. • Teachers walking through educational reading as a faculty for discussion how that would look at our campus. • Dedicated and regular time for teachers to demonstrate/share methodology with other teachers (perhaps every 4th week at a faculty meeting, etc.) • A system created where current teachers observing other teachers to take ideas from and share with each other. What role does authentic assessment play in continuous school improvement practices? Education is not meant to be a situation where we experience days with students without a a specific educational goal in mind. Having a figurative goal to travel to a particular location with students, we need markers to see if they are traveling with us on that journey. This is the core of assessment, seeing if they are moving down a desired path. Thus assessments are used as marker points and we need to be able to be confidant in what they are telling us. In order to make sure that our evaluation of expected standards is authentic (and not accidentally biased), it is important to: A - use other corroborative evidences to confirm our judgement. This currently takes places in numerous ways at Rockford Lutheran. • Student success in competitive art or science competitions. • Student athlete success in athletic competitions. • Student academic competitions success and Model UN success. • Standardized testing results (ACT, SAT,etc) • Areas of growth: writing competitions, language competitions. B – establish that what we are testing is what we are assessing. This is done by being intentional about matching written lesson objectives to the individual instructor assessment methods. (ie. Are we say we are promoting critical thinking but our assessment tools reward point mainly for recall/ recognition skills?). At RLS, we recently had a workshop helping us to look at our unit objectives compared to our assessment questions, but we have work to do on a regular basis to ensure this is the case. How does technology support assessment in continuous school improvement practices? Technology is a tool for an educator to use when it is beneficial. It is not the goal and never should be the priority, but it may be the transportation that increases learning opportunities. Technology offers the potential to a) deliver information to students in an expedient and dynamic (audio/visual) way. b) gain students access to resources that they could not physically create (digital labs, digital tours and library access, etc) c) communicate and share within a faster and farther reaching system. When it comes to assessment, technology has the potential to create a level of individualization for the students through assignments that differentiate based upon student interest and abilities. We currently use online MAP testing in the junior high and online standardized testing in the senior high to assessstudentachievement. We use IXL software in our junior high as part of our instruction. Numerous instructors (ie. Online health class) use Edpuzzle to make information shared through videos to be interactive and create another form of assessing a student’s knowledge. There are some assessment technology options in the educational world which will ask harder and easier questions in response to individual student previous responses until their “baseline” level can be established. We are not currently using this product, it seems to be selectively used still within the educational community. I think the prospect is high for growth of using technology to push school improvement, but the educational world seems to have trouble making full use of this opportunity as schools: • Struggle with resources to purchase the technology • Struggle to find individuals within education with enough IT knowledge to implement much of this as IT skills will find other professional fields more lucrative. • Struggle to find time for implementation in a system where many teachers are already overworked After carefully considering Mr. Todd Nitz's presentation, I believe that Rockford Lutheran is strongly committed to implementing technology effectively and encourages all staff to do their best and utilize conclusive data to drive our goals. Mr. Nitz emphasizes the need for collaborative work on our Schoolwide Improvement Plan (SIP) and the accreditation process, aligning with the concept of continuous improvement in education reform. Our action research, led by the entire staff, is compiled by Mr. Nitz for accreditation and SIP purposes. Our staff meetings are divided into three groups, with a focus on technology, multiculturalism, and curriculum. As an educator, I contribute to the multicultural group. The emphasis on technology at Rockford Lutheran is evident, with the utilization of an LMS like Canvas and one-to-one Chromebooks for all students. It is clear that the schoolwide improvement plan has been continually adapted with technology at the forefront. With the support of Mr. Todd Nitz and close collaboration among the staff, I am confident that we will successfully implement the outlined strategies.