DuFour, Marzano "High Leverage Strategies for Principal Leadership"

found in the Feb 2009 Educational Leadership

p. 65 look at article for Marzano's "Generic Scale for Developing Common Assessments" (4.0 scale)

support collaborative teams by..

• time for collaboration embedded into the routine workweek
• resources to examine curriculum, such as state standards, curriculum guides, analysis of student performance on past assessments; examples of rubrics that specify the criteria to be used in judging the quality of work
• vertical articulation with teachers in the next higher grade level to ID knowledge and skills those teachers have specifed as essential for students entering the course

66 Collaborating on common assessments. Several questions to guide this work: How wil your team monitor the learning of each student on a timely basis? Do your common assessments reflect the characteristics of quality assessment that we have identified? How are we using the results from assessments to support stduents who are experiencing difficulty? What criteria are the members of your team using to assess the quality of students' work? What evidence do you have that members of your team apply the criteria consistently?

"a team that asserts it is committed to helping students learn to write 'a good persuasive essay' must be prepared to define the elements of a good persuasive essay; distinguish among essays that are good as opposed to great, fair, and poor; and practice applying the agree-on indicators of quality until they can provide students with consistent and precise feedback (that is, team members establish inter-rater reliability.)

role of principal - "monitors the ongoing work of teams by asking them to submit the products that flow form their collective inquiry and collaborative dialogue -- products such as the guaranteed and viable curriculum, pacing guides, common assessments, analysis of results, and so on. The principal also meets with each team quarterly to review its work. Together they examine the content, pacing, assessments, and, most important, the evidence of student learning from the assessments."