Professional Practice Standard 7: Student Academic Progress
The purpose of Virginia’s Student Academic Growth Standard is to establish a target for students to reach then to provide evidence of progress towards and eventual accomplishment of this target. The goal of this standard is to view student progress in terms of both short-term and long-term growth, both of which must be observable and measurable, and to make adjustments to ensure that progress continues. Accordingly, the objective by which this standard can be measured is whether teachers are collecting data on student progress and using this to make informed decisions that guide students towards their individualized academic and behavioral targets.
Teachers can ensure appropriate student academic progress by the following tactics:
Document Progress:
In order to show progress, teachers must demonstrate that students have advanced from where they first began. Therefore, teachers should have an effective procedure for frequently recording various forms of student assessment (both formal and informal) throughout the school year so that there is adequate data to analyze to verify that progress has indeed occurred. It must be noted that progress is individual to each student. As a result, a student’s improvement should only be judged based on his/her baseline status rather than against the improvement of other students who started at different points.
Please click here to view my successful teaching goal from the 2015-16 school year, which includes six differentiated lessons, the measurable, positive results of each lesson, and a brief reflection on each lesson.
Evidence of Achievement:
Proof of student achievement can be created using pre- and post-assessments. The pre-assessment creates a baseline score of what the student already knows. Then the post-assessment will demonstrate whether the student has achieved mastery of the new skill(s). There are various ways in which students can demonstrate mastery and the specific method will depend on the skill to be mastered. For instance, a paper-and-pencil test would be appropriate for vocabulary words, however, a project-based assessment would better allow students to show competence in a skill such as analysis of poetry or synthesis of multiple sources into one product. Additionally, for assessments such as a state-provided growth measure, proper alignment of objectives with similarly-formatted assessments ensures that students will achieve their target because they have already worked with and been tested on the specific skills ahead of time.
Continual Learning Targets:
Here, an educator uses available performance outcome data to continually document and communicate student academic progress, as well as to develop interim learning targets. As students are progressing throughout the year, so too should their learning goals. In this way, students are continually but appropriately challenged to reach for a higher level. Establishment of new learning goals must be based on several points of assessment data to maintain accuracy. Furthermore, academic progress should be communicated with students so that they can self-assess, reflect, and track their own progress, as well as with parents so that they can remain informed partners in the learning process.
Thesis:
Please click here to access my paper on this professional practice standard as part of my thesis for my MAT degree from Hollins University.