June 2013
Three recent events addressing assessment and the Common Core featured one of the Collaborative’s recent briefs, Learning from the Past: Exploring California’s CLAS Experience to Inform Assessment of the Common Core. Student assessment is a high priority for school districts as they transition to the Common Core State Standards, but this is not the first time that California has embraced an effort to use more authentic means to assess student learning. Joel Knudson, Deputy Director of the Collaborative, led sessions at two events to identify key lessons learned from assessment experiences of the early 1990s: a joint meeting of the California Department of Education and the California Curriculum and Instruction Steering Committee and a symposium on Common Core implementation and assessment gave educators from the county and district levels an opportunity to identify ways in which the CLAS experience can inform their current implementation efforts. Joel also contributed to a webinar hosted by the Regional Educational Laboratory-West that featured the Collaborative’s work around CLAS as well as efforts currently underway in California Office to Reform Education (CORE) participating districts to develop and pilot classroom-level assessment modules. Ben Sanders, the Director of Standards, Instruction, and Assessment at CORE, shared a systemic approach to developing these assessment modules, followed by a panel of teachers who described the ways in which these efforts have informed their classroom practice.
Link to Common Core symposium slides