Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Hello everyone! My name is Leigh M. Tolley, and I am Associate Professor, Secondary Education in the Educational Curriculum and Instruction Department of the College of Education & Human Development at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL Lafayette). In my current role, I primarily teach undergraduate preservice secondary teachers across all content areas about building positive classroom relationships and how to use instructional design principles—including evaluation—when planning lessons. I have taught a number of other graduate and undergraduate courses, including classroom assessment. I was initially assigned the classroom assessment course for bachelor’s-level students who were elementary, middle, and secondary school preservice teachers due to my own research on formative assessment, its connections to formative evaluation, and how it is implemented by secondary teachers.
Since joining the UL Lafayette faculty, I have been very involved in accreditation work for our teacher preparation program, including for the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and other state and national review processes. In Fall 2024, I had the unique opportunity to teach a version of the classroom assessment course for individuals with bachelor’s degrees who are earning their Master of Arts in Teaching in elementary education. Along with support from and discussions with my department head, I was able to work with my class to revisit and revise all of the course materials, assignments, and artifacts for our online portfolio review system. This helped to ensure that these were authentic and relevant assessments of their knowledge that helped them to develop formative and summative assessment skills to implement with their young students.
Teacher preparation program data is only effective if it is used! We collect a great deal of data, but program improvements can only happen when we analyze them and use that information to revise our program. This is especially important when requirements, such as those for teachers at the state and national levels, are always changing.
Teachers at all levels of experience are important stakeholders that need to be included in the evaluation process. I was fortunate to be able to have weekly discussions with my graduate students about their own needs for the elementary classroom and how we could work together to better align our assignments to address these appropriately.
Ask questions, then ask some more. Having an ongoing dialogue with my students for this course about their needs, teacher expectations, what they already know, and the contexts in which they are teaching only began to scratch the surface of how we could collaborate to develop and use valid and reliable resources for our program.
Keep utility and feasibility in mind. The products that we developed and implemented through this course would not be helpful if they did not support my students (and their students) in using effective classroom assessment practices. In addition, I had to consider how these changes may impact how we prepare and evaluate our undergraduate preservice teachers and their classroom assessment skills and what might work well for our program.
Accreditation is a critical process, but it should be used as a way of sharing the wonderful work that we do, rather than as the sole goal. Program data in any context should be used for continuous improvement, and changes and growth should be documented along the way. It is important that we use evaluation to help move us and the teaching profession forward.
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