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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DISCUSSION GUIDEBy Lois Brown Easton

for the February 2015 issue*

suppLEMEnt to phi dELta Kappan

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DISCUSSION GUIDEBy Lois Brown Easton

for the February 2015 issue

for the for the *

Using this guide

This discussion guide is intended to assist Kappan readers who want to use articles in staff meetings or university classroom discussions.

Members of PDK International have permission to make copies of the enclosed activities for use in staff meetings, professional development activities, or university classroom discussions. Please ensure that PDK International and Kappan magazine are credited with this material.

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Copyright PDK International, 2015. All rights reserved.

Contents 3 Guide to Parents need access to education data — and to know it’s safe Aimee Rogstad Guidera Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (5), 8-12

5 Guide to Student data privacy is cloudy today, clearer tomorrow Sonja Trainor Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (5), 13-18

8 Guide to More important than the contract is the relationship Patricia Burch and Annalee Good Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (5), 35-39

10 Guide to Writing assessment in six lessons — from “American Idol” David Slomp Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (5), 62-67

13 Applications

kappanmagazine.org V96 N5 Kappan Professional Development Discussion Guide 3

parents need access to education data — and to know it’s safe

By Aimee Rogstad Guidera

Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (5), 8-12

ovErviEW of thE articLE

During Data Quality Campaign (DQC) meetings in four cities, parents expressed their need to know what districts mean by data, how their children’s privacy is ensured, and how data are used to enhance student success.

KEy points

• Parents often think data means only test scores.

• They need to know about other kinds of data (such as teacher licensure information and college admittance rates) and how these data are used.

• Though parents largely trust teachers and school and district administrators, they need to know that data kept on their children are private and secure.

• If they are skeptical that their children’s data are private and secure, parents may object to collecting and using these data.

• The author recommends that schools and districts conduct conversations with parents to address questions such as “How do I know that information about my children is private and will not be released inappropriately (such as to business interests)?”

• Even though states have begun to address the need for transparency about data privacy and data use, with 30 bills on data privacy becoming law in 2014, only 17 states (such as Georgia) or districts (such as the Denver Public School District) issue reports for parent use.

dEEpEn your thinKing

1. How do you think the meaning of the word data has changed in terms of education in the past 25 years?

2. How do you think data collected by schools, districts and states about students has changed in the past 25 years? What has caused these changes?

3. How do you think parent/family expectations about data have changed in the past 25 years? What has caused these changes?

4. What data do you think parents should have about their students? About their school and their school’s teachers? About their district and other districts in the state?

5. What responsibilities do teachers have regarding data collection and use? School and district administrators? State-level administrators?

6. What responsibilities do parents have regarding data collection and use?

7. How are media affecting parent relationships with school in terms of trust? In terms of student-level data collection and analysis?

4 Kappan Professional Development Discussion Guide February 2015

ExtEnd your thoughts through activitiEs for group discussion

With colleagues, investigate your district’s policies about data collection, management, and use. Use the following guidelines from the National School Boards Association (Molnar, 2014).

“Data in the Cloud” from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is a legal and policy guide for school boards on student data privacy in the cloud-computing era. It recommends that school districts:

NSBA recommendationsDoes our district do this? How? How well? Recommendations for our district

Identify an individual districtwide chief privacy officer.

Conduct a privacy assessment and online services audit, preferably by an independent third party.

Establish a data safety committee or data governance team.

Review and update district privacy policies regularly.

Communicate consistently, clearly, and regularly with students, parents, and the community about privacy issues.

Establish a data safety committee or data governance team.

Communicate consistently, clearly, and regularly with students, parents, and the community about privacy issues.

Adopt consistent and clear contracting practices that address student data appropriately, and discourage take-it-or-leave-it terms.

Train staff members about data privacy issues and tactics for protecting data.

reference

Molnar, M. (2014, April 14). Student-data privacy guidelines: An overview. Education Week. www.edweek.org


student data privacy is cloudy today, clearer tomorrow

By Sonja Trainor



Since 2001, when data collection and analysis became an important aspect of school reform, federal and state governments have realized the importance of protecting the privacy of student information, especially in terms of vendors that serve the data needs of states, districts and schools.

KEy points

• Many districts and states rely on third-party businesses to collect, analyze, and report student data.

• Data breaches are increasingly frequent, and both educators and parents have good reason to be concerned about data privacy and uses of data.

• Although collecting and analyzing student data was part of the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, states have just begun to consider legislation related to data collection, storage, and use.

• The author shares a set of important concepts, including (#1) that data should be used only for educational and not at all for marketing purposes.

• Concept #2 is that parents and students should have a right to access and correct records, including those held by third-party vendors.

• Concept #3 stipulates that schools should be transparent about what data they collect, how it is collected, how it is stored, how it is used, and by whom.

• Three federal statutes apply to student data: the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

• Exceptions for FERPA include data used by school offi cials as well as directors of information; “school offi cials” may include contractors providing a service to a state, district, or school.

• Modifi cations to FERPA were proposed in 2014.

• Likewise, PPRA has a broad exception to its protection of privacy, for educational products or services such as district testing.

• Under COPPA online entities must get parent consent before collecting, storing, and using data from children under age 13.

• 30 out of 100 proposed state laws regarding student data privacy were enacted into law in 2014.

• These laws focused on restricting collection of some data, sharing data with states, transparency of practices related to data, and “cloud storage.”


1. To what extent do you agree with the author’s statement, “We all hand over vast amounts of our personal information to online service providers for the convenience, speed, and even security they offer”?

2. Have you been affected by data breaches in your personal or professional life? What happened? How did the data breaches affect you?


3. How have data about you been used to market products or services? How do you feel about that?

4. What do the words “big data” communicate to you?

5. What kinds of student data do the following people and organizations need? What do they not need?

• Classroom teachers

• School leaders

• District administrators and boards

• State administrators

• State legislators, state departments of education, state boards

• The federal government

• Media

• Parents

• Communities

• Other

6. What are the positive aspects of collecting, storing, and using data about students? What are the challenges?

7. What categories of student data collection are most important for educational improvement? What categories are not warranted, in your opinion?

8. What are some other categories for which data collection, storage (over time) and analysis are critical for educational progress? For example, what should be collected about teachers and administrators?

9. What are the alternatives to using third-party vendors that collect, store, and report student data? What problems are associated with these alternatives?

10. To what extent should educators be part of the conversation about student data?

11. What concerns you most about student data collection, storage, and use?


Alternative #1

What do educators tell children about data privacy?

With colleagues, go online to ikeepsafe.org. Click on Youth. You will meet Faux Paw, the Techno Cat “an adventurous six-toed, web-surfing cat that loves having fun with her friends. Sometimes, she runs into trouble while being on her computer and while playing video games. Certainly she’s learned one thing over the years: The Internet is like a big city, with a lots of possibilities! That means it is important to learn how to use it safely and follow the rules.”

You’ll see that Faux Paw has had a number of “adventures” with technology:

1. Faux Paw’s Dangerous Download. Faux Paw steals a song and infects her music player and computer and other computers citywide.

2. Faux Paw Goes to the Games: Balancing Real Life with Screen Time. Faux Paw gets so involved in an Internet game that she misses the chance to carry the torch at the Olympics.

3. Faux Paw Meets the First Lady: How to Handle Cyberbullying. Faux Paw encounters an imposter on the Internet and has to learn what to do and not to do when he begins to bully her; Laura Bush helps out.

4. Faux Paw Adventures in the Internet. Faux Paw meets someone online and agrees to meet in person.

Select one of the movies to watch (fun even for adults) or download and view the PowerPoint slides or a PDF of the slides.


The movies and slides end with recommendations for children to follow in terms of keeping their data and themselves safe.

Then discuss the following:

1. How does your district or school discuss data safety with students?

2. What are the most serious issues regarding student data safety?

3. What could your district or school do differently to enhance student data safety?

4. How could students be involved in deciding how the school or district can help improve student data safety?

5. How could parents be involved in this effort?

6. How can students distinguish from data they share online and student data collected and used by educators, especially through third-party vendors? What’s different? What’s similar?

Alternative #2

With colleagues, discuss what “big data” means. To what extent do you agree with the Wikipedia definition: “Big data is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process them using traditional data processing applications.” Large data sets require extraordinary capacity in terms of collecting, storing, analyzing, and reporting them.

Continue your discussion by providing examples of how big data have affected your lives in the following categories:

• Science

• Human research

• Government

• Business and enterprise

Here are some examples given by Wikipedia:

• Science: The Large Hadron collider, the Square Kilometre Array, the Sloane Digital Sky Survey, the NASA Center for Climate Simulation

• Human research: The Human Genome Project

• Government: Election campaigns, the IRS, the CIA, Affordable Care Act

• Business and enterprise: eBay, Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google

Finally, consider these criticisms of big data in terms of how they apply to your school or district:

1. Collecting big data is a fad; often representative samples of data are sufficient for understanding and analysis. The sheer volume of data may be beguiling but is unnecessary and may be misleading in terms of implying a “greater truth” than representative samples.

2. The rush toward collecting lots of data may not allow for nonuseful data to be filtered out; the result of analyzing all the data may mean overlooking crucial data.

3. Data are based on present and past effects; they only predict the future if it is assumed that the future will be the same as the present or past. Use of big data to plan or prepare for the future may not be particularly helpful.

4. Adding more data does not eliminate the problem of bias.

5. There may be less analysis of big data just because the volume of data is considered sufficient “proof” of a phenomenon.


More important than the contract is the relationship

By Patricia Burch and Annalee Good



Contracting for services related to data requires that districts engage in serious dialogue with vendors about the digital curriculum, instruction and assessment, data access, privacy, and steering the data partnership away from marketing and political purposes.

KEy points

• Digital education requires that districts privatize services so educators get the best products and services and don’t waste resources.

• Digital education can provide a fast feedback loop, archive data over time, and provide useful reports throughout the system.

• The role of vendors is critical in terms of providing high-quality digital tutoring, courses and whole school curriculum and instruction.

• Vendors must commit to “bringing innovative digital instruction to scale for all students.”

• Vendors also must work with districts to ensure that confi dential data is not used for marketing purposes and is managed in a way that secures it, providing privacy to students and their families and educators.

• The authors give an example of a proactive vendor whose services were cocreated by the vendor and educators to provide an assessment system, track student progress, provide data regularly and in multiple formats, and make the whole process transparent.

• The authors argue that ignoring the issues raised by contracting for curriculum, instruction, assessment, and data services may result in status-quo learning opportunities for many students; they also argue that educators should not simply reject contracting with corporations that could provide services that would be transformative.


1. To what extent did you experience digital learning, including data collection and reporting, when you were a student? To what extent have you experienced it as an educator?

2. What are your thoughts about digital learning tools? Online assessments? Online data gathering and reporting?

3. What do you see as the benefi ts of digital learning? What do you see as the problems?

4. What interactions have you had with vendors of digital education tools (including those for assessing students and reporting results)? What has been positive about these interactions? What has been problematic?

5. What do you think about districts contracting for digital services related to assessment, scoring of assessments, reporting achievement, and keeping track of student progress?

6. What kind of fi nancial opportunities might be available to vendors that contract with districts for assessments and reporting? What kind of political opportunities might be available?


7. What are some of the privacy issues related to outsourced assessment and reporting endeavors?

8. What are the challenges of engaging in authentic dialogue with vendors about curriculum, instruction, assessment, and reporting services they offer?

9. Where are student data located in your district? Who can access these data? For example, are the data “in the cloud”? How are the data used?

10. Based on your own experience, how are data used to improve districts, schools, and classrooms?


Work with colleagues to understand your own school’s or district’s use of digital products and programs by using the diagram the authors provided with their article:

First, generate a list of vendors that supply curriculum, instruction, assessment, and reporting programs and products for your schools and district.

Then consider the three dimensions of the authors’ diagram:

1. For digital curriculum, consider to what extent the curriculum is vendor driven (that is, created by the vendor and purchased by the school or district) or user driven. Place an X on the diagram to indicate your decision. Then discuss whether this curriculum is effective and with which students. Discuss how you know it is effective?

2. For digital instruction (such as whether it is synchronous or asynchronous, individual or small group, with/without live interaction between students and a teacher) consider to what extent instruction is vendor- or user-developed (or somewhere in-between) and put an X where you think it should be on that dimension. Then discuss how effective you think digital instruction is. Also discuss the students with whom the instruction is particularly effective and how you know that.

3. Finally, look at the dimension of assessment and reporting. To what extent was the system of assessment and reporting vendor-generated or locally generated? Discuss whether the assessment and reporting software is centrally located (such as in the cloud) or locally controlled and accessed. How effective is this system? How do you know?


Writing assessment in six lessons — from “american idol”

By David Slomp



Rubrics, which used to be an educator’s fail-safe tool for evaluating learning, have actually limited teachers’ ability to respond to student work.

KEy points

• In a Foundations of Assessment course, the author forced his students to design and then use a rubric to evaluate contestants’ performance on a talent show.

• The students discovered that using the rubric required them to accept seriously defi cient performances.

• A “technocentric approach” to evaluating student work, relying on generic indicators of quality, prevents evaluators from examining the work in context.

• The author suggests that the purpose of the learning is critical to assessing students’ demonstrations of learning.

• He shares a number of lessons related to effective assessment.

• Lesson #1: Provide multiple — rather than singular — (or “one-shot”) opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning.

• Lesson #2: The people who judge performance should be experts whose subjective judgment can be trusted, making a list of objective criteria superfl uous.

• Lesson #3: Generalized and regular aspects of a performance (such as good writing) may not be suffi cient to evaluate a specifi c performance (such as a particular essay written for a specifi c purpose and audience).

• Lesson #4: Reliability and validity occur when judges engage in dialogue to discover common criteria and work out divergent criteria in order to arrive at an appropriate evaluation.

• Lesson #5: Evaluating student work according to purpose means applying both objective (cognitive) and subjective (affective) criteria in terms of how effective the work is according to its purpose.

• Lesson #6: Students rarely or never have consequences as result of evaluation of their work, which limits the effect of assessment.


1. What is substantially different in terms of evaluating student learning and evaluating talent on a television show? What is similar?

2. What words would you use to describe exemplary student work, such as an essay? How are these words different from the words the author cites for talent show ratings: memorable, confi dent, and strong stage presence?

3. How have you used rubrics to evaluate work? How helpful have these rubrics been in terms of leading you to an accurate evaluation?

4. How have rubrics been used to evaluate your work? How accurate have they been in terms of accurately assessing your performance?


5. What are the options for evaluating student work? Do any of these options overcome the limitations of using rubrics?

6. How could a panel of expert judges work in terms of evaluating learning? How could they engage in dialogue about the work?

7. What would happen if you tried the author’s experiment with fellow educators? With students?

8. How do you evaluate student work on the Common Core standards? To what extent are you using rubrics? Other evaluation measures?


With colleagues, develop a rubric for an effective form of transportation. Your rubric should have five characteristics and a rating scale from 1 to 6. Use the chart below, and don’t turn to page 12 in this PD Guide until you have settled on the characteristics and have an understanding of what a 1 would be and what a 6 would be (you do not have to determine the characteristics of scores between 1 and 6).

CharacteristicDescription of

1 (lowest) 2 3 4 5Description of

6 (highest)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Turn to the example on page 12 only AFTER you have finished your rubric. Individually, use your rubric to evaluate the examples. Share your scores. Then reflect on the following questions:

1. How similar or different are your scores? If they are the same or quite similar, the rubric helped you achieve reliability. Did your rubric help you achieve reliability? Why or why not?

2. Do you think the rubric characteristics helped you understand the particular characteristics of each example? Did your rubric take into consideration the different purposes of the examples? How would it have helped you to modify the criteria according to the purposes?

3. What if you had known the purpose of the whole assessment procedure (e.g., to get to another planet)? How would that have helped you?

4. How would it have helped you to have a conversation about the examples?

5. Have you had good or bad experiences with any of the examples? How did those experiences affect your rating of the example?

6. To what extent did you find yourself thinking about subjective responses to the examples (e.g., “that is an ugly color”)?

7. To what extent do you consider yourselves experts about transportation? How would it have helped/hindered you to have expert judges in the room?

8. Could you use the characteristics on the rubric to assess examples outside the realm of transportation?

9. What consequences occurred as a result of your evaluation process? To what extent does that affect your interest in learning more about transportation or becoming a better assessor of transportation possibilities?

10. To what extent would you trust the results of this assessment process? Could a computer do better than you did?


Example #1 Your rating: _____







ApplicationsThis Professional Development Guide was created with the characteristics of adult learners in mind (Tallerico, 2005):

• Active engagement • Relevance to current challenges

• Integration of experience • Learning style variation

• Choice and self-direction

As you think about sharing this article with other adults, how could you fulfill the adult learning needs above?

This Professional Development Guide was created so that readers could apply what they have learned to work in classrooms (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001):

• Identifying similarities and differences • Summarizing and note-taking

• Reinforcing effort and providing recognition • Homework and practice

• Nonlinguistic representations • Cooperative learning

• Setting objectives and providing feedback • Generating and testing hypotheses

• Cues, questions, and advance organizers

As you think about sharing this article with classroom teachers, how could you use these strategies with them?

references

Marzano, R.J., Pickering, D., & Pollock, J.E. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Tallerico, M. (2005). Supporting and sustaining teachers’ professional development: A principal’s guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

About the AuthorLois Brown Easton is a consultant, coach, and author with a particular interest in learning designs — for adults and for students. She retired as director of professional development at Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center, Estes Park, Colo. From 1992 to 1994, she was director of Re:Learning Systems at the Education Commission of the States (ECS). Re:Learning was a partnership between the Coalition of Essential Schools and ECS. Before that, she served in the Arizona Department of Education in a variety of positions: English/language arts coordinator, director of curriculum and instruction, and director of curriculum and assessment planning.

A middle school English teacher for 15 years, Easton earned her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona. Easton has been a frequent presenter at conferences and a contributor to educational journals.

She was editor and contributor to Powerful Designs for Professional Learning (NSDC, 2004 & 2008). Her other books include:

• The Other Side of Curriculum: Lessons From Learners (Heinemann, 2002);

• Engaging the Disengaged: How Schools Can Help Struggling Students Succeed (Corwin, 2008);

• Protocols for Professional Learning (ASCD, 2009); and

• Professional Learning Communities by Design: Putting the Learning Back Into PLCs (Learning Forward and Corwin, 2011).

Easton lives and works in Arizona. Email her at [email protected].

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