Education Week - February 5, 2014 - 14

'Fully Aligned?' System Weighs Common-Core Fidelity
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purport to be "fully aligned" with the
Common Core State Standards.
The new system, called EQuIP,
represents one way that teachers
are trying to make sense of the flood
of curricular offerings that's been
unleashed by the nearly nationwide
adoption of the common standards.
There are other tools or processes,
too, that are designed to evaluate
instructional materials for commoncore
alignment. The two national
teachers' unions have launched
free portals where teachers can
post and comment on lessons. Student
Achievement Partners, whose
founders led the writing of the common
standards, has a set of free online
tools that can be used to judge
the fidelity of instructional materials
to the standards.
Reviewing Materials
For-profit groups-like the Aus-
tin, Texas-based Learning List,
which uses panels of judges to size
up instructional materials-are
also wading into the alignmentevaluation
business. The Business
Roundtable is talking with partners
about creating a group to do
"Consumer Reports-type reviews"
of common-core materials.
And a group of experts led by
Maria M. Klawe, the president of
Harvey Mudd College, is creating a
nonprofit to review the most widely
used common-core math materials.
The EQuIP program was created
by Achieve, a Washington-based
nonprofit organization that played
a key role in launching the common-standards
initiative in 2009.
Achieve has worked for many years
with states on academic expectations
and accountability.
The approach for EQuIP originated
with the work of three states-Massachusetts,
New York, and Rhode Island-that
designed a set of criteria
to use in judging lessons and units for
alignment with the standards.
The Tri-State Rubric, as it came
to be known, created a buzz as other
states tried it out and sought training
to spread its use among teachers
and curriculum writers. Achieve
renamed the project EQuIP-for
Educators Evaluating Quality Instructional
Products-and began
training for states, districts, teachers'
unions, colleges of education,
and others interested in using it.
Achieve selected its first round of
teacher-jurors last June. It chose
a second group in November. Both
groups came together late last
month for training and practice
using the rubrics-checklists of criteria-to
evaluate math and English/language
arts lessons and units
that had been submitted by states,
districts, groups of teachers, and
nonprofit curriculum developers.
Jurors have reviewed about 40 of
the 125-plus lessons and units that
have been submitted so far, and of
those, only nine have been deemed
sufficiently aligned to be posted as
resources on the EQuIP website, according
to Alissa Peltzman, a vice
president of Achieve who leads the
project.
Curricular materials produced
by large publishing houses-which
dominate tens of thousands of classrooms-haven't
been submitted to
EQuIP for review, Ms. Peltzman said.
EQuIP doesn't anticipate evaluating
much from that sector, either,
in part because of licensing restrictions
that limit those materials'
use, she said, and in part because it
lacks the capacity to analyze such a
big volume of materials.
At the session here in Arlington,
Va., reaching consensus on whether
a lesson was aligned wasn't easy
or quick. It took all day to evaluate
and rate the constitutional-freedoms
unit, with rounds of detailed
analysis and areas of disagreement.
One table of teachers, for instance,
was deeply divided on
whether the unit lived up to a key
criterion in the rubric: stating a
"clear and explicit purpose for instruction."
The teachers also disagreed
about whether the unit met
a criterion that required materials
to demand a good deal of writing
based on evidence in a text.
One middle school teacher criticized
the unit for providing "scaffolding,"
or support, for students
in the assignments but not in the
readings. A group of elementary
school teachers at a nearby table
got into an animated debate about
whether the unit's reading material
from primary and secondary
sources was challenging enough, yet
still accessible to students.
Terri King Hunt, a teacher from
Atlanta, told the group that she
thought the unit fell short on that
criterion.
"You could say you
threw a lot of material at
them, but what did they
get out of it?" she said.
Next to Ms. Hunt, Kay
Dugan, an assistant
superintendent from
Bensenville, Ill., pressed
her colleagues to "be hard" in sizing
up how well the unit provides ways
to assess student learning day to
day. "We need to get better at giving
students feedback through formative
assessment," she told them.
EVALUATING
INSTRUCTIONAL
MATERIALS
Educators who review
curricular units and
instructional lessons as
part of Achieve's "EQuIP"
program evaluate four
aspects, or "dimensions,"
of the materials submitted.
Below are highlights of some
of the English/language arts
criteria they consider.
I. Aligning to the
Common Core
State Standards.
a central aim of the EQuIP project.
In fact, a section of the training was
devoted to giving effective feedback.
"It's easy to get cranky, like 'Why
didn't you do this?' and 'If I were
teaching this, I'd do it this way,' "
Judson Odell, one of the facilitators
of the training, told the participants.
"Try to stay positive."
The first round of EQuIP judging
returned individual reviewers' comments
to developers. That feedback
could be "conflicted and confusing"
because of the differences in each
reviewer's comments, Ms. Peltzman
of Achieve said. So another layer-
the lead review-has been added to
the process in an attempt to send
clear, overall messages about the
revisions needed.
Evaluating instructional materials
for quality or alignment is inherently
thorny and subjective, and
reaching consensus can be tricky.
Assembling juries of experts to
make those choices is hardly new.
In 19 states, panels comb through
submitted materials and decide
DO THEY:
nTarget a set of grade-level standards?
nInclude a clear and explicit purpose for
instruction?
nChoose texts that measure within students'
grade-level band?
II. Reflecting
key shifts
of the
standards.
nRequire students to read text closely for evidence and deep meaning?
nFacilitate rich, rigorous evidence-based discussion and writing through thoughtprovoking,
text-dependent questions?
nExpect students to draw evidence from texts to produce clear, coherent writing
that informs, explains, or argues?
III. Responding
to students'
varied needs for
instructional support.
n Cultivate student interest and engagement?
nIntegrate appropriate supports in reading, writing, listening, and speaking for students who read
below grade level, are English-learners, or have disabilities?
n Provide extensions and/or more advanced text for students who read well above grade level?
IV. Regularly
assessing whether
students are
mastering the
content and skills
in the lesson/unit.
Cautionary Notes
Since this was a sample exercise,
votes on rating each "dimension" of
the materials were taken by a show
of hands. Collectively, the teachers
voting showed they thought the
unit needed significant revision.
Had it been a real evaluation,
three or more reviewers would have
graded each dimension on a scale of
0 to 3, and written explicit feedback
to guide developers in revising the
materials. Then a "lead reviewer"
would have written one evaluation,
summarizing the feedback and assigning
an overall rating.
The materials rated "exemplar"
or "exemplar if improved" would
be posted on EQuIP's website. Those
needing more revision, or not yet
ready for review, would not be
posted, but feedback would be returned
to the developers.
Guiding curriculum developers is
14 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 5, 2014 | www.edweek.org
NOTE: A full version of this
evaluation rubric and a
companion document for
mathematics are on the
EQuIP website at
www.achieve.org/EQuIP.
SOURCES: Achieve; Educators
Evaluating Quality Instructional
Products
Ms. Hayes said. "I just wonder
what's lost in that process."
Another risk in creating panels
to evaluate materials is that their
findings can be viewed as silver
bullets.
Jim Burke, an English teacher at
Burlingame High School in California,
said it's important to avoid mistaking
any panel's approved materials
for a "total curriculum solution."
"It does give you some assurance
of quality about the 'what,' but it
doesn't deal with the heart of the
work-the 'how'-how you are
teaching your students," he said.
Educators who had come to the
Virginia training and EQuIP jurors
were eager, however, to see how the
process could help them, and cadres
of colleagues back home, move
forward with the common standards.
They seemed particularly
interested in its value as a tool for
creating their own instructional
materials.
In Idaho, a small team of literacy
coaches at the state department of
education will use the EQuIP process
this spring to help 250 teachers
write model units, said Christopher
Butts, one of the state coaches, who
is serving as an EQuIP juror.
Suzanne Snider, a curriculum coordinator,
said many of the teachers in
nElicit direct, observable evidence of degree of mastery?
nAssess student proficiency with methods that are unbiased and
accessible to all students?
nProvide sufficient guidelines for interpreting student performance?
what to include on an "adoption list"
from which districts must choose if
they purchase materials with state
funds. Elsewhere, districts are left
to shop for themselves.
Even those who welcome the
evaluations by EQuIP and other organizations
voice cautionary notes
about the process.
Sandy Hayes, the immediate past
president of the National Council of
Teachers of English, said the EQuIP
guidelines are "terrific tools for conversation"
as teachers write lessons
together in their schools. But she
worries that a rating system could
subtly work to narrow the concept
of "good" materials.
"In talking about what's good,
sometimes people can be silenced,
or there's this 'groupthink' that
happens, when you find yourself
compromising to get consensus,"
her districts in California's San Bernardino
County "haven't had a lot of
direction" in figuring out what constitutes
real alignment to the common
core. "Teachers have been going on
Pinterest, for goodness' sake," she
said. "We really need this."
Different Uses
States, districts, and vendors have
been using the EQuIP tools in a variety
of ways. The Maryland education
department submitted sample lessons
and units, and found the reviewers'
feedback "explicit and valuable,"
said Ava B. Spencer, the state's English/language
arts coordinator. Teachers
are working on revisions based on
that feedback, she said.
In North Carolina, the state education
department has used the
EQuIP rubrics in training to help

http://www.achieve.org/EQuIP http://www.edweek.org

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