Universal Screening and Assessment Practices in Montessori

Introduction

Sometimes assessment seems to be considered a dirty word in Montessori classrooms, but here is my argument for why universal screeners and formative assessments are vital. However, I also think assessment is one conundrum all Montessori teachers struggle with. Public school teachers share their laments on how much assessment they are required to do, and often how little use they find in many of the assessments. Private school teachers either still believe their anecdotal opinion should be enough for parents, or they struggle with which assessments to use (just enough, not too many). Having experienced schools transitioning from the omniscient anecdotal observations of teachers to more organized and consistent data collection, I can tell you from a plethora of experience:

• Anecdotal data is colored by bias and opinion, and no two teachers see the child exactly the same way. This can become especially apparent when a child transitions from one class to the next (for example, from early childhood to lower elementary or from lower elementary to upper elementary) and the new teacher’s perceptions are wildly different from the past teacher’s. This puts new teachers in the position of raising an alarm with families that feels contrary to messaging families have been receiving in the past, and this message can be tied personally to the relationship with the new teacher instead of being seen as valuable data on which to base teamwork.
• Additionally, this type of progress communication requires a lot of trust on the part of parents. Trust that is sometimes irrevocably broken when their perceptions or the perceptions of another professional do not align with those of the teacher, and the teacher has no real data (think inventory numbers, checklist, rubrics, accuracy rates, etc.) to back them up.
• Even when we do use a screener or assessment tool that ensures we are looking at the same things and using the same ranking system, there is still variability in teacher assessment.

However, Montessori was a scientist and built her pedagogy on observational data. Data is vital in classrooms for many reasons, including:

• Communicating with parents about current developmental levels and progress
• Identifying student needs to inform teaching
• Identifying tier 2 and 3 students who qualify for extra support services
• Communicating with other professionals (children’s next teachers or schools, medical partners, etc.)
• Helping track instructional effectiveness and school continuous improvement

One might say that most assessments are not “observational” data, but screeners and inventory assessments are simply tools to organize the information begin gathered during an observation or activity. They standardize what is being recorded for use in comparing over time or among groups. Dr. Paul Epstein reminds us that we are born natural observers, but we are not born natural recorders. Having rubrics, checklists, and rating scales available helps us identify:

• What to observe
• How to categorize what we observe in a meaningful and usable way
• An organization for information that allows us to look for patterns and trends

In this article, we are going to talk about quick screenings and assessments that can be used universally (screeners) or as short assessments of foundational skills for targeted groups. These tools help us gather information that can improve our lesson planning and teaching and target our support more effectively. We will not be diving into external data sources, such as standardized testing, which are designed to give classrooms, schools, districts, and the larger community student achievement information through an external, third-party tool. We will be discussing screeners and formative assessments used in the classroom, at building-level, to ensure high quality instruction and positive student outcomes.

What is Universal Screening?

Universal Screening is when data is collected from all students in a given age group for the purpose of identifying potential gaps in learning and providing early intervention. Universal screening can collect data about developmental milestones, hearing and vision, or academic progress.

Why is Universal Screening Important?

Universal screening serves three vital purposes. It:

1. identifies risk for learning gaps and can connect students with early intervention services.
2. opens doors of communication among the members of a child’s team (families, teachers, and families’ medical partners) to work together to increase student success inside and outside of school.
3. Identifies areas of lower achievement within a group–if enough children in a group need particular supports, they can be built into the Tier 1 classroom setting for everyone.

What are some examples of Universal Screeners?

• English Language Fluency Screening such as the WIDA assessment, measure a child’s understanding and fluent use of the English language for children who speak a language other than English at home. Children are identified for this screener by families completing a Home Language Survey. Any child a family identifies as having a home language other than English can be screened, beginning in kindergarten, and gets a fluency rating (5 being “fluent”). For schools that accept Title III funding, this can be a tool for identifying qualifying students. For any children that test below fluency, supports, accommodations, and interventions can be put in place to help make sure learning gaps do not occur (or begin to close) while they continue to build toward fluency.
• Developmental screeners such as the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, which also has a social-emotional supplemental screener. These screening tools are based on milestones and calculated using a child’s exact age. Developmental screeners usually assess areas such as:
  • Communication: language skills (what they can say and what they understand)
  • Motor Skills: Gross motor skills like using arms and legs and other large muscles to move and also fine motor skills such as finger and hand movement. 
  • Problem Solving: How a child plays with objects or solves problems.
  • Personal-Social: Self-help skills and interactions with others
• Hearing and Vision Screenings can allow for impairments to be identified before they significantly impact learning. 
• Academic Screeners (when applied universally, these are screening tools; when applied to targeted groups, they are progress-monitoring assessments).
  • Literacy Screeners and Assessments
    • Phonemic Awareness Screeners for Early Childhood students, emergent readers in Lower Elementary, and children with significant reading challenges in Upper Elementary provide insight into the “building blocks” of reading that we can only clearly measure in a verbal assessment. Orton Gillingham offers a useful tool for this.
    • Literacy Skills Assessments such as DIBELS can begin in kindergarten and offer samples of a variety of literacy skills in a relatively short assessment period. Students take about six minutes each to assess. There are phonemic awareness, decoding, word recognition, and comprehension sections. UFLI also offers a similar assessment and both are open-access (free). 
    • Running Records can be a useful tool for organizing information around what kind of errors students are making. UFLI offers tools for running record assessments for free.
    • Inventories such as letter sounds, sight words, etc. are an assessment, not a universal screener, because we would not administer them until we know children have been exposed to the content and they are comprehensive vs. “samplers”. For example, a letter sound inventory usually includes all letters. 

Who Should Not Be Screened?

Parents can opt out of screenings in most settings. Also, screeners are for identifying that there may be potential issues–they should not be administered to children who have a known disability. 

While screening data may also be used as formative assessment data, helping teachers plan what to teach next to whom, they are not interchangeable. A teacher would not want to repeat a screener very often, as patterns in the first portions of the screener may become predictable or memorized, skewing the data. Inventories of all letter sounds, for example, could be used for more frequent classroom progress monitoring, while DIBELS would not be done more than three times per year (beginning of the year, middle of the year, and end of the year).

A Note on Consistent Practices

Practices for screening should be equally applied to all students. Communication with parents is important so that they are informed and ready to hear results and partner with classroom teachers as needed for any interventions. 

Not only should screening and assessment be applied consistently in the classroom (for example, if each teacher in the classroom leads a literature group, there should be an agreement about what assessments are administered and what data is used to determine which assessments are administered when, where that data is collected, and how it is analyzed and used. This ensures every student is receiving the same quality of instruction.

Additionally, classrooms in the same level need consistency of assessment to align expectations throughout the school, ease communication with teachers of the next level, and ensure that parents have a similar experience from one teacher or classroom to the next.

Finally, classrooms throughout a school need consistency so that, organizationally, data can be used to support teacher development and track progress toward goals outlined in the school’s continuous improvement plan. If one lower elementary uses one screener or assessment, and the other classroom uses another, this can result in “apples and oranges” data that does not translate for all stakeholders.

Avoiding Over-Assessment

Instead of piece-mealing together a plan and adding new assessments as we learn about them, it is essential to think strategically as a school. Using a Universal Design for Learning or Backward Design model can help. Start with the big questions:

• What skills do students need to be successful in our programs, outside of school, and beyond?
• Break these down into isolated skills…What essential or foundational skills do students need to be able to do these things? How can we tell if they have them? What would “success” look like?
• What developing skills do we need to progress-monitor to know we are serving families well to meet these goals? How do we know if a child is “on track”? How do we know when a child might need extra help?
• How can we measure these skills? What tools are available to help us organize our observations into who needs help and who is doing well? Does the tool help us communicate what we need to with parents so that we are all working together?
• For each of the above, what tools are logistically feasible:
  • Affordable
  • Take a manageable time/number of people to administer
  • Minimally invasive for the student
  • Accessible for families to understand
  • Easy to score/interpret
  • Data can clearly be used to inform teaching (How? Make a plan–if assessments do not make our teaching better, we are not doing something right…)
  • Provide the most data in the most areas with the least “cost” (money, time, effort, student stress)
• From there, holistically design an assessment plan of what will be assessed, using which tools, administered to which students, and when. It can be helpful to map assessments out on a monthly calendar to make sure no time of year is too assessment-intensive (for students or staff). 

Conclusion

I in no way intend to tell you what you should assess, what assessments you should use, or how often to use them. Instead, I urge you to take inventory of the data you are currently collecting.

• Does it cover everything you need to know?
• Are there duplicates? Are you doing too much and interrupting the child more than you need to?
• Does that data actually get used in the best possible way to positively impact teaching? Explicitly plan how you will use data, and what benchmarks might be used to trigger certain actions.
• Is there alignment within classrooms, across classrooms, and schoolwide so that you are all “speaking the same language”?

There is no one right or wrong answer, only a journey. Dr. Montessori called us all to be scientists. Analyze the fidelity of your experiment. Make sure you feel like it is leading to strong results.