In addition to my role as the Instructional Coach at my school, I am also the assessment coordinator. This role of Assessment Coordinator is my choice and is in addition to my full-time contracted hours as the Instructional Coach. I’m responsible for coordinating the state test, our quarterly benchmark assessments, and the ELL assessments for our building.
So as we enter the big testing season, I am crazy busy. (Our main testing season begins in February and end just before June.) Things have definitely changed in regards to my responsibilities, especially when it comes to coordinating our state test for our building. In the past, I simply helped to make the schedule, went through the proctor training of staff, handed out materials and locked them up when not in use, inventoried said materials, and sent them back to our district office to be sent to the state evaluators. That probably took me about 12 hours in total. Not too bad. Well…those days are gone.
Our state testing of SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) doesn’t start until the end of March and I’ve already put in about 15 hours, 5 of which were just today. I’ve been to trainings, participated in webinars, helped to create the very tight schedule, made all of the class rosters for the classes testing, worked with our IT guy to make sure our computer lab is ready, provided staff development several times, and more. Today, I spent about 5 hours making cards with each student’s individual log-in with a copy for the principal, the teachers, and myself. I probably could have completed it in about 3 hours but I had technology issues in the morning. Ugh. All that, and I’m still not done.
In my future, I still have to input the accommodations for all students with IEP’s or 504’s. I need to manage the cart of laptops that we will be borrowing from out IT department. Then there is the proctor training that I will provide. I know there are other elements that I will need to deal with too, especially when the testing actually starts, but right now I’m just focused on the prep. So I can see an additional 4-5 hours (I estimate) of testing coordination coming up. I can only imagine the hours that I’ll be running around supporting the classrooms during the test.
Many of the Instructional Coaches in my school district are also Assessment Coordinators; whereas other schools have classroom teachers take the role. I don’t know how classroom teachers will do it all. I have a more flexible schedule than the classroom teachers, so I can drop something and go take care of an issue that arises. A classroom teacher simply can’t do that. Then, there is the abundant number of things to take care of outside of their daily classroom responsibilities. Classroom teachers already take work home. This would just double that workload.
All this to say: I hope my school district takes into account the hours upon hours that we coordinators devote to making these assessments run smoothly in our buildings. In my opinion, this should be a part-time job or even a full time job if the person was responsible for two schools perhaps. But for now, I’ll keep setting things up and doing the best I can for our teachers and students.
For right now…I’m going to get some chocolate. J
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