Purpose of Assessments

Assessments are an ingrained part of an education organization, or any organization for that matter. However, whether we are considering an assessment of student learning, of teacher performance, or of principal effectiveness, there is one consistent detail: assessments tend to benefit those who are conducting the assessment rather than those who are being assessed. For example, students are assessed often. And the results of those assessments are for the teacher to inform instruction, or the school to promote their success to the community, or the state to gauge effectiveness of their schools. Rarely do the students benefit directly from that assessment. And the same can be said with regards to teacher or principal evaluations.

Making the CALL System About More than Survey Results

With that in mind, when the CALL Feedback System was created, the developers' goal was to provide formative feedback to school leaders to support their work. As a result, the CALL Feedback System provides targeted data in the form of the "Improvement Needs" and "Top 10 / Bottom 10" features. Over time, and having worked with schools and districts across the country for the past several years, the CALL Team has been listening to education leaders on how they would best be able to use the action-based CALL Feedback System. To be sure, having a user-friendly feedback system was very useful. However, they wanted to do more...

An Enhanced Interactive Approach

Based on user feedback, the CALL system has two new features within the feedback system that promotes school improvement planning, collaboration, and leadership coaching. 

First, there is the ability to select data blocks in the system to create a Personalized Report. Given that CALL is comprehensive by nature, there are a lot of data to sort through. Users can cut into the data in many ways. And, once they have identified their target areas on which they are going to focus, they can "star" those blocks of data, and save them into their personalized data report. That way, when school and district leaders return to the CALL system, they do not need to search through the full report to work with their targeted data and feedback.

In addition, school and district leaders work with the online CALL reporting system to obtain the results from their CALL survey(s). But the system functions as something more than a results-delivery platform. School and district leaders use CALL for school improvement work, and they can begin the process by engaging with the data and with each other at the same time. Users can enter notes into the data blocks within the report. They can pose questions and make comments. School leadership coaches and probe principals around certain findings. Principals can post a note to their leadership teams. Most importantly, education leaders can use this function to meet their school improvement planning needs.

Check out more of the features of the CALL Assessment Platform and Feedback System features.