I hope that by the time lunch rolls around on Monday that the mini-heat wave of the last couple of days will have cleared the school fields for recess. Every day, students plaintively ask if we are going to go outside for lunch; unfortunately the weather conspires to keep us inside.

The life of school must go on, of course, and the weather didn't disrupt everything. Although our full 7th grade team-building activity ("the Court of Dreams") couldn't go forward, our students and their families did get to watch the Wizards-Heat game on Friday evening. The Wizards failed to lose (although they came close); they showed us how well a team can function when all the parts are working together (the first half) and then what happens when you stop playing as a team (the second half). What was almost the second-largest lead ever given away in an NBA game turned into a nail-biter; that alone made the trek to the Verizon Center in the snow worth the effort. Special thanks to the 7th grade teachers who pulled it together; extra special thanks to Ms. Aileen Shaffer who came up with the idea and made us all believe it could happen!

Starting next week, we will be implementing the PARCC assessments. I thought I would share with you some of the thinking behind Deal's approach to the new assessment. There will always be some form of assessment. As a school we do not rely solely on the PARCC. We have used growth measures throughout the year (SRI (reading) and iReady (math)) that give us excellent information about where your child is today. We switched in 6th grade over to IB assessment, in which students better understand what they know and what they need to learn in order to grow. This will roll up into 7th grade with this class. At the core of all of these is a need to better know what has been working with which student and what is still needed. None of these tools is perfect, but they all play some part in figuring this out. My goal is to find the right balance of time and to never lose sight of the only reason we do this: to help grow students.

I believe that the best way to prepare for any assessment of standards is to know what those standards are, develop excellent curriculum in support of those standards, and do the very best teaching possible. With the Common Core standards in particular, the base idea is that the expectations grow over time; each standard becomes deeper as students mature. There should be, therefore, no need to prep or cram for a test if it has been the subject of instruction for several years. The only new variable is the testing design and that, I believe, is a vast improvement over excessive reliance on multiple-choice tests.

In order to minimize any potential impact of testing, I have made some decisions to keep us on track. DCPS provided Deal with 16 laptop carts (the standard ratio of 1 laptop per 3 students) to make the testing process as efficient as possible. Our test coordinator has designed a schedule that will keep any schedule disruptions to a minimum - each student will have just the right amount of time for testing, but the remaining five classes will not be any shorter. In the first week of testing, for example, our 7th graders will have all of their classes as planned, full length; the same will be true of our 6th and 8th graders during the 2nd week of testing.  My expectation is that the new test will be less disruptive of school life than the DC CAS of years past; we will see in a couple of weeks whether that is true.

Finally, what can you do reduce the concern on the part of your children? Together we need to lower stress levels associated with assessments; these only serve to skew results and hide student performance. On our end, I promise that we will approach any testing in a measured way, building student confidence, and not over-emphasizing the testing outcomes as determinants of anything more than current status. What can you do? Make sure your children are rested, feeling positive, and ready to show what they know. Check out the schedule and avoid scheduling non-emergency doctor or dentist visits. There will be regular academic expectations - arriving on time, doing one's work, engaging in learning - and we need this to be reinforced at home. The testing schedule is simple on your end: 6th and 8th graders will have the PARCC on the week of the 16th through the 20th; 7th graders will have the PARCC on the week of the 23rd to 27th. Period by period schedules will be in next week's bulletin.

This will be a different type of assessment, a model that is bound to be challenging but that will be, when all the kinks are worked out, a solid way to gauge growth and learning.