The Inner Workings of Implementing Universal Screening, Part 2
By Ed Finkel
Universal screening helps educators recognize strengths and talents in more students than traditional identification methods, which often depend on referrals or a single test score cutoff, according to researchers and practitioners within and outside of CTD. Part one of our blog series described what universal screening is, while covered here in part two are keys to implementation.
Implementing universal screening with fidelity requires a number of elements to be in place, including the right mix of assessment tools and data sources, along with optimal policy shifts, resource commitments and change management strategies—all while confronting a variety of myths and misconceptions about these shifts.
Assessment Tools and Data Sources
At the outset, Melissa Hinshaw, CTD coordinator of assessment, recommends deploying tools the district is already using, then adding measures if those tools are not capturing the data needed, perhaps to “look more at a student’s strengths and potential, versus just their current raw achievement,” she says. “It’s also important that teachers are watching students and noticing how they’re learning in class. Where are they exhibiting strengths? Where are they exhibiting talent?” And teachers need to be properly trained in using talent-oriented checklists, she adds.
While individual tests can be useful, they’re necessarily snapshots in time, and districts should build out a comprehensive profile vs. relying a single metric to determine what a student knows and what they need to learn next, says Eric Calvert, associate director of CTD, adding that test scores reveal nothing about interest or motivation level.
“Some of the teacher observation pieces coming into play add another layer of insight, where we can say, ‘I know that [a student] is not yet performing at the 95th percentile in science, but every time we do a science project, he gets really excited and wants to talk to me after class about it,’ ” he says. “That observational data from the teacher can give us confidence that if we gave this student that more advanced and more challenging opportunity, that their motivation and their interest would allow them to grapple successfully with that more advanced content.”
Scott Peters, assessment implementation director at Curriculum Associates and a former CTD board member, says there’s no such thing as a “valid” or “invalid” assessment in a generic context—the right assessment is one that measures the skills, abilities and dispositions needed for a student to succeed in the service in question that’s been proposed.
But too often, students are assessed for general abilities when the program in question is something like seventh-grade Common Core math. “That’s just never going to work,” he says. “We’re going to have kids who are identified, who that service doesn’t work well for. We’re going to have kids who would have benefited from that service, who aren’t identified.”
Policies, Resources and Strategies Needed
To embed universal screening, districts need to cement policies in place that speak to what they’re trying to accomplish, ensuring that there aren’t “blind spots” that inadvertently exclude groups of students, for example because they have an IEP or 504 plan, Hinshaw says. And it’s crucial both to communicate those policies with families to explain why the district undertakes universal screening, how so and what it means; and also to place a dedicated person as the “overseer of all things” for talent development programming.
Calvert suggests that districts make productive use of the data they collect beyond identifications for gifted programs and be thoughtful about providing professional development opportunities for teachers in how to use data for other purposes, such as differentiated instruction within the classroom. Given that assessments cost both money and staff time to administer them, districts should ensure that they serve multiple purposes, which “makes the move from doing just selective screening based on that referral process to universal screening more palatable and easier to budget,” he says.
In addition to finding ways to identify students for various services, districts also need policies in place to “exit” students who are not benefiting from a given service, Peters says. “We don’t like to think about that in gifted ed, but if we’re going to be more inclusive, that means we’re also going to have some kids who it just doesn’t work out well for, and we need to have a plan of action for transitioning them out,” he says, adding that assessments shouldn’t be performed in the first place if there’s not a matching service to provide. “Identification is a means to an end. We do it so that the student’s resulting educational experience is better.”
Shifting to a talent development model might require change management in that longtime gifted coordinators might see aspects of it as “heresy,” particularly the notion of moving students out of a gifted program, Peters says. “Are you saying we’re de-gifting kids now? That’s not what I’m saying,” he says. “We are moving to a more flexible model where students can be gifted in some areas but not others. … It’s in certain circumstances, at certain times, in certain places. And that’s just a more complicated world than a binary, 130 IQ, gifted forever kind of thing. That’s hard to manage. That’s a shift in mindset.”
Myths to Address
Among the myths and misconceptions that district leaders and gifted coordinators need to confront is the notion that all students who need beyond-grade-level services show up on assessments, Hinshaw believes. Another is that whatever programs students are placed into thus are “automatically going to meet their needs,” she says. “What we see very often is that programs measure the floor of entry. … We don’t do a great job of measuring the ceiling and potential of kids who are now placed in there.”
Among the myths and misconceptions that district leaders and gifted coordinators need to confront is the notion that all students who need beyond-grade-level services show up on assessments. Another is that whatever programs students are placed into thus are automatically going to meet their needs.
Calvert would like to debunk the myth that universal screening will only benefit the 3% to 5% of students who ordinarily would get identified for gifted services anyway, noting that as long as school leaders are strategic, this process can be beneficial for all students—especially if the resulting datasets are used to refine professional learning, uncover blind spots, and promote discussion among professionals about what students need and how they can best be served.
“Through classroom observation forms, through characteristics that we mention, in information that requests referrals or nominations from parents, that can help us form a watchlist of kids who are not at-risk, but at-potential,” he says. “Who maybe aren’t quite ready to be placed in the gifted program or the most advanced level of services, but who are showing us that they are approaching the boundary of that, who might benefit from some opportunities for additional supplemental enrichment. … Kids develop cognitively and academically in fits and starts, just like kids grow physically in fits and starts. It’s not linear.”
Peters sees the need to debunk the myth that “once gifted, always gifted,” underscoring that “we can’t just do one-and-done identification. We can’t universally screen kids in second grade, identify them and put them in services through 12th grade. Because kids’ needs change. The school changes. The curricula changes. The teachers change. So we need to keep this ongoing.”
Secondly, Peters challenges the misconception that a generic gifted identification can or should lead to domain-specific services. “We probably need to get out of the business of trying to diagnose ‘giftedness’ and instead identify unmet learning needs in specific academic areas,” he says. “And ‘academics’ doesn’t need to just be math and reading; it can be in any area. … That’s probably the biggest policy thing I would emphasize, and again, that would be a pretty big shift. Because most places do really global talent identification.”