Bringing Together Stakeholders Through a Virtual Mini‐Conference

Abstract

P lan. Deliver. Assess. Repeat. These are familiar steps in the assessment cycle. As assessment practitioners within departments, colleges, and schools of education, this message is amplified from the dean's office to the classroom. Our teacher education candidates internalize these steps into their professional training. Indeed, we want P-12 teachers to think, know, and do assessment: it is the building block of impacting student learning. Assessment is a habit of mind; and when routinely performed, leads to stronger practice. We also found that the assessment habit served us well in tackling a new experience, in this case, planning and executing a means for assessment practitioners around our state to gather, communicate, and learn.After years of pandemic living and learning, we can all list myriad ways in which we have needed to adjust our own practices. As assessment directors, we have had to reimagine our methods for data collection, our timelines, and our means of communication as educational environments have shifted to online contexts. Busby (2020) touted the value of resilient assessment and provided the assessment community with a reminder to examine our respective assessment practices and to streamline and adjust to achieve a flexible, robust assessment plan. As we reviewed our own processes, many of us found the simple Plan-Deliver-Assess-Repeat chain was strained, kinked, or broken.The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) accredited institutions in Virginia (all teacher prep programs are required to have CAEP accreditation) have formed a strong network in recent years. CAEP is relatively new (started in 2013), and many Educator Preparation Providers (EPPs) are still navigating their first visit. Data sharing in Virginia is fairly decentralized, and there is currently no systematic structure for collecting and sharing data across the state education agency, university-based EPPs, and P-12 school divisions. Virginia has 36 university-based EPPs, which represent a range of rural, suburban, and urban contexts. Programs range in size from those that produce fewer than 10 teachers per year to those that produce several hundred. Some EPPs utilize residency or professional development school models, though these are not typical. In an effort to bring together efforts across these diverse institutions, we have developed an assessment consortium open to all EPPs in Virginia: the Virginia Education Assessment Collaborative (VEAC; https:// www.projectveac.org). This consortium represents a networked improvement community, which brings together diverse stakeholders to learn, innovate, and engage in joint problem solving (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, and LeMahieu 2015