the forest or the trees?

There have been lots of "flavors of the month" at LPS, so I hear. My more experienced colleagues have mentioned a few, and they tend to be wisely skeptical when another new trend comes their way. I have heard some quieter mutterings like this about PLCs and developing essential learnings and common assessments. I don't feel this is just a passing fad; I think that if we handle this trend intelligently and from a variety of perspectives, we can keep it from becoming just another fad that teachers will chuckle about a decade or so after it's passed.
Really though, common assessments are running the risk of TRULY being the kind of thing the "flavor of the month"! What do I mean? Let me tell ya! Common assessments are meant to ensure that students arrive at essential learnings, no matter which school they go to. So, in the hierarchy of importance with PLCs, essential learnings are at the top. However, it's going to be pretty much impossible to make sure that each teacher grades the same way. That appears to be a big hurdle for creating common assessments. So, we should resort to holding students accountable mainly for information that could be tested very easily with scantron sheets, right? I don't think any of us thinks scantron-type tests are very good assessments, but I think this is the direction we'll go in if we want to dwell the fine points.
Some of these fine points are that none of us grades the same way, and that objective tests might be the only way for us to have a "reliable" common assessment that rates the kids' knowledge and ability exactly the same way. This is dangerous if we want to overwhelm ourselves with "perfecting" the assessment rather than keeping the big picture in mind. If having the most accurate means of assessing students' knowledge is the true end-all with this district-wide push toward common assessments, we'd have to discount entirely the importance of essential learnings.
I think it's not being able to find the forest for the trees: the forest is to get them to attain these essential learnings, but we're hitting the trees of common assessments like unfortunate skiers!
Missing the forest for the trees, I think, could be a real reason why educational trends come and go, and that new ones lose clout because of the way others have been handled in the past. I probably don't have enough experience in either the field or the district to make this claim, but here's some more fodder for my argument anyway: when describing other "flavors of the month", many of my friends who've seen trends come and go say that the main idea behind the philosophies and practices are great - ie the big picture is great - but the details are what made it fall apart and pass into history.
This was the main complaint this afternoon in the world language office: how to give an accurate common assessment despite how differently people grade. The horrifying idea came out that an accurate common assessment could only be an objective one, because even with rubrics, everyone grades so differently. I'm pretty sure that this claim was horrifying even to the person who made it, and that she made it out of frustration and uncertainty about what to do instead. However, if we had to resort to an objective test because of a fastidious desire to have students assessed the same way, we would start to undo what we've done on emphasizing upper-level thinking skills in the last few years. This kind of test would that tell us only about their fleeting knowledge, but it also would send the message that we expect our students simply to recall what we've taught without true application.
The theme of the conversation was that, according to pretty much all world language teachers in the district, we don't count simple knowledge of a discrete grammar point or a set of vocabulary words an essential learning. We agree that the bigger picture is what matters: what they're able to do with the language. I think what makes common assessments run the risk of becoming another passing fad in pedagogy is that it might become the main focus rather than truly what they're learning, be dealt with in a way that doesn't support what teachers feel is worth learning, and make everyone so fed up with the idea that they just chuck it. Until the next trend comes along, that is.


I have a couple of questions for myself and others:

• How can we make an assessment that best measures what we find valuable in our subject areas?
• Can we skip the "drill and kill" of grammar and vocabulary and still get our students to a point where they can move on to more sophisticated uses of the language? Is there a way to teach the material that simply needs practice of patterns and memorization of words WITHOUT the traditional drill and kill, like sneaking vitamins into a kid's food without his knowing?

I ask these questions because I really don't think there needs to be either-or kinds of approaches to practice and testing. I don't know the right answer yet, but I don't think it's gotta be drill and kill to build their knowledge sufficiently, and only after that can language use become more personalized and meaningful. I also don't think we have to resort to testing students on just what's easily graded in nearly the same way by many teachers, just for the sake that all the students jump over this particular hurdle in essentially the same way. If you have any possible answers to my conundrum, let me know. Believe me, I'm not just waiting for the answer to be given to me, either!