Question
What is the CLASS?
Answer
CLASS stands for the Classroom Assessment Scoring System. It is an observation tool that is designed to look specifically at interactions that are happening in the classroom. It is published by Teachstone and is used nationally. Every Head Start program is assessed using the CLASS and many school district pre-K programs and state pre-K programs are assessed using the CLASS.
What is unique about this tool as opposed to some other observation tools or assessment tools that you might have experience with in your classroom is that this really focuses on the people. It focuses on the interaction and captures the complexity of the relationships in your room. We all know that a pre-K classroom is so much more than simply the amount of materials you have or the specific curriculum that you use. It is really about those relationships, and CLASS is designed to look at that and capture that and give you feedback about it. It is a tool that is used most heavily in pre-K classrooms, but there are versions of it that are available for infants through 12th graders, so you can use it across a child's educational career or the span of schools within a district. Today, we are going to hone in on the pre-K CLASS tool, which is designed to be used with children ages three to five.
The CLASS is research-proven. It has been used in thousands of classrooms across various settings, from home-based programs to center-based and school-based programs. It is curriculum agnostic, so it does not matter what your instructional approach is, CLASS can be used with any curriculum in any setting. This makes it a really helpful tool to be used across entire districts or states. It is a reliable tool, so every person who comes in and does a CLASS observation goes through rigorous two-day training and has to pass a reliability test. That means that if I were to come into your room and do a CLASS observation, and someone else were to come into your room and do a CLASS observation, we would come out with the same scores. That is really important because we do not want observer variability to impact the feedback that you are getting about the relationships and the interactions happening in your room.
It is also a valid tool. We know that classrooms that score higher on the CLASS are correlated with classrooms that have higher student outcomes. We all know how hard it can be to measure actual learning outcomes for three, four, and five-year-olds, so it is helpful to have a tool where someone can observe the interactions happening in the room and know that there has been plenty of research done that has correlated the quality of those interactions with the quality of educational outcomes for kids. To summarize, it is a widely used tool that is research-based, valid, and reliable, so we can trust the information that is coming from it. It is not just a subjective view of your classroom.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Interpreting Your CLASS Scores, presented by Jennifer Rosenbaum, MEd.
