I waited to join Cohort 21 until I was certain about what I wanted to research. I want this journey with C21 to truly act as professional development: my personal goal with this program is to set a strong and intentional foundation for the professional that I want to be as I move forward with my career. I don’t only want to learn about what I might do or change in this specific year; I want my learning with C21 to shape my practice for many years to come. To that end, my goals aren’t in any way urgent, but they are certainly important. One of the conversations from the first face-to-face C21 session was around the question of what is urgent vs what is important, and a key idea that emerged was that the important things can sometimes take time. My goal is to take my time with what I’m learning this year.
I chose the Pedagogy and Wellbeing (7-12) strand precisely because I am deeply interested in assessment and its relationship to teaching and learning. More and more, I’m interested in skills-based assessment, and believe that it is the key to developing our students into critical thinkers who are interested in and engaged with the world around them. Though this isn’t in any way urgent learning for myself or my school, I consider it to be deeply important. Right now, I have more questions about skills-based assessment (from checkbrics all the way to gradeless models), but I think that’s an okay place to be in this moment. I’m so excited to learn from other educators who are just as fascinated by and giddy about teaching and learning as I am. Here’s what I’m wondering currently, in no particular order:
- To what extent can rubrics be used in a cross-curricular manner? What skills are the same between subjects? What skills are different?
- How do we decide which skills are important?
- How might skills-based assessment be used to support PBL, especially in cross-curricular projects?
- If we take a “one rubric all year” approach, what does that look like? Especially for reporting?
- How might we use skills-based learning goals to help students understand and assess their own achievement? Are exemplars integral to this, or is there another way?
- What does a gradeless classroom look like? What implications does “going gradeless” have for reporting?
One educator that has deeply influenced my thinking about skills-based assessment is Tyler Rablin. Starting with scouring his blog, I’m hoping to find some breadcrumbs that will lead me on my own journey.
So glad you joined Cohort 21! Looking forward to your posts.
I am so excited to see these ideas grow and develop over time. It may not be urgent for the school but it feels urgent for your ‘teacher soul’. I’m so glad you’ve found such a juicy idea that will give you energy to pursue!
@sleaper Great post here – and some fantastic questions as well. You should connect with @jadams as he made his blog post and some of it is resonating here for sure. In particular, I was struck by “To that end, my goals aren’t in any way urgent, but they are certainly important.” and I encourage you to read this quick post from Seth Godin on Urgency vs. Importance where he highlights: “If you take care of important things, the urgent things don’t show up as often. The opposite is never true.” You can read the whole post here: https://seths.blog/2016/01/deconstructing-urgent-vs-important/
Thanks and see you soon,
Garth.
Great first post @sleaper! What a great way to frame your learning as an educator in taking your time to really hone in on what’s important. It’s too easy to be distracted by the urgent and you’re already in a frame of mind that will serve you long after C21!
To your thoughts about one rubric all year and skills-based assessment, I share this from Cult of Pedagogy https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/hyperrubric/ – it’s the hyper rubric and it’s presented from the perspective of an English Teacher. Jen Gonzalez also has a podcast episode that outlines how to set up a mastery-based grading system. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/mastery-based-grading/
The MTC – Mastery Transcript Consortium is a really cool place to check out as well. https://mastery.org/mtc-insights/ Scott Looney and the team has done some amazing things with this and who knows, as things open up you might even be able to visit Hawken School in Cleveland.
I love your thoughts on a “Gradeless” classroom and graduating from Queen’s OEE we had a pass/fail/honours system that was great. Your work was either great, not to the bar or exceptional. With this is mind, it will be important to work within your sphere of influence and to chat with your administrators to explore if this fits within the strategic vision of the school.
I love assessment and I would love to sit down and listen to your thoughts and experience and where you want to go, we can distill this down to actionable steps and how we might engage students in this work.
One person to connect with would be @lmcbeth as she has done this work with many educators from all over the world. Another thing to look into would be HTS did
Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow!