“Fake it til you make it” – a method of creating student templates for major assessments

This year my guilty pleasure has been listening to podcasts. It has been my method of learning and entertainment this year, largely due to the convenience. After signing up for Cohort21 and then subsequently being hired as a textbook author to write a chapter for online IB chemistry textbook (from Kognity – great IBDP resources!) along with living away from my fiance every Monday-Friday, I just found I was not able to read as much as I would like to. So this year various podcasts took over any minute I was driving, running, working out, walking and basically breathing.

I’ve been obsessed with Gimlet media‘s podcasts. So much that I’ve listened to nearly every recent show and I’ve had to work backwards to shows from a couple of years ago. Over March break I was listening to season one of their podcast StartUp, the original podcast where Alex Blumberg records himself starting the company Gimlet media from the ground up. It was so interesting listening to this person describe the creation of something that already existed and that I loved! What I found even more fascinating was how many parallels I was able to draw from the experiences of Alex and his coworkers to that of being a teacher, especially a teacher at an independent school. I would never have thought that I would have resonated so strongly as an educator with someone who was trying to start their own business.

There was one episode in particular that I found really interesting and that gave me an idea for my action plan. This episode was called “Fake It Till You Make It”. In this episode, Google Ventures Design visits the New York-based company to help the founders figure out whether they should invest in making a podcasting app for their podcasting content. They describe to the founders Alex and Matt that they might spend years making an app only to have it be surprisingly disappointing. Instead, they go through a process called a design sprint. In this design sprint, they design a version of their idea, release it to the public, get feedback and then refine their idea. They begin their design sprint by using the Crazy Eights exercise to brainstorm what their app should look like. They then suggest to Alex and Matt to design a fake app. One that has the skeleton of an app but not any of the functionalities that are time-consuming.

This is where I stopped in my tracks (I was on a long run outside). I thought, there is something here that I think I can use with my grade 12 chemistry students. At the time I was marking my grade 12 chemistry student’s internal assessment. This is an individual investigation that the students must complete as a part of their IB Chemistry course in the IB Diploma. While marking these I was shocked at how much difficulty students had organizing their thoughts, presenting data in tables and discussing quantitative information. I thought to myself, what if I made a fake internal assessment. One that had no real substance, but had the layout and organization of what one should look like.

The following is going to walk you through how I started and what it looks like today. First, the IB criteria for the internal assessment is incredibly vague. Two summers ago, I sat down, read through the criteria a million times and then came up with my own criteria and rubrics to assess students. This criteria, I have called my internal assessment template #1. I was really proud of this criteria because I thought it really clarified things for students about what they needed to complete and while it certainly helped, this year I discovered, I still had work to do. I think that the rubrics designed assisted my marking and helped those students who took it upon themselves to go through details of the rubric but I think I could design something that would help students much more.

 

To build grittier students ready to tackle a challenge, I really wanted them to look at this investigation as a way to structure scientific information similar to an actual research report or a scientific paper. One that ended the report with questions about where to go next. What I did was first pull out all of the small details that were necessary from my criteria. I called this my internal assessment template #2.

Now to help guide students through the process, I included a significant portion of the necessary information but in a template similar to what would be expected for the internal assessment from students. I called this my internal assessment template #3. This one would represent my fake it til you make it. Now I realize that these students are in grade 12 and should be able to put a lot of this together on their own, but I saw a lot of my students struggle with the organization of their thoughts this year. Particularly when it came down to organizing their data, calculations, thoughts, explanations, etc. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be better for them to have an option of a method to organize their thoughts to model future investigations off of?

In summary – the fake it till you make it approach can be used as a tool to convey success criteria for an assessment, while also emulating the structure and organization of the assessment itself. If you have any feedback or suggestions I will enable editing in my template #3 Google doc.