We worked on this during twice-weekly department meetings throughout the course of the year, though without ever having a model of what the end product should look like. Our department was instructed to create a scope and sequence of outcomes that would scaffold the development of specific skills as students moved from the ninth grade to the 12th grade. For example, there was no clear coherency between the ninth-grade global teacher’s outcomes and my own for 10th grade global, since we both wrote them independently of one another. There was little coordination between the outcomes written by teachers in a given department. Though returning teachers had been told to write outcomes over the summer, the new teachers were finding out about it near the beginning of the school year and had to scramble to compose them. For example, for my outcome about Hobbes and Locke, would a detailed Venn diagram be considered evidence of proficiency, even if it led to a poorly written essay? If the student filled in the Venn diagram accurately but could not articulate his or her ideas orally, has he or she shown adequate understanding? It was challenging to provide clear criteria to my students for what they needed to show me to be considered proficient or highly proficient in a given outcome. Students can apply knowledge about governmental systems by designing a school based on the principles of democracy, monarchy or totalitarianism.įor each outcome, I then had to write a rubric of what it meant for a student to be “highly proficient,” “proficient,” or “not yet proficient.” These rubrics were difficult to conceptualize because students could submit many different forms of evidence for each learning outcome.Students can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of both democratic and totalitarian societies.Students can explain the basic philosophies of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and can use evidence to support an argument about which philosopher’s ideas more accurately describe human nature.Students can demonstrate an understanding of multiple points of view by comparing and evaluating their own cultural and societal values (about parenting, gender, government, etc.) to those of Confucian China.As a result, I wound up with the following outcomes for my first unit about political systems: Thus, we had to think about how to write outcomes that spoke both to content and skills. ![]() At least within social studies, our curriculum, as standardized by the state of New York, is organized by content. The administration asked us to write 12-15 outcomes for our classes for each semester and encouraged us to align them with “key cognitive strategies” as outlined in David Conley’s book “College Knowledge”. I even heard that our school had paid $10,000 to a consultant to help set up an on-line computer program that would organize and track our student’s performance on each outcome (this program was decidedly not user-friendly, as I had to click from student to student when entering data, instead of being able to press tab like I could using “Gradekeeper”). Class attendance, homework, and effort are not necessarily assessed.Īt the end of that year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy, we were informed that all teachers would be required to use outcomes-based assessments the following year. By contrast, with an outcomes-based assessment system students need only demonstrate “mastery” or “proficiency” of specifically articulated “learning outcomes.” Students have multiple pathways to demonstrate such outcomes (essay writing, oral exams, etc) and can do so at any time in a given marking period. A student who worked hard and always turned in homework had a chance of receiving the same or better grade than a student who skipped classes but still demonstrated understanding of class material. This approach to assessment acknowledged many factors of student performance beyond particular learning goals. I tallied grades according to student performance on exams, projects, daily class work and homework. ![]() I opted out of the pilot group, preferring instead to remain consistent with the system I’d had in place from the beginning of the year. Our principal invited a guest speaker from this school to promote this form of assessment, and teachers were asked to join a pilot group on a voluntary basis. The paper, written by a public school teacher from Chicago, detailed how one school increased student achievement by doing away with grades and report cards in favor of records assessing student performance in very specific areas. Midway through my third year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy, not too long after our disappointing school quality review, the principal asked all teachers to read a long article on the limitations of “traditional” methods of assessments for underperforming students.
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