So one of my major challenges this year is attempting to overhaul my Big Picture on assessment to include our “curricular competencies”. For those outside of this province, the cc’s are a sort of orthogonal set of skills we want students to demonstrate that are, for the most part, content-independent.
Here’s my summary version of what that might look like for PreCalc 11:
The phrases across the top row are my SBG-like summary of the course content. The phrases down the left side are my summarized take on the cc’s as they’re listed in our curriculum doc.
So what does this mean? Do we have to fill this entire grid? How am I going to have students demonstrate Reflection, Indigenous Experience or Multi-modal Representation on every single learning target??!?!?
Well, no. The grid is here for a few reasons:
- To remind me that simply handing students a quiz might show algebra skill, but does it show conceptual understanding? Can they estimate reasonably with these concepts? Can they represent their ideas visually? etc.
- To emphasize to students that those things on the left are REAL and they MATTER. That if students show they can be flexible with how they solve something, that’s a strength worth noting.
- Because I stole the grid idea from Peter Liljedahl and it seemed like a good idea.
My current goal is to have every column get “checked off” at least twice to count as complete, and for every row to be hit at least once during the course. Nothing left out, and by showing more than one connection to the content, students are demonstrating some kind of mastery over it.
BIG FREAKING OPEN QUESTIONS:
- When students DO write a normal-looking SBG quiz (eg. focused on an algebraic skill), where would that even fall under this grid? “Reasoning and Logic”?
- Can some of the competencies on the left be demonstrated entirely without connecting to the course content? What if I have students work on a ‘numeracy’ task that uses earlier known content but in a way that stretches their communication and reasoning skills?
- How the heck do I store data for this? Right now I have a half-started Access database app that could store the info, and a spreadsheet that I’m just old-school-gradebook dropping checkmarks into for the time being. Do I need to store this entire grid? What if I just store the per-column and per-row summaries somehow?