This past "summer", I did backwards design on nitrous oxide. Notice the comma placement; I was not huffing laughing gas during vacation. The relatively forced at-home time got me to check-off items I penned on a to-do list over a decade ago. I made excuses to not do them at any point in the history leading up to now, which I do not regret. It does make me wonder what those first years of teaching would have been like had I been as prepared as I am now... A lot of the excuses revolved around needing to decompress, relax and have fun after keeping my nose to the grindstone. After only a few weeks into the quarantine, in April, I realized I could relax and decompress but with clear limits and schedules, therein finding the space to accomplish some meaningful and authentic planning.
To prepare for planning, I did a lot of reading. One of the books I finally took off the list from over a decade ago was How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students, by Susan M Brookhart. I was looking for ways to improve the feedback I give (and how much time it takes me to produce), and it led to something much more beautiful.
At my current school, we do standards based grading. In the science department, we use the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). For the grades we enter to the gradebook, some are content standards (DCI) linked to the summative assessment they complete. The other grades are skill standards (SEP), which they use in completing the summative assessment. As a department, we designed rubrics collaboratively. I was never fully satisfied with the rubrics because some parts repeated the same confusing language used by the NGSS. And the range of skills and what to look for within the rubrics themselves made it difficult for me to determine what am I actually looking for. Not all assessments used all criteria in a selected rubric, or some criteria being assessed would be linguistically interwoven with something else not being assessed.
It took me a few weeks of quiet and stillness (plus lots of reading) to be able to articulate that.
Here is a tool I developed to address all the above. I needed something to help me provide more focused feedback, and something to inform me what I was actually assessing. And to know whether my formative assessments were actually building up coherently to the summative assessment. These more specific applications I will share in greater detail later. For now, I will outline the steps how I approached designing this tool and why specific features are important to me.
Click this link (SEP Criteria) to view the living document. Feel free to review the sample formative assessments and activities designed around the criteria, as well as making a copy of the document for yourself. Watch my most recent vlog on the feedback I asked my students about the work I am assigning, including what it tells me about these criteria I developed. Keep scrolling for the procedure I used in designing this tool.
Developing Criteria
1. Make a copy of your standard, benchmark, assessment statements. The ones I was interested in are the skill-based standards (Science and Engineering Practices, SEP). I began by going to the NGSS @ NSTA and went to the appropriate page. There's eight SEP's and within each I wanted to focus on the grade levels I teach (9-12).
2. Include the rubrics and assessment criteria you (and your department) currently use. Before reinventing the wheel and going off on my own, I wanted to honor and respect the work my department completed. If I want to encourage my colleagues to use this tool, too, they need to see their work in it; I am not infallible and more knowledgeable than they are by any means.
3. Rewrite the benchmark statements in simpler terms; divide more complex statements into units that would assess a single skill. When we are presenting information to students, we need to do it in their own words. Academia seems to have forgotten how to transfer that practice to how they communicate with those of us in the trenches. Eliminate the extra detail and find the core information.
4. Repeat that step with your (and your department's) current criteria. Make sure you understand what and how you are assessing students.
5. Compare and combine the lists. When I did this, I noticed that my department was addressing almost all the criteria I identified from the NGSS benchmark statements.
6. In your own words, write clarifications of what each criterion means. I wanted to ensure that I was (A) teaching students how to successfully complete each criterion consistently and completely, and (B) evaluating what I was asking students to do in their work (and, therefore, providing criterion-referenced feedback on every artifact). This has become my standardization tool in designing student materials and assessing student work.
I chose to use Google Sheets for this, because I can resize the columns and rows easily, and edit the amount and types of content without compromising the ease of accessing information. For example, after organizing this information I added the third column, "Examples" for quick reference and understanding the range of skills I am having students use. As I design more activities and assessments, I can add those links. When a clarification does not meet mine or my students' needs, they can be rewritten or amended to reflect
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