Sharing Rubric Design

Written by Kim Miklusak and Quinn Loch

Sometimes in the CollabLab we hang unit plans, lesson plans, or assignments up on the dry erase wall to request interdisciplinary feedback from our peers.  It's a great opportunity to provide a consistent message to our students and reflect on our own instruction.

We did this for our writing rubric in regular & honors biology and AP English.  At first glance, you might not think there’s a large overlap between the subjects; however, we realized quickly that the writing skills in one class can inform those in the other.

In English, I have recently moved to a 3-degree rubric: mastery, proficiency, and “not yet.”  The way I think about it, a 4-degree rubric still accepts borderline unsatisfactory work.  Instead, proficient shows that the student technically understands the skill and has demonstrated it in their work.  Mastery, however, moves to a more successful, argumentative, or stylistic demonstration of the skills.  I’ve also taken up the language I’ve seen online; instead of having a “revision” or “unsatisfactory” category, I’ve labeled it “Not Yet,” indicating that students can progress to the next level.  Yet I wasn’t sure of a straight 3-degree rubric because even AP considers “rising” and “falling” scores,” so I added two categories in each area, which also satisfies a points-driven report card.  Ideally those point values would go away and students would be able to focus on honing skills-driven writing.  

The feedback from the team involved wording and whether students were familiar with the language on the rubric and how well this aligned to the College Board's actual holistic scoring guide. 

In Biology, skills related to experimental design, execution, analysis, and reflection are a continued focus for the freshman biology team. Last summer the team designed a rubric to help provide feedback on lab assessments. Here is our original rubric. The goals of our rubric included the following...

1. Allow for focused student revision
2. Make grading easier, less subjective, and more consistent
3. Clearly communicate expectations to the student

Based on discussion and feedback with colleagues, I made some changes to condense the original rubric with aim to make it clearer. This involved having fewer descriptors and including "rising" and "falling" scores to provide some wiggle room when grading, making the score translate better into the grade book. Here is the second revision.

In biology, next steps within the process of skills assessment will be to gather student samples that can be used as models in the development of skills. These models can be used as guides or as a way to train students to further understand the expectations within the rubric.

More on common rubrics soon! Big conversations are happening!

EdCamp Elk Grove: A Teacher-Led Professional Learning Day

By the Collab Lab Team

Check out the Professional Learning Day we enjoyed at Elk Grove High School and Across District 214!

EdCamp Elk Grove: 

Who: All staff
What: Teacher-led Professional Learning. Professional Learning that responds to staff needs.
When: April 4th, 2016
Where: Theater, classrooms, labs
Why: Build our professional learning networks within and across departments and the District. Take next steps in our own learning to impact student learning.
How: Ignite Sessions, EdCamp Sessions, Content-Alike Sharing sessions, PLC time, and crowd-sourcing our resources on Google Docs and Social Media


Our EG EdCamp, planned by our Collab Lab team in collaboration with our colleagues, was a kind of a hybrid of the traditional EdCamp format.  Like EdCamps, staff had the opportunity to propose sessions the same morning of the In-Service day, but we also pre-planned some workshops based on prior feedback from staff about their needs and interests.

Overview of the Schedule

Sample Ignite Presentation

EdCamp Schedule

Feedback from staff was positive.  The ignite presentations were quick, just 90 seconds, sharing a variety of strategies that staff could learn more about in the EdCamp sessions that followed. We also followed the EdCamp format of using Google Docs for shared notes. 

A new twist to our In-service day was to add Content-Alike sharing sessions for our final EdCamp time slot. Staff were invited to come back together in course alike groups or PLCs to share highlights, questions, follow-up needs and feedback for future in-service days. Here is an example:

Check out this link to the resources shown above.


Professional Learning across District 214:

All of the District 214 School ITF teams planned similar teacher-led professional learning experiences, in collaboration with their colleagues, for the April 4th In-Service Day. Check out this Storify to learn more about what those professional learning experiences looked like!

My First Video Blog! OneTab

By Mark Heintz

It is my first video blog! If you want to download OneTab, click here!

Saying Good-Bye to a Co-Worker and Friend

By The CollabLab Team

Later this afternoon we say good-bye to our friend and co-worker, Alexa Rodheim-Cutler.  At 29, Alexa lost her battle with stage IV, triple negative breast cancer.  You can read more about her journey here, and you can read more about the amazing influences she had on her students and peers and beyond here. 

The CollabLab would like to take a moment to thank Alexa for the influences she had on our school and district.  Immediately as she became a staff member, Alexa's collaborative qualities were apparent.  Even before stepping foot into the classroom at EG, she was meeting with her new team members outside of school to learn the curriculum and share ideas. She was always at school late making and revising materials, all of which she shared with her teams as a team leader and team member.

She became an early active member of our Peer Observation Groups, opening her classroom doors for people to observe and coming in to observe others.  She was constantly trying new ideas that she had learned whether they were through technology or traditional teaching methods.  This dedication and innovation were apparent as she was one of the first members on the Professional Development Committee, which helped to plan our initial staff-led institute day sessions.  She also wrote a post called "Lesson Reflection: determining relevant vs best evidence" for this blog (in addition to the others that she influenced).

Alexa never shied away from difficult conversations with her students in and out of the the classroom--whether that be sharing information about her own treatments, listening to their concerns and helping guide them with their problems, or tackling challenging social issues such as racism and homophobia.  Students and staff knew of Alexa's kind, yet firm, nature and felt comfortable talking to her and listening to her advice.

Thank you, Alexa, for all the lessons you taught us.  We are grateful to have known you and had you in our lives.  And we will miss your collaboration, reflection, and passion for teaching.

During the day we invited staff to come to the Collab Lab to write messages or memories on the whiteboard wall.

Relative Deprivation: Student Examples

By Mark Heintz

Over the summer, I read David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell. One of the things that struck me was the concept of relative deprivation. Relative deprivation is when people compare themselves to others and feel they are inferior based on other's ability. I see this clearly in coaching running. Many students will not even come out to the sport because they can very visibly compare their mile time to other students. They do not see they can improve and therefore, do not come out for the sport.

 

I then read an article about using student work and examples to help students achieve.  You can read the overview of the article here.  The article contends that using only exemplary student examples can lead to very negative consequences.  I believe the student examples I have used led to negative consequences.  At first, I felt I was a good teacher because I used students examples.  I showed low, mid, and high examples.  However, I spent most of the time on the best examples.  I feel and students love to see what a 100% looks like.

  

The problem with the A, the best, and the 100%, is it is unrealistic.  One of the classes I teach is AP World.  The highest score a student can get on an essay is a nine.  I have been to the AP reading and I graded somewhere around one-thousand essays.  I graded only one nine. One nine out of a thousand.  Furthermore, a student can get a five out of nine on the essays and still be on their way to getting the highest score on the AP exam.  

It is hard to be perfect.  I think it is harder to show kids an essay at their ability that is below the best and be okay with it. Sometimes it feels we are lowering the bar.  Last year in AP, I showed more of the five out of nine essays and my scores went up.  Kids were not confused or looking at an unobtainable writing sample.  

One of the best changes the Human Geography PLT made this semester was norming the average writing.  It took time and discussions about what we thought the average student's writing should be. We started with the average and worked up.  The result is being able to show more student samples at the average level. The process helped me guide students to better writing and meet them where they are. 

Using Powerpoint or Keynote to make make content more interactive

by Kirsten Fletcher

Digitizing your curriculum doesn't have to take enormous chunks of time. Here is a quick trick to allow students to interact with content at their own pace.

I used to do a lot of PowerPoint presentations. Sometimes I would use them to present new vocab. Sometimes I would pull out white boards and have students conjugate the verbs they saw on the screen before the answer popped up.

Then I got iPads and felt like I had to convert everything. I ditched the PowerPoints for Nearpod presentations where students could write on the slides. However, students sometimes found this cumbersome. Lately, I've discovered that I can take the same PowerPoints I've always used and simply put them in the hands of the students. This way, there is minimal prep on my end and students get instant feedback during activities. Also, once they download the presentation, they don't need wi-fi to work on it. Here's what it looks like:

• Students download either the free Powerpoint app or the free Keynote app
• Post your Powerpoint presentation as a file in your LMS (Schoology, Canvas, etc)
• Students open the presentation in the app, tap on the pencil icon, and write directly onto your presentation. 
• If students use the Powerpoint or Keynote app in presentation mode, the information will pop up in order. I like to have them write an answer to a problem, then swipe to see the correct answer and/or explanation on the same slide.

Here are some samples of my students' work:

Slide with student writing. Note the "pen" selected at the top of the screen.

The same slide after student clicked to see the answer.

Another possible use of the PowerPoint app might be to annotate an existing presentation. This is one that I shared with students. I asked them to find and correct errors in the writing. I also annotated my own copy so I could project an answer key. (Notice the drawing tools at the top of the page.)

I had students correct this writing sample in PowerPoint.

I then created a key so they could check their work.

Editing Lifesaver: Skitch!

By: Rachel Barry

Need to quickly edit a picture or diagram AND want it to look professional?  Skitch is your answer!  I have used Skitch throughout my entire teaching experience, and I still can't believe how quick and easy it is to create or edit images.

I first started using Skitch when we were creating our own digital curricula in the Math Department six years ago.  You can read more about our curricula here.  Following our creation, we have been doing a lot of editing of our materials.  That problem didn't work out to a "nice" answer?  The diagram doesn't provide students with enough information?  The picture provides students with too much information to be the level of difficulty for that class?  Use Skitch!  

Here is an example of how to edit a diagram in Skitch.  Let's start with an image of a rectangle and triangle, created from Autoshapes in Microsoft Word.

This video explains some of the features of Skitch:

I also use Skitch to create warm-ups, exit slips, and other supplemental materials for class.  This application allows me to create numerous variations of the same diagram, or quickly edit an already existing picture.  Here is an example of an edited diagram:


 

**Throughout my Skitch experience, I have only used the laptop version, however, there is also an iPad version.  I played around with it prior to writing this blog post, and I find it to be just as user friendly.