Thursday, April 24, 2014

Creating Skills Assessment Rubrics Revised and Aligned with Blooms & CCSS


The past week I have been spending a lot of time revamping Magen David's Skills assessment rubrics to align them to the Common Core.  Because Magen David is a regents school, we need to align our curriculum to the common core and this is a fundamental part of the process.  In an effort to fully align our skills based curricula to something teachers can actually follow on a daily basis (ie the curricular template I have for all courses in the school created with department heads and teachers), I crafted daily objectives corresponding to each skill in the rubric.

Now, teachers can daily teach for skills with a skills objective regardless of what content they are covering.  This ensures all skills are covered from the commencement of school to the completion of the year.  There is a two year overlap on this to allow for the proper spiralling of skills acquisition.  I created roughly 60 subjective specific literature objectives for social studies alone.  Writing, when completed will have over 100.  Together someone in a social studies course, will have roughly 160 objectives they can complete during the course of a year to ensure successful acquisition of the skills based curriculum.  I am excited to start tweaking them with department heads in the next couple months.

Magen David has a skills based report card which unlike the traditional report card, serves to let students know, twice a year, how they are doing in acquiring skills.  The skills report card is an essential part of the skills based education here at Magen David.  As a "Blooms" School (a school firmly rooted in the principles of Bloom's Taxonomy), the report card, in the past, has been linked to Bloom's Taxonomy.  However, now with NY adopting the common core standards and rearranging the regents to correspond with them, we needed to create a skills rubric that both stayed true to Bloom's Taxonomy and was aligned with the common core.  This was no easy task.

Compounding this task was the simple fact that the common core's language is extremely confusing and often repetitive.  Because of this, it is difficult to determine "the staircase of increasing complexity" the common core writers speak of in order to them piecemeal out aspects of each standard to properly align to each level of Bloom's.  Even if one can manage to do this, the additional problem often becomes that the highest aspect of the rather confusing language of the standard does not always appear to be a the one that is considered the highest order of Bloom's Taxonomy.  Furthermore, the difference between what lower grades and higher grades are required to do is often also not so clear.  Hence, it extremely difficult to ascertain the progression of the rubric.   However, and despite this rather formidable task, I ventured on.

While I in no one suggest that what I did is a finished product, I will offer it up to the world to hopefully be tweaked, corrected, and further attempted by educators endeavoring to complete a similar task.  Over the next few months I hope to have the opportunity to create rubrics for every core subject (including religious studies) aligning them to both common core and Bloom's.

For a link to my first attempt at this please see below.  I will update with additional ones as they are created.

Social Studies Department Literacy Skills Assessment Rubric CCSS Aligned 9-10th Grade 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UoE_EC9pnMzNmQX5rrAoyDn0DMDwbJNY7-YJxOf1Gc4/edit?usp=sharing

Social Studies Department Literacy Skills Performance Objectives that Correspond to the Skills Assessment Rubric CCSS Aligned 9-10th Grade
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTGdHq0iqGrLU8xS0Yza05SWFE/edit?usp=sharing

Social Studies Department Literacy Skills Performance Objectives that Correspond to the Skills Assessment Rubric CCSS Aligned 11-12th Grade
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTGdHq0iqGrTEItT2ZnbjZ6aGc/edit?usp=sharing

Social Studies, Science, and Technical Department Writing Skills Assessment Rubric CCSS Aligned 9-10th Grade 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTGdHq0iqGrVDYzRWJxa204VmM/edit?usp=sharing

Social Studies, Science, and Technical Department Writing Skills Assessment Rubric CCSS Aligned 11-12th Grade 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTGdHq0iqGrV0NzMU9tbVVlV3M/edit?usp=sharing

Science and Technical Subjects Literacy Skills Assessment Rubric CCSS Aligned 9- 10th Grade
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTGdHq0iqGrVzdkWFFVMllXNkk/edit?usp=sharing

Science and Technical Subjects Literacy Skills Assessment Rubric CCSS Aligned 11 to 12th Grade
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTGdHq0iqGrSmR4eHhhaG1qelk/edit?usp=sharing

English Language Arts Language Skills Assessment Rubric
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fV_Zut0_BK6KMXTh4LLhztGUSjAxTgDv997gsWhFap8/edit?usp=sharing

English Language Arts Listening and Speaking Skills Assessment Rubric
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VaHzvfs3BZMBDGtAzuFBgLr6WyhkqvHUmVoAJl6VZbU/edit?usp=sharing

English Language Arts Reading Literature Skills Assessment Rubric
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VLY4CyxkTqtdg0iluCZTOA00aQfG85IRng7xY8cOaGs/edit?usp=sharing

English Language Arts Reading of Informational Texts Skills Assessment Rubric 9-12
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uepRu2S2G7RF0UdxR9V7rsa-OLQzrMXWmU_SurdUFmQ/edit?usp=sharing

English Language Arts Writing Skills Assessment Rubric 9-12
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AqVkp0jeK1ZqZlCkuQTSZL26E1ITuRJ9AYHQlVkRmhk/edit?usp=sharing

Others coming shortly!

Math- Hopefully, but it's a HUGE project.

Tanach Skills Assessment Rubric CCSS Aligned
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16iBjLtRPkDtx5bswNdg4xPi2X9zOlKO41ijyPHJrdbk/edit?usp=sharing