Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Reflections...

Reflection topics:

Transferable Skills - Middle grades teachers create learning opportunities within and across their disciplinary fields that enhance students’ transferable skills.
& Calibration of Proficiencies - Middle grades teachers collaborate with each other and with students to define proficiency and determine progress toward achieving it.

Some of our goals this week included a re-validation session of our Proficiency list. Our Proficiencies are set up as transferable skills, so it was important to examine the list for any content-biases so as not to impede transfer across disciplinary fields. Students must have a voice in the process of calibrating Proficiencies. This is needed for buy-in at all levels. It is important to curate honest conversations about the value and use of the Proficiencies with students across a variety of platforms- advisory, class reflection time, the lunch room, student council, dedicated meetings, all-school meetings and so on. As advocates for their needs, the teachers in the conversation brought student's concerns and experiences to the table we reviewed and validated improvements to the list.

1 comment:

  1. Your acknowledgement of the need for student voice in the proficiency process is an important one. If you have ways of collecting those conversations with students, I think they would be valuable for others to hear as they grapple with proficiencies in their own schools.

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