Educators at the Mastery Collaborative Fall Quarterly, likely also ruminating on rubrics.
Dear MC,
I’m principal of a school that is beginning a shift to a mastery-based approach. We are in conversation about how broad or specific our learning outcomes should be. We are trying different things, but would like some parameters that make sense.
Teachers at our school are also wondering: How is an outcome different from a row of a rubric? Our school is used to assessing students with rubrics. If each row of a rubric measures something that matters, do the rows simply become out learning outcomes?
Can we settle both issues by asking teachers to use their current rubric strands as outcomes? If we do this, most of our outcomes will be pretty narrow/specific. Or should we start from scratch by re-writing learning outcomes to be more broad, and rewriting our rubrics to give criteria for mastery for our new bigger learning outcomes?
Please help me figure out how to guide my teachers as we engage in this work.
Sincerely,
Ruminating on rubrics
~
Dear Ruminating,
Happy 2020 to you and your teaching team! Right on for recognizing the crucial connection between outcomes and rubrics. Responding to your second question first: Rubrics should make clear criteria for mastery of each learning outcome that’s in play—so a rubric row can definitely be for one outcome.
Students should know clearly from the start what they are aiming for. When writing rubrics, start with descriptors for grade-level mastery. Then you can write descriptors for exceeding mastery (or mastery with excellence, or the like). You may not need descriptors for “not yet” or “approaching mastery,” because we don’t want students focusing on what they are not aiming for. Rather, we’ve seen schools get a lot from leaving pace in the rubric for feedback/next steps to learners about what to do next on the learning journey to mastery. This has a side benefit of lightening the language load for students as they make sense of the rubric. Fewer little boxes filled with small type.
As to your question about broad or specific outcomes, since you’re just starting out, and teachers need experience with using learning outcomes as the basis for everything: lessons, feedback, assessments, pacing—it can be a good idea to start with what makes clear sense to each teacher, in terms of specific or broad outcomes. Each teacher can determine the important skills and knowledge students need to master in a given course, and write outcomes to describe these in student-friendly academic language. Initially, how broad or narrow they are can be up to what makes sense to each teacher.
Ideally each outcome can be mastered over time, and assessed multiple times, so teachers should keep that in mind as they consider the size of outcomes. It should not be Mission Impossible to assess each outcome several times. So, it’s important to think and talk about the size of the outcomes, but not so important to norm on this as your school is starting out. Instead, doing what makes best sense for each teacher can support educators in using outcomes they understand, as they push into rubric writing, feedback and assessment loops.
A few things to consider as you support the work of outcome design:
We have seen a strong pattern of schools and teachers moving toward fewer/broader outcomes over time. This tends to happen organically as teachers become more comfortable in their use of outcomes.
Each outcome should include some higher order thinking skills, and no outcome should be strictly about compliance or work production (such as: no socializing during class, or raise your hand at least 3 times a class to show active participation).
Sometimes practitioners mistake the shift to mastery-based learning as a way to more closely track and measure the details of learning in each course. devise narrow outcomes to uphold this culture of accountability, rather than a culture of deeper learning.
To promote a culture of deeper learning, teachers might consider that anything being assessed fewer than 3 times might be part of a broader outcome. Outcomes are meant to be learned and assessed over time as students build mastery, so it should be hefty enough to be worth returning to.
Here is the MC’s guidance about writing effective outcomes. Here also are a few examples of outcomes at MC schools that are quite different, for you to chew on. Let us know how it all goes, and thanks for your question.
Warmly,
MC
Math & ELA outcomes from MC Living Lab school PAIHS-Monroe.
Math outcomes from MC Living Lab school Flushing International HS.