Yearly Archives: 2019

To design equitable assessment systems, we focused on range. By expanding the range of learners, the range of teachers and the range of classroom contexts we considered since Day 1, we ensure that diversity was supported through flexible structures. In this post, designing "to a T" refers to the meticulous, nuanced work involved. It also refers to three "T's" -- an expanded timeframe for assessment horizons, attention to task design, and the preservation of teaching time in classrooms. To care about equity is to act, and comprehensive, equitable, yet realistic designs don't engineer themselves. Balance and symmetry also find their way into this third post about our assessment system.

A robust competency-based assessment model is difficult to design, difficult to implement, and can be difficult to explain to parents and community members. As evidenced by the many conference presentations about competency-based assessment with titles that begin with "Lessons Learned," it seems like others feel the same way. In this post I describe the macro-maneuvers we employed to ensure we could engineer a complete, multi-year model. Read on to discover why "removal" became one of our favorite activities, and weigh in whether you believe teachers are ready for a functioning system--not a supervisor--to hold them accountable.

Current assessment practices send terrible messages to students, and nothing teachers say or do can change that fact. Systems behave in a way that communicates their values. To design a functional, equitable, logistically reasonable assessment system, we endeavored to align the messages with our values. The mechanisms of the system--the rules, structures, processes and feedback loops--deliver those messages. It is only through the lived experiences of teachers and students that we know whether the messages got through. This post describes both the messages and the accompanying mechanisms responsible for delivering the values we want to uphold. If you've never before thought about assessment in these ways, welcome to the conversation....The lovely artwork above is by artist Naomi Gatt of Malta.

Why do high schools need to re-engineer assessment practices? For one, they are inherently inequitable. And then there's this problem with contradicting the neuroscience of teen brains. Oh and they put teachers in a terrible position at a time when relationships with students need to be strengthened, not weakened. And for all you folks who keep chanting, "But the tests! The tests!" we have some news. Our current practices are not making students college & career ready, and test scores are not improving at the high school level. So sit back, take a deep breath, and let's get to the bottom of this...

Secondary schools have a unique relationship with content coverage, in part due to policies, standards, and exam requirements. Has it ever bothered you that not one cadre of standards writers ever determined whether all that content could reasonably fit into the regular school day and year? It bothered us. So we systematically figured out exactly how much content can be covered in the average Grades 8-12 classroom if desirable instructional practices (e.g. PBL, inquiry-based learning, etc.) were employed (all the way down to 20-minute increments, which is why we can customize pacing guides for every school schedule). Read on to gain our insights into content-per-unit-time as well as why we need to change our relationship with content altogether.

Society's most pressing challenges are multi-faceted--they're integrated. And a solid foundation in STEM will support young people as they negotiate these dynamic, complex challenges. We need to break down silos in upper secondary and early-university courses to better reflect the realities of 21st-century citizenship, professional STEM, and the human condition. And this hyper-connectivity is exactly what teen brains need to thrive.

The science is clear: secondary academic systems must be re-engineered in order to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world, of diverse learners, and of a dynamic teaching landscape. EduChange took a systems approach to this task, and after two decades of R&D, in-school implementation, and over 115 iterative design cycles informed by ongoing data collection, we're ready to equip more schools and learning settings with a 'system of systems' that creates virtuous cycles. In this first blog post, President & Founder Catherine Saldutti reflects on her personal evolution with systems thinking, foreshadowing future posts about the principles and drivers of our work.