Benjamin Butchart - 9th grade Design Teacher
In the 9th grade design lab we use rubrics for soft skills from New Tech Network and Buck Institute for Education. The four main soft skills we are assessing for growth are collaboration, written and oral communication, creativity and critical thinking. We embed these rubrics into our Learning Management System Schoology so that they can be added to an assignment. For example, when students write the story retelling the path taken by their group in their challenge, we use the rubric for written communication on the assignment. When we review and score a challenge story, we are looking for specific elements in the writing, like the ability to develop ideas, organize the structure of their writing, and skillfully communicate ideas through their writing. The rubric we score for students on Schoology allows students to receive specific feedback on their work. We also pull elements or lines from each rubric and make custom rubrics for specific assignments. We use these types of custom rubrics to create questions for students to discuss in reflection videos. The reflection video is a powerful artifact of learning that can be scored to assess a student’s ability to utilize the soft skills. The teacher considers the language from the rubric when creating a discussion question, so listening for evidence in the student’s video recording is a straightforward process. The subjective nature of measuring soft skills is quite different from the typical quantitative assessments we had been accustomed to in traditional classroom teaching. It has taken some time for us, as instructional leaders, to feel comfortable with the more subjective approach, even when solid rubrics are in place. When looking at measuring growth in soft skills, it is important to not get too hung up on the grading - because something wonderful happens when students reflect, and it’s hard to describe or measure what you hear and see - a moment of silence, right there on the video reflection. The silence when a student stops speaking, thinks about what they want to say, how they want to say it, how something happened, or what they did, and then begins speaking again is important. After the silence, the student more eloquently describes how they used a soft skill to solve a challenge. Maybe this moment just has to be experienced or reflected upon itself to see the power in it - a learning moment, when students get closer to becoming a master of words - and masters of themselves.
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AuthorsThe Design Classes at North High are taught by four educators: Alexis Greer and Benjamin Butchart in 9th grade and Miranda File and Brian Whitson in 10th. These teams lead the CBL and design thinking approaches at North Rowan High. Archives
July 2020
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