Group items tagged

Question #3: What are your expectations for student to self-assess their work and publish it for a wider audience?

Question #2: How do you manage your own professional growth?

Question #5: How do you give students an opportunity to contribute purposeful work to others?

Question #6: How do you teach students to learn what you don’t know?

Question #7: How do you teach students to manage their own learning?

1. Learning is a Positive, Inclusive Experience

Students set and pursue individualized learning goals and have in-person and online academic support options.

Reassessment is an academic norm.

Students pursue their passions.

Conflict resolution is built on restorative justice, not traditional disciplinary techniques.

2. Students Lead Learning

A common thread: Culture and program should be deeply connected, specifically in how communities support student agency.

Every student and adult in the community creates, pursues, and updates a Learning Plan; every student has an advisor; and public exhibitions of learning that involve school and community members are the standard summative assessments.

3. Professional Culture is the Foundation of School Culture

LASER, an acronym for Love history, Acquire and analyze information, Solve difficult problems, Envision new explanations, and Reveal what you know. Sourcing work, which Calder called a “threshold concept” in history, means asking students to evaluate the reliability of various historical texts. Who made it? When? Why? What value does it hold for historians, if any?

letter grades “do little to differentiate the level of student effort or the quality of student work or student growth over the course of a semester or program,”

to the idea of “transparency,” which they all agreed begins with articulating clear student learning goals -- for themselves and their classes.

Whatever the activity or assessment, Mintz said it needs to be aligned with a particular learning objective. Research suggests that the most effective activities and assessments when it comes to student learning are considered “authentic,” or those that mirror professional practice and address some meaningful question,

Project and performance-based assessments are much more likely to provide a “valid measure of student proficiencies and higher-order thinking skills than are multiple choice or short-answer questions,” Mintz continued. And evaluation needs to be based on a detailed rubric, he said, suggesting that students may help create these rubrics.

But “a paradigm shift is occurring in higher education,” Mintz said. “We all know this. We’re sifting from teaching to learning, shifting from a sink-or-swim mentality to a mentality where we have obligation to bring all students to minimum viable level of competency.” That is regardless of institution type, he said.

think of themselves as "learning architects" whose meaningful "forward-looking" assessment will be a "true learning opportunity" for students.