Our Story

We started our journey by determining what characteristics and attributes were important to our stakeholders.  Our stakeholders consisted of teachers, administrators, parents, community members, and ACES agency leaders.  These stakeholders participated in a ThoughtExchange.  The process included identifying and defining important attributes.  Then participants would rate others ideas using 1-5 stars. 

From the data collected from the ThoughtExchange, the Leadership Cadre collaboratively used an open coding strategy (Merrian & Tisdell, 2016) to generate patterns and determine the major attributes.  The group determined 10 key themes that were named to represent potential attributes.

While we were conducting our ThoughExchange, we also built capacity within the Faculty to better understand our core values around big ideas.  Teachers worked in groups and selected a question to explore further.  

• What are the “big ideas” of STEAM at  Chase?

• How does theme and time help us define “big ideas”?

• What instructional practices support the “big ideas”? 

• What “big ideas” cross all disciplines?

• What “big ideas” are discipline-specific?

• How does your discipline support STEAM “big ideas”?

• How do STEAM “big ideas” support your discipline?

The Faculty participated in a professional development which included work on the Portrait attributes.  Starting with the list of 10 attributes generated by the Leadership Cadre, the Faculty used an affinity voting strategy to identify the most important ones.  The faculty also reviewed the written draft definitions and suggested changes and improvements.

The Leadership Cadre used the data from the Faculty professional development and determined how attributes could be collapsed, eliminated, and enhanced.  This resulted in the emergence of 4 attributes and their associated definitions and descriptions.  In addition, the Cadre began to identify preliminary indicators that would help measure success of the attribute.

We met with two parent focus groups by Zoom and three teacher focus groups in person.  We reviewed their feedback on our 4 attributes and made updates.

Our final Focus Group engaged the leadership of ACES, including members of the Executive Leadership Council, the Core Knowledge Platform, and School Principals.   

We worked for two full days with KnowledgeWorks to develop our draft of a Competency Continuum.  The Continuum will be the framework for our schoolwide rubrics.

During Faculty Learning, we conducted mutliple focus groups to obtain feedback and refine our Competency Continuum.  We also conducted a family feedback session.

Our final version of the Competency Continuum.

In October, we partnered with KnowledgeWorks to develop the rubrics.  The work included capacity building for high quality rubric design.  

Our rubric development was a struggle because many of the concepts we were trying to examine within an attribute began to meld, making a discrete measurement impractical.  Our Principal reimagined the approach and developed a strategy to better "Unpack the Black Box."  With this strategy, we were better able to create our graduate-level rubrics.

Our graduate-level rubrics were developed followed by critical feedback provided by the leadership cadre.   Prior to faculty feedback, we provided professional development to build capacity of the educators to better understand the characteristics of quality rubric design. 

We revised the rubrics with internal feedback, consultant feedback, faculty feedback, and family feedback.  This working document shows some of the feedback in process.

Our final version of the graduate-level rubrics.  Since these rubrics indicate our "north star" of what we want our students to achieve when they graduate, we leveraged the Marzano Taxonomy to help delineate the growth we expect to see from different grade-level bands (e.g., 6-8, 9-10).   Therefore, the taxonomy provided a guide in the development of the other rubrics.

Following a similar process as the graduate-level rubrics, we developed our 6-8 and 9-10 ones.  

Because we currently have 6-8 grade students at the school, we leveraged their experiences with a 6th-grade focus group and an 8th-grade student leaders focus group to get their feedback on the 6-8 rubrics (only).  One of the most interesting findings obtained was that students were having experiences with the attributes and certain indicators, but those learning tasks were not as comprehensive as the rubrics demand.   As a result, we expect these rubrics to increase the rigor across all content areas. 

Intensely developed, like our graduate-level, these rubrics are horizontally and vertically aligned using our Competency Continuum and the Marzano Taxonomy as guides.

Intensely developed, like our graduate-level, these rubrics are horizontally and vertically aligned using our Competency Continuum and the Marzano Taxonomy as guides.

Now that our middle-school level rubrics are complete, we are conducting some "experiments" with them to see how they work and gather feedback.  The Principal created a short video (above) to describe the expectations for conducting an experiment.  The document templates associated with these experiments can be found in this Google Folder.  The folder contains a Guidelines document.

A collection of teachers participated in our rubric experiments to try the rubrics with students and generate feedback.  Some key take-aways include potential misalignment of the Marzano taxonomy and previous experience with rubrics that are more quantitative in nature.

To share our work with our community and the education community at large, we worked with the ACES Marketing and Communications Services to develop a series of public-facing documents.  Like our Portrait work, we went through many iterations to develop our "just right" images and documents.  The final documents can be found on the Documents tab at the top of this page.