We opened our school using EdLeader 21's 11th/12th grade 4 C's rubrics as our competencies. They were built and ready to go, and their 4 C's aligned with our values: collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. We employed these rubrics in our first year. We found them to be too cumbersome to use with our students. They were too wordy and their focus on 11th & 12th grade made it hard for us to know how to apply them to 9th & 10th graders.
In our second year (2021-2022), we began writing our own schoolwide competencies. Our work was heavily influenced by the 4Cs we were already using. The process began by going through the topics in the 4Cs rubrics and choosing which to keep, which to eliminate, and which to combine. We decided to move away from the rubric paragraphs to bulleted lists of short statements which would be much easier to use. Then, a teacher committee combined the ideas in the existing 4Cs rubrics with our priorities as a school to create our list of skills that we wanted students to learn at ILHS.
We then created our criteria ....
In the fall of 2024, we began the revision of our existing skills. The previous version of the skills included some skills that were very similar, others that were very difficult to assess, and then there were other skills that we felt were missing. Given the somewhat haphazard way the previous skills were created and how they evolved from just one particular source, it seemed prudent to approach this revision from scratch.
This revision process is currently in process.