MBLC Assessment Guidance

Teacher Name: Matt Monnastes

School: Envision Career Academy, North Thurston Public Schools

Assessment Title: The Post Apocalyptic Podcast

Grade Level & Subject Area: High School Technology

Link to Assessment

Context: This is a CTE Digital Essentials and ELA project for 9th graders to explore a variety of topics by creating a podcast.  This exploratory project can be scaffolded with a variety of standards for introductory to a more complex applications for this assessment. Digital Essentials Students: Focus on the digital tools and platforms used for podcasting, including software for recording and editing.  The ELA concentration is on content creation, including scriptwriting, storytelling, interviewing techniques, and ensuring the podcast is engaging and informative.

Project: A podcast series created collaboratively by students from different disciplines.

Content: The podcast can cover a variety of topics such as educational content, student life, local news, or thematic series on specific subjects relevant to the students' interests or curriculum.

Skills Developed: Technical skills in audio production, digital literacy, creative writing, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.

Teacher Name: Julia Morrison and Mary Levenhagen

School: Heights Campus Open Doors

Assessment Title: Cultural Insight

Grade Level & Subject Area: Upper grades Open Doors

Link to Assessment

Context: This assessment is available to Open Doors students at Heights Campus who are working to meet our Cultural Insight competency. We know it's important for students to learn how to respect all people from all backgrounds and disrupt the racism and inequalities that still exist in our world. 

Here is a piece of student work that illustrates what students produced in the first year of implementation of this assessment. 

Cultural Insights Student Sample

Reflection from the teacher: “Having time to look over assessments and calibrate is incredibly impactful. It was helpful to have discussions around the rubrics, not just for the sake of improving the rubric for the creator, but also to help me know what I need to be looking for in my own rubrics. The next time we implement the cultural insight assessment, I hope to focus the evidence on application, rather than just on what facts were learned. Our next step is to create the performance task around writing a letter to the teacher/principal for suggestions on inclusion based on the research of the chosen culture. I'm really excited to try that out next year!”

“I had a great experience with your assessment strand training. I began looking at the assessment as a piece of the work students are doing, and at the same time making sure it contained rigor, was culturally responsive, and met our rubric or performance indicators. Next time I use this assessment, I want to make sure I have multiple students working on it so that I can look at more data to see if students are giving me the best results that they can. I am wanting to add language to the prompts letting students know how much writing is expected for each piece of the assessment. I think that will give us even higher quality work than what we got this year.”

Teacher Name: Devina Khan

School: West Valley Innovation Center, West Valley School District

Assessment Title: Cultural Insight

Grade Level & Subject Area: STEM/ELA/Computer Science, 9th grades

Link to Assessment

Context: This is an end of the year unit for 9th grade students who have shown mastery in skills from previous units and have completed 90% of their classwork. During this 5 week unit, students will be able to work in teams to create mobile app designs addressing authentic challenges in their community. They will utilize design thinking processes to select a challenge, understand its impact, determine criteria for their app, map out a user journey and flow, and develop paper prototypes for their apps. If time permits, students may use their programming skills to build the app as an extension activity. Each part has an assessment but the attached assessment is for Part 5 (the final) assessment which will assess the Paper Prototype and Gallery Walk.

Teacher Name: Erinn Zeitlinn

School: Summit Virtual Academy, North Thurston Public Schools

Assessment Title: Weather and Climate

Grade Level & Subject Area: 3rd Grade Science

Link to Assessment

Context: This is a series of explorations and assessments on climate and weather for 3rd Graders over a period of 6 weeks. The learning outcomes are to understand that scientists look for weather patterns over different times and areas so they can make predictions. And the big idea is to understand the difference between climate and weather. This was written for a virtual academy but could be adapted for a brick and mortar building. This would be given to students in small managable parts, but the entire document shows the scope of the unit and assessments. This assessment and project include learning outcomes in science, math, ELA, and Social Studies.

Here is a piece of student work that illustrates what students produced in the first year of implementation of this assessment. 

Weather and Climate Student Sample

Reflection from the teacher:  “My biggest takeaways from this experience included the time for reflection with others to compare my vision for the assessment with the outcome of the assessment. Next time I use this unit assessment, I would like to implement even more hands-on tools for students to measure the weather on their own instead of just using a weather app to record. For instance, having them get their own outdoor thermometers to check/read each day at the same time. They made a rain gauge this year, so we could continue to make tools for measuring along with checking the data from the weather service to see how they line up. I think that would lead to more rigorous discussion about the margin of error in weather predictions and reporting.”

Teacher Name: An Truong

School: Hudson’s Bay High School

Assessment Title: Career and Job Search

Grade Level & Subject Area: 9-12, Life Skills

Link to Assessment

Context: This project is a great way for students to learn and explore a career they are interested in or want to learn more about. There are different ways students can present the information and gives them a choice on the topic they are researching.

Here is a piece of student work that illustrates what students produced in the first year of implementation of this assessment:

Career Search Student Sample

Reflection from the teacher: “I think I would have the students read each part of the exceeds expectations on the rubric out loud as a class, so they are very familiar with the rubric and discuss as a class what that looks like in examples shown on the screen. I would have sentence starters for their questions of positive/ negatives for their responses.”

Teacher Name: Joanna Brown

School: Bush Middle School, Tumwater School District

Assessment Title: Reading Literature Passion Project

Grade Level & Subject Area: Middle School ELA

Link to Assessment

Context:  This project was designed for sixth-grade English Language Arts students, however, it could be utilized with grades 7 and beyond by swapping out the language of the grade level standards being assessed. Students should be familiar with various fictional genres, authors, and series. Book talks, First Chapter Fridays, and opportunities to sample literature should be offered to students before this project. Students need time and guidance to discover individual preferences and reading levels to successfully self-select a book for this project. Objectively present project examples. Listen and coach students through decision-making but avoid offering suggestions to prevent stereotypes and strengthen student ownership. Increase student support by utilizing standard-specific graphic organizers, sentence starters, lists of academic vocabulary to incorporate into writing, audiobook options, guidance with book choice, and more frequent check-ins.  I use past projects as exemplars to score as a class with the included scoring rubric. Students then work with partners or small groups to score additional exemplars to gain an understanding of success criteria. Because this project offers a wide range of choices and modes for students to show mastery of standards, students must understand how to use the success criteria to self-assess their project. Reading can be completed in and out of class, but dedicated class time and teacher check-ins are necessary for students to complete projects.

Teacher Name: Juvi Lamas

School: Vanguard Academy

Assessment Title: Linear Inequalities

Grade Level & Subject Area: High School Math

Link to Assessment

Context: This assessment can be used in conjunction with more of a target mastery (traditional looking assessment) to get a better understanding of student knowledge in solving multi-step inequalities. This assessment is focusing on if a student can not only solve an inequality but come up with a real world scenario that represents each problem they were given. Solving an inequality shows procedural fluency but being able to create a situation where the inequality could happen in real world context shows and reflects a deeper level of understanding. As the slides progress, the inequalities get more and more challenging, therefore creating a scenario also increases in difficulty. This is intended to have an entry point for all students, even if it's solving the inequality without creating a scenario, students should find an entry point where they can demonstrate understanding.

Teacher Name: Brandon Austin

School: West Valley Innovation Center

Assessment Title: Health Maintenance Practices

Grade Level & Subject Area: High School Health

Link to Assessment

Context: This assessment is a part of a larger unit on Health Maintenance Practices in a CTE (Career and Technical Education) Health Science class at the West Valley Innovation Center, a mastery-based school. We utilize a standards-based grading system, which is why the rubric and scoring system highlights specific industry and Washington State standards. 

Students at the Innovation Center have a pathway-specific schedule and spend a large amount of their day within that pathway, which allows for more instructional time for a project like this. Due to this, the assessment has been written to have fewer stopping points than it would if it was taught in a more traditional setting. I would suggest splitting up certain activities such as the Part One worksheet, and providing more time to do introductory learning if students don't have background knowledge on public health strategies.

Here is a piece of student work that illustrates what students produced in the first year of implementation of this assessment.

Health Maintenance Student Sample

Reflection from the teacher: “I had an amazing time sharing my assessment and reviewing/critiquing it with other educators. One thing I am definitely planning  to do before assigning again is to make sure my rubric better reflects my actual expectations for the project. I was very focused on aligning my assessment practices directly to standards, but I felt I could have done a much better job of putting this into specific language related to the project, rather than keeping it only standards-focused.

Aside from this, I would definitely like to spend more time with my students going over the data I shared with them and having more in-depth conversations on how youth are specifically at risk of these within our community. I feel this would have had more of an impact and built a deeper connection with these students.”

Teacher Names: Maddie Huscher

School: LaConner MS/HS

Assessment Title: Keystone Species of the Salish Sea

Grade Level & Subject Area: 7th Grade Science

Link to Assessment 

Context: This assessment is for middle school science aligned to Next Generation Science Standards. It assesses students' understanding of ecosystems and specifically keystone species within an ecosystem. Students are asked to complete a science research poster on a keystone species of their choosing that lives in the Salish Sea. This assessment can be modified for the region that you teach in. To foster engagement, it is encouraged to take a place-based field trip to your ecosystem if possible to kick off the project. We go to Deception Pass State Park. 

Teacher Names: Molly Watkins

School: Tumwater Middle School, Tumwater School District

Assessment Title: Creature Features Natural Selection Unit Assessment Project

Grade Level & Subject Area: 6th Grade Science

Link to Assessment 

Context: Creature Features is utilized in my 6th grade classroom at the end of the Amplify Natural Selection unit. It could be used in any situation where adaptive traits and environment have been the focus of study. With some flexibility and creativity there is a lot of room for modification/accommodation/expansion for IEP/504/Gifted students. It takes approximately 5 instructional days to complete Parts 1 and 2 for most students. This is a great project for having individual conversations with students around their understanding. It could also be turned into a pair/small group project. Not provided are templates for organizing the one-pager so you may want to prepare some possibilities. It can be completed in a variety of formats: Google slides, comic strip, etc so you will need to decide on formats and add those OR allow students to build their own.