Participating and Contributing rubric

This staff meeting was taken by the lead teacher. As part of our inquiry development, we needed to think about the skills involved. Previously the children had used essential skills to self assess and as a staff we developed out own success criteria to use for assessment. It is the aim that with the development of school wide understanding of inquiry learning, that skills would be assessed with a focus on the key competencies. This really promoted ownership from the children as they developed an understanding of the skills and attitudes required for their learning. However, it was limited as it didn’t really give the children their next learning step, they could create a learning step themselves but they weren’t sure what they needed to do as a learner to progress to the next step, most of these skills were used and assessed in isolation.
As part of developing our inquiry model, rubrics are now included. This continues to develop the system we already had in place, and it was aimed that we would develop a rubric that could be uniformed throughout the school, again showing continuity of language and systems throughout the school.
To follow is the structure that was used to design the first rubric for participating and contributing.
· Define what the key competency is about
· Connect it to the old essential skill
· Make a list of things that fit under this umbrella
· Get old assessment sheets out and record what the children think are important for the related essential skills
· In pairs write 3 virtues that are vitally important to this competency
· Decide as a staff – 3 or 4 key elements to this competency
· Introduce the rubric
· Start from the best, then worst, then in between

The staff created a rubric. However, we decided that we needed more work on this as the rubric was frequency based and not skill development based. We went back to our classes and tried the same process with our children. We all designed rubrics for our classes with the children ideas. We decided to use these as the childrens self assessments, these proved to be really powerful, the children are very critical of themselves but said that this way, they knew exactly what they needed to do to move to the next level.
Lead teacher then investigated other schools that use rubrics. From our cluster day with Jan-Marie Kellow, looking at the planning template, and from notes taken, decided to use rubistar to help design our first rubric, we needed a model to bounce our own ideas off. Next, under the umbrella of ‘collaborative working’ found skills/attitudes that matched what we were doing. Lead teacher then took a sample to the staff and discussed it. Having that model in front of us seemed to make the whole concept more concrete. We decided to select four areas to use for our rubric this term to assess our focus key competency. We now have something to think critically about and have decided to readdress this next term.
All staff have been given ‘key competency case-study’ from Karori, Central, Hillcrest, Kelburn Normal Schools, sourced from TKI. This is holiday reading and we plan to come back and address the rubric idea for next term.
It has been really great to see everyone on board, with great commitment to this development. We have all been impressed with the childrens understandings of the skills needed to work through an inquiry and put this down to them ‘buying’ into the inquiry way and their ownership of the whole process.
Well done teachers, you are doing a great job!!!!!