Representative: Jeff Heyck-Williams, Director of Curriculum and Instruction

EdSurge Case Study

Teachers at Two Rivers Roll Up Their Sleeves to Build Assessments from Scratch, March 21, 2017

Two Rivers is committed to a definition of student success that covers four broad dimensions: core content & basic skills, critical thinking & problem solving, collaboration & communication, and character.

The charter organization is working on designing, testing, and revising assessment tasks related to the five components of critical thinking & problem solving: schema development, metacognition and evaluation, effective reasoning, problem solving, and creativity.

With MyWays, the school is interested in figuring out how to measure habits from its social and emotional (SEL) curriculum focused on collaboration & communication and character. They are considering how to incorporate the MyWays whole-student competency plot.

Dilemma: The balance between domains of student success.

Questions: How much do we work on basic skills and knowledge (within projects)? How are you allocating that time effectively so kids are getting basic content and then are able to apply it to go deeper? And a parallel problem—how much content knowledge do kids need to have to do the work effectively?

Dilemma: Assessment of reasoning, problem solving, and metacognition and evaluation.

Questions: How well are kids transferring skills from projects to a broader context? How and when is the best way to assess these types of skills—during (via metacognitive moment), after (survey), a combination of both, or something altogether different? How might we use this type of information to understand how individual students are doing and how the system is doing?