Triptychs and Collective Judgment
A triptych is a multi-panel work of art that offers different perspectives on a subject or scene. Read more at Wikipedia, mostly so you can stumble across The Garden of Earthly Delights and get lost for a while in the very, very strange paintings of Hieronymus Bosch1. If you’d like simpler but just as disturbing triptychs, you might like Francis Bacon.
In here, the triptych metaphor started last year when we shifted to three GAP scores a quarter, as opposed to just one at the end. Here is the post detailing the shift, which remains critical to your understanding of it. The rest of what you need has been gathered in the ramiform materials spread throughout How Feedback Should Work and A Glass Case Full of Lost Treasures and Fossils, plus the introductory post from the first day of school.
This is all flipped instruction, designed to be read interstitially and carefully, at your own pace. It teaches you by making explicit connections and reiterating key ideas. Everything is completely, painstakingly transparent. You must invest in the reading to do what comes next, even though it will take practice and time to internalize the process. When you do, you will be able to handle any class, any teacher, any job — anything at all that life throws at you.
In our course, we stop briefly every three weeks to assess your body of work. It is a collective effort. It’s what Tony Wagner, author of Creating Innovators and Most Likely to Succeed, two books studied by administrators and teachers in your district, calls “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” That’s the first of three ways you should look at the process:
- As collective human judgment informed by evidence
- As a measure of the value you’ve added to the environment
- As part of a story about you
The third one may be counterintuitive, but all data tell a story. The one told by traditional grades is unclear, except in broad strokes: High numbers are good; low numbers are bad. You can’t unpack traditional grades into a clear picture of what was learned, what was created, etc. You need a cipher to do it — a breakdown of weighting, point values, penalties. It’s why the case against traditional grades is so easy to make.
In here, the story is clear, and the cipher is universal. The number out of 100 corresponds to a GAP score, which unpacks into a profile. That profile corresponds directly to universal and timeless skills and traits. Your formal and informal work are all tied directly to those skills and traits, and all of it can be tracked — and therefore assessed — interstitially and transparently.
You’ve been given an opportunity to read about my approach to feedback, which is a window into the kind of makerspace trial and error you are meant to embrace in this room. What once took a week or longer to process and included individual conferences and essays or reports now takes only 24 to 48 hours. This is the paradigm shift.
The technology available to us makes this far easier than it used to be. Our collective assessment is framed by the profiles, and the profiles can be sorted into tiers. Those tiers have explicit criteria, and there is no mystery surrounding how a student meets or doesn’t meet those criteria. It all comes down to the evidence you’ve generated and the value you’ve added, which can’t be faked easily, if at all.
I won’t repeat what is in the many essays and instructional posts you’ve been given. I’ll only tell you that the answers to your questions are in one of them. Where we need to focus instead is on how Google and related technology allow us to make our collective assessment more efficient and effective.
Googolplexes and Other Strings of Zeros
New to Google Classroom this year is a central page for all your work, which is essentially a portfolio of assignments. It looks like this:
Enlarge that by clicking on it. This tells us if you’ve missed any assignments, left any incomplete, and so on. It also lets us click on any response to quickly review the content and quality of the work. It’s the first and most important level of investment in the course: getting work done to the best of your ability.
Then we consider this handout/poster, using that evidence and all the notes and observations made on your in-class focus and feedback loops:
That’s a slightly edited copy of the Scoring Basics on the main page of the site, distributed in class, and embedded in two or three feedback-related posts. As one of those posts explains, we are interested most in what an objective observer would note about your in-class focus and student-generated feedback over these three weeks. Your intention doesn’t matter — not yet, anyway. Intentions will matter more than anything else when we move into the next three-week panel. For now, all that counts is what we could have observed.
As we move into scoring, we have your formal assignment data from Google Classroom, a sense of your in-class focus and the value you’ve added to the classroom, and evidence of the feedback loop generated from those things. If you don’t have enough evidence in these categories, you can automatically sort yourself into one of the lower three tiers, using that GAP Scoring Basics handout or the first section of this longer protocol.
Tier 4 students, on the other hand, might need to provide further evidence. This is a self-fulfilling criterion: If you’re truly a student in that fourth tier, you understand the course enough to know what to do; if you don’t understand the course enough to know what to do, you aren’t in the fourth tier. And if you haven’t asked for help in order to understand the course, that by itself is evidence of a lower tier.
That’s why the final assignment of any three-week period is a Google Form — a self-assessment of your in-class focus, feedback generation, and general value added — with the chance to submit evidence that doesn’t fit one of the other formal assignments. That evidence is made more accessible and more transparent through the tech we use, but it starts with the in-class focus and feedback looping you’re required to do.
One way to look at it is to return to a handout distributed in class, posted around the room, and embedded in a half-dozen instructional posts:
[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2FHandout-What-do-I-do-next.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]
A legal-sized version is available here and embedded at the top of the website. Keep it handy. And, as always, ask questions below.
The title and tags are a reference to his paintings, by the way. Cutting the Stone gives us the featured image thumbnail, if you look closely, and also serves as an apt metaphor for education. ↩
This post clarified the use of three evaluations per quarter; however I still have questions about how peers can inform the process of gathering evidence. How can we use feedback from our classmates to inform our perception of our achievements and our collection of evidence so far?
I think if you are regularly interacting and sharing your work with your classmates, you can gauge your improvement, or “achievements,” based on their comments.
Yeah, I totally agree Victor. I think that if you are sharing your writing frequently, the comments will change from something like, “That’s well written.” to something like, “Wow, that really made me feel as if I was there.” or “This was really deep, I think that is a perspective that is very interesting…”
Your classmates are also your peers so you can always ask them for their opinion on a topic like, has my writing improved over the quarter… That is what this class is all about, growing as a student and as a thinker as the year goes on.
One way to use feedback from our classmates as evidence at the end of each three weeks is to keep a metacognition notebook/journal that reflects on how our classmates improve our writing. Last year, some of my peers and I would share our pieces with each other on Google Docs, and we would comment on each other’s pieces, offering advice, and describing our own interpretations. These online comments are preserved and can be shown to the teacher as evidence. I always write with a purpose in mind, so I could ask my peers what they thought my purpose was (mood/tone/subject). Sometimes my peers would guess a different purpose than I had hoped for and this would tell me if I needed to improve my piece. Other times, I would shape my reflection around what purpose they had guessed, because it better described my piece. Another method would be to include the teacher in group discussions with your peers. That will not only add on to your feedback loop, but will also show amenability and collegiality among your peers.
I think if you are regularly interacting and sharing your work with your classmates, you can gauge your improvement, or “achievements,” based on their comments.
Using feedback and being involved in other classmates work is an efficient way to not only compare, but expand on eachothers ideas to create something bigger than the original product, whether it be a reading, a comment, an essay , etc.