The Creativity Assessment Wheel

In my teaching, I ran into a problem.

You see, at my school, we are piloting a provincial curriculum called CTF - Career and Technology Foundations. I wrote about it briefly before when I showed the beginnings of my 20% Time. CTF, in many ways, mirrors the current shift from curriculum content to competency-based learning. It focuses on four processes: design, create, assess, and articulate. It is also meant to expose students to many of the different options they might have in high school and beyond in the areas of technology, human services, business, communication, and resources. In high school, these would be classes like legal studies, cosmetology, automotives, foods, video production, and so on. In middle school, it's more of a taste of some of these things.

So my problem was in this 20% Time project. I was trying to figure out how to assess how well my students were working on these processes. I was also trying to figure out how to help my students understand exactly what I was asking them to do. If I believe strongly (which I do) that the 20% Time, as well as other creative endeavours, teach them important skills that transfer to other areas in their learning, then I should devote some attention to assess it, right?

Serendipitously, I was in the middle of the last course of my grad studies program, Creativity in Educational Practice, and my classmates and I were asked to tackle assessment. A tough challenge, that's for sure, and there were many different approaches in my class to this task.

I went away and thought about it for awhile. I wanted to figure something out that would link the learning I've been doing in Creativity with the CTF curriculum. Here's what I came up with.

These graphics were designed by a former student of mine, Miranda, who's going to post-secondary right now for graphic design. You can download them here for your use:

Colour PDF
Grayscale PDF

Here's how I use this tool. Each class, at the beginning of their 20% Time, the students come into my room, where they each have one of these wheels up on the wall of my room. They then mark on their wheel, with the date, which of the skills they'll be working on that day. I have felt that this has made them more able to discuss their learning with me and each other.

The Power of Conversation in Student Learning

It took me eight years of teaching to come to the realization of how important conversation is in student progress and assessment.

It sounds sort of stupid to say this. But maybe I'm not alone. So that's why I'm writing this post.

Structured, purposeful conversation can reveal so much about where the student is and where she needs to go next.

We did an inquiry project asking the students to find their own answer to the question, "How can Calgary be considered a modern Renaissance city?" Students chose a field to focus on, like an art, medicine, science, or architecture, to name a few. Built into the project was a series of checklists, that were steps students needed to take to fully understand their topic and be ready to answer the question. But here's the key: the students needed to have the checklist checked by me.

When students felt they were ready, they called me over and I checked their work. Actually, no, I didn't check their work, we had a conversation about their work. If students were not at a point where they truly demonstrated an understanding of that particular checklist, I gave them feedback and we talked about some ideas of what they could do next to ensure a more complete understanding.

And it was beautiful.

I understood, more than any other time in my entire eight-year-career, what the students understood and had learned, and what they hadn't. Maybe this comes with professional confidence - I trust my own judgement rather than having to rely on a rubric to do it for me.

The next step for me is to figure out how to better document those conversations in a way that makes it easy to come back to. I've tried video before but I find I never go back to them.