Clear and Visible Targets
New strategies help kids aim straight
When Juneau students take exams, write papers, or do projects, they don't have to aim blindly for excellence. They don't have to read the teacher's mind. Or hope they studied the right material. Or wonder whether their work is in the A, B, or C bracket. That's because the Southeast Alaska district gives kids clear and visible targets. Students know in advance what qualities will earn high marks—and what deficiencies will ensure low ones. And, as everyone knows, it's a lot easier to hit a target when you can see it.
"We are making kids abundantly aware of our goals and our standards—and where the kids are in relation to those goals and standards," says Bernie Sorenson, who coordinates grants and assessments for the Juneau Borough School District. "Teachers who are using strategies such as self-reflection and rubrics are seeing amazing things happen—things they never thought they'd see."
Take Chad Denton. The Juneau Borough High School senior decided to organize his year-end portfolio around Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive skills. His classmate Pat Race took a different tack. For his portfolio, Race created an online multimedia presentation featuring a 3-D piston rotating in space to the theme of Mission Impossible; an animated movie featuring fish swimming through light and shadow; and a math project set to The Beatles' 1960s hit song Revolution. He stored his presentation on a CD-ROM. Freshman Sarah Aronson expresses pride that her online portfolio shows her willingness to take risks by "stepping out on a limb" in essays on Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and on the bombing of Hiroshima. "It's hard for me to voice my opinion," Sarah confides.
These students participate voluntarily in the high school's two-year-old interdisciplinary program, Phoenix. With an emphasis on using advanced computer technology for project-based learning, Phoenix steers kids toward meeting state and national standards by making them visible and showing how they connect with every assignment. Classroom walls bear copies of the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics standards along with state standards in English, history, science, and technology. In technology, for example, Alaska's performance standards say students should:
"We're teaching to the standards rather than going by a curriculum in a textbook," says Sue Zimmerman, a Phoenix program founder. "We tell the kids, `You're doing this because you're meeting this standard in English and this standard in social studies, so that the kids understand why they're doing what they're doing."
The portfolios, Zimmerman says, "are geared toward showing parents and showing the kids themselves how they have met the standards to graduate from high school in Juneau." The portfolio must give examples of how the student met the standards in all subjects. It also must answer the question, How did your work this year demonstrate your skills as a communicator, a problem-solver, a reasoner, a connector, and a risk-taker?
The Phoenix portfolio replaces the old parent-teacher conference. Students present their portfolios to their moms and dads. The teacher remains in the background and gets involved only if the student asks her to join in. To rehearse their presentations, the high schoolers hook up with third-graders from neighboring Harborview Elementary School. The big kids present their portfolios to the little kids, and vice versa.
"Our purpose in doing portfolios," says Zimmerman, "was to have kids reflect for themselves and be able to say to their parents how they have grown as learners this year. They come up with these remarkable insights on themselves."
In a letter to his parents introducing his portfolio, for example, freshman Peter Moore wrote this: "Compromising for me has been about the toughest thing to sustain and contribute. Compromising has more frequently come up, and has mostly been seen in project periods. The fact that everybody has semi-different ideas about how things should be done, it often comes to compromising to solve the problem. You both know me, and know that I have good ideas and a creative mind, and it is sometimes hard for me to listen to other people's ideas. Even though compromising is a part of everyday life and is something I'm good at, there are still things I need to work on."
Phoenix teachers create scoring guidelines called "rubrics" for all student projects. As used in classroom assessment, the term rubric refers to a grid that contains the criteria for achieving a certain score on a project or an assignment. Phoenix students may earn one of three scores: an E for "exceeding the standard," an M for "meeting the standard," or an IP for being "in progress." One group project, for example, required students to create a "cultural structure" representing the group's answer to the question, "Who has the right to the Holy Land?" To get an E, the group had to, among other things, include a detailed floor plan; explain how elements of the structure represent the ethos of the relevant cultural groups; discuss the structure with clarity; and give examples of how the group integrated technology, history, math, and English into the project.
The Phoenix approach, stressing real-world applications of knowledge, is designed for a technology-rich, information-glutted planet. "Nowadays, there's just so much technology and so much information in the world, we cannot fill students up with information," says Zimmerman. "So we have to teach them how to make choices and reflect on their own."
Down the road at Dzantik'i Heeni Middle School, eighth-graders are testing their skill, knowledge, and ingenuity through such self-initiated projects as tanning a bear hide, building a hot tub, staging a mock trial, swimming the Gastineau Channel, and attending a veterinary surgery. Students work with a community "coach" to plan and execute their rite-of-passage experiences, ROPES. They make oral presentations to three-person community panels, as well as to classmates. Students' reflective essays on their projects are scored from a rubric.
Like Phoenix, this front-of-the-pack program exemplifies Juneau's commitment to taking the mystery out of assessment. One of three "houses"—schools within the school—the ROPES house mirrors the Phoenix program's emphasis on self-directed learning and alternative assessment practices. As they are in Phoenix, rubrics are standard practice in this house of Dzantik'i Heeni (the school's name means "flounder river" in the language of the native Tlingit people). The house's seven teachers have established master rubrics spelling out the criteria for earning E, M, and IP in content, work habits, and communication so that as the house's 240 students move from project to project, teachers aren't "all over the map," says Parson. Students who show E quality in work habits, for example, support others in staying on task, are highly focused, double-check due dates, use personal checklists, maintain extra supplies, prepare for the unexpected, finish early, and demonstrate leadership. On the other hand, students who show behavior suggesting they are distracted, disorganized, forgetful, short-sighted, passive, and tardy will receive an IP.
The rubrics for individual projects contain only a "smattering" of the behaviors contained in the master rubrics so that students can focus their efforts, the teachers say.
"We don't try to assess everything at once, but try to focus just on the things we think are really important," says science teacher Paula Savikko. "We tell the kids, `These are the behaviors we expect, these are the behaviors we're looking for.' It's a place to state our expectations very clearly. It's a system of feedback, and it's very specific."
Unlike the traditional D or F, which acted as brick walls to halt effort, an IP lets the student try again. "We don't allow them to give up," says Lopez. "One of the neat things about `in progress' is that it's not a one-shot deal. We're not going to give up on you. We expect you to move along further than this."
While the house requires a portfolio from students, "right now it's an anthology—a collection of student work to present to parents," says English teacher Gail Parson. "They're not used diagnostically. We're still talking about how to focus this in terms of its purpose."
The house hasn't abandoned traditional grades. But the rubrics provide a different avenue for getting to those grades. Students whose work earns about half Ms and half IPs get a C. Students who earn mostly Ms get a B. If at least one-third of their scores are Es, they get an A.
"It's too big a battle to let go of the A, B, C stuff altogether," Parson acknowledges. "We have one foot in both worlds."
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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