(Originally published in the COMPETENCYWORKS BLOG October 2023)
If you were to analyze student work samples in a body of evidence for students in your school right now (such as in a digital portfolio), what would you typically expect to see? Does the collection of artifacts – the evidence – tell a comprehensive story of each student’s learning? As my colleagues and I have worked with school teams across the country, the question of how to build a defensible body of evidence continues to come up. It comes up when we talk about assessment. It comes up when we talk about grading. And it comes up when we talk about how to determine whether or not a student has met the requirements for proficiency.
A new handbook for professional learning community (PLC) teams with my co-authors Jon Vander Els and Brian Stack addresses these questions by defining and offering a guiding framework to competency-based schools for building an equitable and defensible body of evidence.
