Although summer isn’t quite over, I’m back in Shanghai after a relaxing vacation with family. In June, I had the opportunity to attend the NHD National Contest and support the students representing NHD China. It was a fantastic event. I continue to believe that the NHD program is one of the most effective ways to bring historical thinking into the classroom in a meaningful and lasting way.
Back in December, I shared some thoughts on the differences between standards-based and competency-based teaching and assessment. Since then, I’ve drafted competency-based rubrics for each dimension of the C3 Framework. In this post, I’ll share those rubrics and explain the thinking behind how I constructed them.
First, a word about the indicators I chose: Developing, Approaching, Mastering, Innovating. These terms emerged from a collaboration with a small group of teachers after school. Developing and Approaching are fairly common and don’t really need any explanation. Our focus was on Mastering and Innovating as the more important indicators for the target and enrichment rubric levels. As we had all taught in standards-based systems before, we were familiar with the tendency of students to always push for the Score of 4.0, even when it may not be appropriate at that point in their learning. Both students and parents want to understand how to achieve it, which can present a challenge when teachers may sometimes struggle to define it without feeling as though they are hand-holding too much.
That’s why we preferred Mastering over Proficient for the 3.0 indicator. The term subtly suggests an acceptable “end” to a student’s learning journey at that moment. Likewise, the term Innovating connotes a level of enrichment that is not required of every student at every time. It is something meant to be challenging that not all students may reach within a unit. We wanted terms that did not make students feel as though getting to the highest level was required when the 3.0 indicator is the target and earns an A. Hopefully it works as intended. While these labels may be one of the least important parts of a rubric, I value the psychological intent behind them, especially in a high-achieving academic environment.
Below are the rubrics for each Dimensions. I have called each one a “Standard” for semantic purposes that make sense within my own teaching context. These will no doubt go through edits before I use them in the fall. A word document that includes all of them is linked at the bottom of the post. Feel free to adapt or modify them to suit your own needs.
Dimension 1: Developing Questions and Planning Inquiries
The skill components are pulled from the C3 standards within the dimension, though they are edited in a way intended to make them more understandable and meaningful for students. Ideally, students can recognize the progression of skills as they develop and plan their own inquiries.
Dimension 2: Applying Discipline Specific Tools
There are 58 standards in this C3 dimension across the four disciplines of economics, civics, geography, and history. It’s not exactly an easy task to fit them all on a single rubric, let alone integrate them within one or two courses.
Like many schools, we teach economics to our juniors and seniors through the AP curriculum, and the connections in 9th or 10th grade are glancing at best. The civics standards are very U.S.-focused and do not make sense for our current curriculum. As a result, both of these were kept off the rubric. While we teach aspects of both in 9th and 10th grade, they are not emphasized in a way that justifies prioritizing a skill or standard and then having to spiral it through a unit or semester. Geography plays a much larger role in our curriculum, but the C3 standards are sometimes awkward and do not all fit a course where geography is just one of several lens being used to analyze historical content. For that reason, these were also de-prioritized from explicit mention in the assessment rubric.
The historical standards were chosen because they extend beyond the discipline of history itself. They provide a flexible framework through which other social science lenses and themes can also be taught and assessed. This rubric, and the selected standards, are intended to serve as broad, big-picture skills that support more streamlined assessment and grading practices. Our other curriculum documents offer a more detailed view of how we continue to instruct and practice many of the individual skills embedded within the vast scope of C3’s Dimension 2. These rubrics should not be seen as an attempt to cut away swaths of the C3 framework, merely an attempt to create a simplified classroom system that is easily explained to students and parents.
Dimension 3: Evaluating Sources and Using Evidence
This dimension has grown a lot on me as I have done a better job at teaching the research and source evaluation processes. There is a bit of wording overlap around evidence and claims between this dimension and dimension 4. I am working on that.
Dimension 4: Argumentation
C3’s name for this dimension is “Communicating Conclusion & Taking Informed Action.” The connotation embedded with that title is a challenging one given that I teach at an international school in China. We do ask our students to present their work and get involved in social issues beyond the classroom in creative ways, however, it is easier in my context to visualize this dimension as argumentation.
Final Thoughts
I hope these rubrics prove useful to others, even in draft form. If you end up adapting them, I’d love to see how you make them your own. As daunting as it can feel, the start of a new school year is the perfect time to dive into something like this. These rubrics coincide with a slight redesign of our 9th grade curriculum to a Integrated Social Science course. This course will introduce students to multiple lenses and theories of knowledge within the social sciences, using thematically selected historical units. I’ll be posting this year on how the course develops and how these rubrics support more streamlined and meaningful instruction and assessment. My goal is for students to see how each Dimension and skill set connects in meaningful ways, and how they can apply these tools beyond the classroom. Its a tall order, but worth pursuing.