As we look ahead to the beginning of MCAS in April, teachers have been hard at work in our Instruction and Learning common planning time and our Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Learning through Data common planning time!
During our Instruction and Learning common planning time, grade-level and specialty teams have dug deeper into norming our expectations with the MCAS rubric for constructed response in both English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. In ELA we have wrestled with the question: What makes a central idea insightful and fully developed? To help us answer this question, which is derived from the MCAS rubric, we created criteria for success that we can apply when looking at student work as well as to share with students along with models.
In Math, we have also used the MCAS rubric to score constructed response questions and have grappled with questions such as: How do we help students persist through multi-step problems and constructed response questions? How do we teach students to transfer their work from scrap paper to the computer screen? How do we work with students to appreciate the context of a constructed response question and check to see if their answer is reasonable given the context?