The Living Schoolbook

There are really 6 steps to the Goal Aware Activity process.

1. Establish Goals and Sets of Goals (create and publish them).
2. Associate Goals with Activities (tag/link an assignment with a  goal).
3. Engage students with the Activity and make them aware of the Goals.
4. Evaluate student performance against a rubric for each linked goal.
5. Analyze the results.
6. Correct instruction/activities/program.

During step 2 we ask faculty to provide a rubric and a "rationale" for the link between the activity and the goal.  While I was giving a demonstration of the Goal Manager and Goal Aware Assignment tool today at the Sakai conference I had a funny realization. I realized that the faculty are going to blow off the rationale.  Like my grandma used to say, “Dimes to donuts” they are not going to provide meaningful information here.  

Earlier in the week I listened to Paul Treuer and Jill Jensen from Minnesota talk about effective use of portfolios.  They lamented the poor reflections they commonly observed in student portfolios.  It took a grant and a great deal of time for Jill to realize that she was not asking them good guiding questions to help her students form their thoughts and see the connections between their learning and their practice and strategies.  My guess is that the prompt: “Rationale” will not suffice as a sufficient guide for faculty to make them meaningfully consider how and why they engage their students.   What are they expecting?  What happened last time?  What did they learn?  So what? 

While the use of portfolios systems like OSP require faculty to provide helpful guidance to students, it is easy to forget that the same sort of scaffolding will likely be necessary for them as well if the analysis of the data is to be useful for program review and correction.