Assignment
Assessing a group project like this one is a little different from a typical competency demo. You may not have encountered much brand-new CS content — though you may well have learned a great deal about what it actually means to design curriculum. Either way, a traditional "did you master the material" assessment doesn't quite fit.
What I do need to assess is your individual engagement with the course design process. To do that, I am asking you to complete four individually written reflections over the course of the project, one tied to each major element of your team's design document. This is the first of those four. Each reflection is your chance to step back, evaluate what your team produced, and articulate your own thinking about the work.
For this reflection, focus on the outcomes section of your team's document and address the following:
- Write a 2–3 paragraph review of what you think about your team's outcomes. How well do they define what students should know and be able to do?
- What did you personally learn about curriculum design from working through this part of the project?
- Select the three outcomes you think are most important to this course. Why are they important, and where might students draw on them in the future?
- Select the two outcomes you think are least important. Why don't they excite you? If you removed them, would you replace them with something else, or would you strengthen the expectations around what remains?
There are at least two common reasons you might have outcomes in your document that don't fully resonate with you: your teammates felt strongly about them and persuaded you to include them, or they satisfy a state standard or district requirement that you're less personally invested in. Either is a legitimate answer — and there may be other reasons too.
- What is one question you still have about identifying outcomes as part of curriculum design?
Evaluation
- Submit a single document containing your responses to all five questions above.
- Deadline: no later than Sunday, July 12. [This is not a typo. While assigned in week 3, I am giving you until the end of week 4 so that your group can finish your work and you, individually, have time to complete this reflection.]
- This is evaluated as a competency demo.
- Each question will be evaluated on a scale of 0–4. The entire set will be assigned a combined grade that is not necessarily the mathematical average of those scores.