In recent weeks I’ve observed a growing conversation about how best to advance both character education and the learning of 21st century skills.

What is increasingly widely recognized is the idea of backward design: that we can promote learning of our intended outcomes if we put greater emphasis on our assessment of these intentions. Students know what to strive for, and teachers over time find themselves giving greater attention teaching and having students demonstrate the things upon which teachers know they’ll have to assess and report.

The recent New York Times Magazine cover story, What if the Secret of Success is Failure?, tells the story of two schools in New York City working to develop a clear set of intended character outcomes for their students. At one school, KIPP, they embedded these outcomes in a formal report card element, highly quantified and if I understand correctly, a part of the permanent record.

[KIPP] started working to turn it into a specific, concise assessment that he could hand out to students and parents at KIPP’s New York City schools twice a year: the first-ever character report card.

At the other school, Riverdale Country School, the school was avoiding formalizing the character goals into a formal report card, in part because of concerns that students would “game the system” if it became high stakes, and so instead they were working to find ways to bring these character goals into the culture of the school.

“I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” [Riverdale Head of School Dominic Randolph] explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”

We here at St. Gregory believe we are seeking and finding a middle ground between Riverdale and KIPP in our approach to a character and also 21st century skills report card supplement. This has been a central thrust of our efforts in the past three years to elevate the importance of and the development of these skills in our program, and to better fulfill our mission to promote and cultivate in our students Character, Scholarship, Leadership and Innovation. Our approach has been to develop a KIPP like report card for these qualities, but use it as a formative guide for students to self-assess, collect feedback from their teachers, and set goals with their advisers, rather than as a high stakes summative assessment which would then be “gamed.”

I should add that in addition to the character qualities called for in the NYT Magazine article, we have added what we consider 21st century skills, drawn from Tony Wagner’s Seven Survival Skills in his book, The Global Achievement Gap, from the Partnership for 21st century skills, and from the NAIS Commission on Accreditation’s Essential Capacities for the 21st century. Just yesterday, I received an email inquiry from our National Association of Independent Schools President Pat Bassett asking of member schools who was promoting enhanced learning of 21st century via backward design, and so it is nice to take this opportunity to share again our EGG: the essential goals for Gregorians.

I have written about the EGG before, here and here, and I shared our student newspaper report on the EGG here, so this is familiar to long-time and regular readers, but this has been an iterative process for us, and the egg has continued to evolve, both in what we are assessing and how we administer the EGG with our students. So what follows is both new and revised, and, because of the NYT article, timely for sharing again.

Below you can find three pieces of our EGG: the process/timeline; Essential Goals for Gregorians (EGG) assessment form; and the “descriptors” for what each of the goals being assessed might look like in the classroom environment, what we sometimes jokingly refer to as the “eggsplanations” for each attribute being assessed.

This particular version is for our High School students. Click here to see the similar but developmentally appropriate distinct process, form, and descriptors for our Middle School students.

PROCESS/TIMELINE

Students complete EGG self-assessment in advisory	Oct 1-Nov 30
EGGs open for faculty to complete, closed to parent viewingWindow for completing EGGs for all students

Middle school students begin writing self-asessmentsDecember 1December 1-19Students/advisors begin going over EGG reportsAll students, US and MS, write self-assessment in GoogleDocs, responding to and reflecting on the EGGs and setting goals.

Advisors begin writing advisor comments on the same GoogleDoc which students used for self-assessments. Be sure to include the two sentences (below) before the student self-assessment.January 10January 17-27

January 28 Student self-assessments and advisor comments (same GoogleDoc for both for each student) emailed to parents and students by 8 a.m. Be sure to include the two sentences (below) before the student self-assessmentFebruary 10

The Upper School EGG

(Essential Goals for Gregorians)

Students are assessed on the following traits using a continuum of Novice, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. Comment boxes follow each section of traits.

Novice: Student rarely exhibits this behavior.

Basic: Student sometimes exhibits this behavior.

Proficient: Student frequently exhibits this behavior.

Advanced: Student consistently exhibits this behavior.

Character