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Benchmark Update 1/15/21

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The principal discusses the midyear benchmarks.

Show Transcript

Hi Tigers Mr. Sosnovik here. We are 9 days into the roll out of the Benchmark assessment plan that's taking the place of midterms. Over the last week and a half I've had a lot of meetings with students that have contacted me, I've had meetings with departments and all the staff members and I’ve answered a variety of emails from students that have been sent to me you know with regards to the expectations of this from everything I've heard, I think it's pretty clear that the rollout of this initiative wasn't necessarily as smooth as what I had hoped for. I'm a firm believer in taking responsibility when things occur and for that I want to apologize to all of you. The intent was to never create additional confusion or anxiety. I knew this was going to be new and I knew there might be some questions and concerns about what to do but at the same time our goal was actually the complete opposite of this.  We wanted to move away from traditional one and a half to two hours assessments for eight classes and condense that and give you an opportunity to take ownership of this. This is a project-based learning assessment for your courses that's more so a portfolio or a body of work something that you would see at a higher level. It gives you complete and total ownership and that is worth 10% in my eyes but the goal is we got to make sure we minimize stress because I add to the plate. So that reason I know your teachers over the last couple days and have maybe adjusted what they gave you on day one in there and they're starting to modify or come up with other strategies or ideas or sharing with you what they are doing, at least I'm hoping that is occurring because the reality is over the next three weeks I want you to be able to understand there is plenty of time to still adjust if you need to, make adjustments and make some movement because this is worth a substantial portion of your grades and I want you to be successful. So for the next 3 minutes I'm going to dive into a couple things that you may have heard over the last few days so you hear it for me directly as to what some of those expectations are. First and foremost this is tied to all core courses with graduation requirements. Some of you upperclassmen might be saying well I have a couple science courses that are electives so why am I doing this, like a Physics course for example. Although Physics may not be a graduation requirement for most of you at Hackettstown High School, it could be for some of you. So that is the reason why some of the science courses are included because they are lab based sciences which could be a graduation requirement. Next students have asked me and several of my meetings they were concerned and would say, “Mr. Sosnovik you may think it's a lot less but now I have 12 different projects to do across four contents you know Science, Math, History and English. That's not actually the case. It can be if you want it to be but again this is a student plan the goal is to take each one of those units that you covered and answer the learning objective. You have to  pick one learning objective per unit and show mastery in that. If you want to create one project that shows Mastery for all three or four learning objectives, that is fine and  acceptable. If you want to create four projects, that's also fine and acceptable but the choice is yours as a student for what to do. So when I started drilling down and meeting with students and I am going to show you here on the website, here’s our website go to benchmark assessments and it goes over everything right down here are the department and I will pick on a department. Here is social studies. I am going to scroll and take a look, here is the department level rubric you are going to go over but then here is all the objectives your teacher selected as the most important so I'll dive. Here's this one right here we'll go into CP, CPA, and honors World History.  I go ahead and open that up. Everything right here is laid out for you as to what to do. There's some examples of things that you can do to accomplish that from posters, to essays,  to videos and then there's this, email Mr. Stout or Mr. Varhaul if you have another idea or something else that works for you, you can do it. Now  if you want to make something I scroll down and look it looks that they have two learning objectives here. So if you want to make two separate projects, go for it. If you want one project that covers both you can do that as well and you can do your research put your slides together and do a slideshow presentation to record yourself presenting just like I am now both of those as long as you show mastery. And your going to dive into that based on what you've learned so far this year. So if I scroll down here and I just take a look compare and contrast Civilizations and Empires I have to imagine that was discussed in your classes so all you need to do is go back into your notes, take a look at what was discussed, use that information, do some research online, use credible sources and make sure your citing your work and you're going to explain in your opinion how the comparing and contrasting of civilizations and empires occurred. You put that together. You know what your teachers are expecting because it was presented to you oin the first two marking periods. You do the same thing for unit 2 and you can pick any one of these. Analyze Change and Continuity over time. I have to imagine there was a lesson there was a project or something associated with that you need to extend that learning a little bit further you can put both of those into a podcast. If you go back to the main page I know it was drilled down and you may not have seen it but within the top 5 questions it tells you exactly what I'm telling you now and I had a link on that gives you a whole bunch of examples for things you can do.

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Benchmark Update 1/15/21

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