Reply To: Priority Standards (FOSIL)
Thanks for the context, Anne.
I was sure that we had met – the IASL conference passed in a bit of blur – and now I even remember exactly where we were standing. To my shame, your email with your contact details is languishing in in my Inbox, so I am very pleased that you posted to the Forum as it is still my hope to visit you, if I may, when things return to some semblance of normal.
As a matter of interest, do you know why your campus chose to write its own curriculum rather than offer the MYP like the other 3 campuses?
Because our main intake is in Year 7 (Grade 6, although for historical reasons we have a growing number of Year 6/ Grade 5 students), Year 9 (Grade 8) and Year 12 (Grade 11), we’ve had to approach the question of diagnostics with two things in mind at each level of entry, which are consolidating the gains that we have made with existing students while laying a solid foundation for new students in terms of the FOSIL process and skills at the appropriate grade level.
What I didn’t mention in my previous post, and what you probably already know, is that the skills in bold are priority skills, all of which are linked to 1 or more assessments (see below). I mention this for two reasons:
- Given the very steep learning curve that I was on, these assessments helped me to better understand what many of these skills actually looked like in practice.
- Our FOSIL resources then grew out of these assessments, although we are currently using them more for instructional rather than diagnostic purposes, although use of the resources does reveal a range of student competence that can serve a diagnostic purpose.
I will share something more concrete on this later from the perspective of our Year 9 (Grade 8) Inquiry Skills Project.
Darryl
