Hi Darryl,
I can’t thank you enough for your detailed response. You have the grade breakdowns of the divisions at my school spot on. We have four campuses and my Middle School is the only one that has written its curriculum–the other three MS divisions use MYP. We are preparing students to enter the IB in 10th grade, take AP classes, or graduate with an American high school diploma. Because we are an international school, at the moment my patrons hail from nearly 70 different countries and around 30% are either in Learning Support or are learning English as a second language.
My division has not been introduced to FOSIL yet, but I plan on doing this next August when we return to school. I learned about the framework from your keynote speech at the IASL conference and felt it was ideal for our needs and evolution as a division. I took the SLA course in March with Elizabeth Hutchinson and there first came into contact with the standards document above. Due to the current circumstances, I had so little time to feedback to my Admin about my priority standards that I thought I would use the FOSIL framework to assess where we were right now. It enabled some much-needed practical time with them and made me realise that I was on the right track! But maybe I put the cart before the horse!
What would help me now, especially given my current distance learning environment, would be some recommendations for diagnostics that I can give at the beginning of the next school year to assess where grade levels currently are with their information literacy skills. I especially feel that we will need to do this with the 9th graders. Any advice on moving forward with this is so appreciated at this busy time for all. Best wishes, Anne
