Imagine This - Ideas & Stories for Creative, Meaningful Teaching

How do you make creative, cross-curricular projects easier to assess?

In this episode of Imagine This, Dylan sits down with BC educator Jennifer Moroz to talk about the assessment frameworks that make rich classroom projects worth doing. From student podcasts to theatrical performances, Jennifer explains why assessment is what legitimizes creative learning and helps teachers clearly communicate what students have learned.

Together, they unpack learning progressions, rubrics, depth of knowledge, mastery learning, and the difference between learning activities and learning intentions. Jennifer also shares practical advice for using frameworks, AI, and professional learning communities to better align projects with curriculum and assessment.

This conversation is for educators who want to design engaging projects without losing sight of clear, meaningful evidence of learning.

About Jennifer Moroz

Jennifer Moroz is a BC educator who has taught kindergarten through grade eight and currently works as a resource teacher. She is passionate about helping educators implement best practices in assessment. Through her YouTube channel, The Assessment Syndicate, Jennifer shares frameworks, tools, and conversations to support teachers in their day-to-day practice.

In this episode, you’ll hear:
  • [00:03:17] How Jennifer discovered that “assessment pays for the party”
  • [00:07:55] The researchers and books that shape Jennifer’s assessment practice
  • [00:11:47] Why time and assessment literacy are major barriers for teachers
  • [00:13:35] Depth of Knowledge and cognitive rigor explained
  • [00:17:53] Applying assessment frameworks to an immigration podcast project
  • [00:20:10] How to reverse-engineer a project from the final learning goal
  • [00:23:57] Rubrics, learning ladders, and gradations of quality
  • [00:27:26] Why BC curricular competencies require unpacking
  • [00:31:44] The difference between a rubric and a learning progression
  • [00:37:50] Managing cross-curricular assessment across subjects
  • [00:40:13] Why learning intentions matter more than task completion
  • [00:43:16] What AI reveals about weak assessment design
  • [00:47:04] Using AI to support learning progressions
  • [00:49:23] How schools can build shared assessment language through PLCs
  • [00:50:27] Where to find Jennifer’s resources and connect with her
Resources discussed in this episode:
Rubrics and Learning Progressions by Jennifer Moroz
Contact Classmate: 
Contact Jennifer Moroz:

Creators and Guests

Host
Dylan Ismail
Dylan Ismail is the host of Imagine This and an Educational Technology Coach with Classmate, a Vancouver based team that helps people in schools succeed with technology through fun, collaborative learning experiences.
Guest
Jennifer Moroz
Jennifer Moroz is a BC educator who has taught kindergarten through grade eight and currently works as a resource teacher.

What is Imagine This - Ideas & Stories for Creative, Meaningful Teaching?

Imagine This is a podcast about what’s possible in classrooms.

Each episode features conversations with teachers who are building meaningful, creative (and sometimes boldly real-world) projects — the kind that help students create work that matters beyond school. From documentary field trips and immersive role-playing games to student-made podcasts and more, we explore ideas that make learning feel alive.

Hosted by Dylan from Classmate — a team that partners with educators to co-create fun, collaborative learning experiences — the show blends reflection and storytelling. Some stories come from classrooms we collaborate in; others come from schools and educators we meet along the way. Each episode includes a teacher interview alongside reflection from the Classmate team on what worked, what surprised us, and what we’re still learning.

This show is for K–12 educators (and really anyone who cares about learning) who want school to feel more meaningful, more imaginative, and more real.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:00:01] If you're not creating a meaningful sequence of learning intentions, and you don't have a rubric that measures gradations of quality, and you miss that alignment of the tasks we're asking students to take on with your performance assessment and the expected cognitive depth of the standard, it's really difficult to come up with any kind of reasonable assessment.

Dylan Ismail: [00:00:32] Welcome to Imagine This, a podcast about what's possible in classrooms. I'm Dillan Ismail and I'm an edtech coach at Classmate, a team that helps people in schools succeed with technology. One of the ways that we help educators succeed with technology is through co-designing creative cross-curricular learning experiences, rich with assessment opportunities. And that last part matters because here's a tension that comes up in a lot of the work that we do. We're building rich multi-subject projects. Students are engaged. Real work is happening. You've even heard about it in previous episodes. We're making documentaries at the Vancouver Aquarium, recording soundscapes at the local parks, and even bringing role playing games into the classroom. But when it comes time to evaluate what students have actually learned, or maybe even defend the project to administration, or maybe even a parent, there's often no framework to stand on. So the question becomes, how do you design something creative and accessible? How do you know before you even start what you're going to be looking for? That's what this episode is about.

Dylan Ismail: [00:01:34] I'm sitting down with BC educator Jennifer Moroz to talk about using assessment frameworks that make Cross-curricular projects worth doing. We get into learning progressions, the difference between learning activities and learning intentions, deconstructing the curriculum, and the researchers who have shaped Jenn's approach to this work. Part of this problem is the curriculum. The BC curriculum is full of potential, but decoding it and pulling out the specific competencies a project is actually hitting, then building a progression or scaffolding for students to move along, that's a skill that most teachers were not explicitly taught. Jennifer Moroz is a BC educator who has taught kindergarten to grade eight and is currently working as a resource teacher. She is passionate about sharing frameworks to help educators implement best practices in assessment. Her YouTube channel, The Assessment Syndicate, is dedicated to supporting fellow educators in their day to day practice. Thank you for being on the show, Jen.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:02:36] You are so welcome, Dylan. Pleased to be here.

Dylan Ismail: [00:02:39] How are you?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:02:40] I'm in the middle of report cards, but this is a welcome diversion, so thank you.

Dylan Ismail: [00:02:44] I know for everyone who's listening, when someone says they're in the middle of report cards and then they do something else, that means that's pretty important, right?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:02:52] This is what I'm saying. I'm just. I'm really pleased. Yeah. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Dylan Ismail: [00:02:57] Yeah, I really much appreciate it. So I found your work through this passion of yours for sharing frameworks. And I've had the pleasure in the past of picking your brain when it comes to adding assessments and making some of our projects more useful to teachers. How did you come across this work and when did you discover your passion for assessment?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:03:17] I'm going to be very honest with you. I started my career with the desire to make learning as fun as possible for me, as well as for the kids, and I have this passion for theater. So early on in my career, I had or I staged with my students, this is grade four through six, multiple theatrical performances, and it was all to do with bringing history to life. Through that process, I realized something very critical, and that's something I'd like to share with everybody. That assessment pays for the party. So I had to go through, I'd say about five years of putting on dinner theaters and all kinds of different performances to meet curricular outcomes, I had to legitimize and prove that the funding that I was receiving, the grants that I received were all, like I said, legitimate and based in curriculum, the delivery of curriculum, and that I could reasonably assess the learning outcomes and I could reasonably provide communication of student learning within these broad projects, because projects are broad, deliberately because they're supposed to be, they're supposed to be cross curricular. But the level of contextualization is huge. It's a huge job that is often not done for us. In fact, it's never done for us, And it's not something that we necessarily learn in teacher training. So it's something that you figure out, oh, if I want funding for this dinner theater, for the costumes, for the music, if I need to hire these dance instructors, I'm going to actually have to prove that what I'm doing is valid learning, and assessment pays for the party. It does just that.

Dylan Ismail: [00:05:15] Yeah. So we were talking about this before we started recording. Assessment is the thing that allows you to do these creative projects and like say to everybody, it's worth it. It's worth it to do this.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:05:26] It absolutely is. Yes, absolutely.

Dylan Ismail: [00:05:29] You even said that assessment isn't sexy, but it's not.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:05:33] It isn't. And in fact, I've likened it to. And again, this doesn't help, by the way, I might add, but I've likened it to it's the long game. In other words, it's a little bit every day. It's like, wow, I'm going to Mexico next year. I'm going to start now with my exercise and my regimen. And people tend not to love it, but it's the easy answer. That's what's unfortunate is it's the simplest answer, I should say, but it requires a lot of sort of front end loading and it's a long game.

Dylan Ismail: [00:06:08] You're building on your previous successes. You're iterating on it. You're kind of like making it part of your practice and it takes a while. I totally resonate with this because part of my job as an Ed tech coach is to help people embrace some of this, some of these technologies, like Chromebooks or iPads, taking pictures, using video, these things. And a lot of the time the learning curve for those things is quite steep, especially for the students when you want them to complete a certain project that they're working on, perhaps a podcast, perhaps a documentary. And so adding assessment there as the like, if you try this and you have a framework for assessing the work that the students are doing, you might end up on the other side with a better product.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:06:56] I would also submit, though, that your platform is much more fun and much more engaging if people are just gobsmacked by, well, people, including me, are incredibly gobsmacked by your skill set, and it's sort of what everyone wants to do. I would just, I always caution people just based on my own experience. Go for it. This is good. This is important for students to learn, but let's qualify it properly. And there are a few ways we can do that.

Dylan Ismail: [00:07:25] So it feels like we're both sort of trying to legitimize each other. I'm trying to legitimize these creative projects that we're working on. You're trying to legitimize the creative projects through your own assessment.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:07:35] Yeah. And your job is I would, I again, would submit is much easier than mine, but that's okay. That's why we have to keep plugging away.

Dylan Ismail: [00:07:42] Yeah. That's why we're talking. So we can help, we can help everybody. So we're talking about frameworks. We're talking about assessments for frameworks. What are the frameworks that you use in your practice and the ones that you like to share with other educators?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:07:55] So an important distinction I should make is that although I'm invited to provide pro D, I'm very pleased to do that, it's not my expertise I'm sharing. I'm sharing the expertise of researchers and authors who are critical or whose work is critical for educators to read, and I really need to get across that I think there's a tremendous disconnect between practitioners, the gap between practitioners on the ground like I am, and researchers and authors. And it's not a deliberate disconnect, but I think it's something that we have to acknowledge, that we have to read, we have to be scholars on our own and study and implement these best practices because we know what they are and they're published. So if I could offer a few recommendations and they are the books that I base any learning progressions that I develop or rubrics I've learned from the best. The first one I would recommend and I need everyone to read is Implementing Mastery Learning by Tom Gusky. He's basically mastery learning rather than the progenitor of competency based learning. So we have a lot of new terms for things that are not new, they've just been repackaged a million times with a zillion different presenters. But really it's the progenitor is mastery learning and it's personalized instruction, differentiated instruction. It's all of those things. And the book is very, very good about going through evidence from recent implementation efforts, results of most current research. So that's very important. The second book that I would definitely recommend in reference a lot is Karen Hess, her book? We're going to link these.

Dylan Ismail: [00:09:50] Yeah, they'll be in the show notes for the episode.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:09:52] Yeah. Using depth of knowledge. And that's going to be her work that is crucial. She's a lead researcher and author, and she's developed the Hess Cognitive rigor matrix. And she takes Bloom's taxonomy verbs and sort of delineates them across D, okay, one, two, three, and four. So it's a lot of technical, it sounds like technical terms, but I think because we don't learn them in teacher education necessarily, it's really important to educate ourselves so that we can effectively unpack these standards that we're talking about.

Dylan Ismail: [00:10:26] So what I'm hearing is that you have a couple of these authors who are. One of them you said is the progenitor. So it came before the BC curriculum. And that language you're using to sort of help translate what's in the BC curriculum, which is specific to where we teach.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:10:43] Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think again, as a practitioner, it's something I learned the hard way as I learned on my own. And the curriculum as it stands is not going to tell you what your sequence of instruction should look like. And it doesn't tell you necessarily what the cognitive rigor is that's expected of these learning goals. You have to do it. And so to do that, you need frameworks. So I recommend the depth of knowledge framework that Karen Hess writes about. And I highly recommend Tom Gorski's work in terms of developing learning progressions. Actually, both of them are pretty fabulous. And so I can talk a little bit about why that's important for cross-curricular learning.

Dylan Ismail: [00:11:26] Before we get into that, I have to ask you one other question. So you've spoken with other teachers about this kind of thing. When you get into this idea of translating the curriculum for their own progressions and like how they want to go about teaching that year. What do you hear from teachers about the big things that they're struggling with?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:11:47] The barriers, yeah, there's some barriers for sure. There are barriers. I think the biggest barrier is time, which is why I offer free samples that are editable and that teachers can use and edit from exemplars. It's time, but it's also education. I think that we and I'm speaking for myself, I mean, I was in teacher training a million years ago, and I did not learn about necessarily about what Bloom's taxonomy was or if I did, it was in passing and it wasn't how to implement it appropriately in the classroom to leverage my assessment. Like not even remotely. I think a lot of us are just surviving, and when we go for projects, we want kids to be engaged. This is huge. But if we don't have the frameworks and the tools to really leverage that engagement to some quality assessment, I think we're missing a big chunk.

Dylan Ismail: [00:12:48] Yeah. And like, I'll just add to that. I see when we help teachers with these larger projects, they take up a lot of class time. You're working on them for long periods of time. And so if you spend three weeks on a project and you haven't planned out your assessments, it feels like maybe you've just wasted three weeks.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:13:07] Absolutely. That's why I was saying that assessment, it pays for the party and it legitimizes what your classroom time and the time that you're spending. Absolutely. That is a good way of saying that.

Dylan Ismail: [00:13:21] I want to get into what that looked like in the classroom. But before we do that, can we talk about blooms and DOK1, two, three and four. So for people who maybe haven't heard of Bloom's taxonomy, can you give us a little definition of what that is?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:13:35] Well, the way that I would approach, I always go with the work of Norman Webb, which is depth of knowledge, which never was intended initially as an assessment tool, but it was intended as an alignment tool. So in other words, we have to align test questions or assessment performance assessment questions to intended cognitive rigor. In other words, if you are assessing students and you're trying to align it with a standard, it's really necessary to know what is the cognitive rigor expected and are my questions or are my requests of the students aligned to that? Am I asking for more? Are my activities eliciting less than what the standard demands? So the simplest way to do this, and I'm going to simplify it big time, is to look at DOK one as knowledge acquisition. So it's usually what teachers refer to as the 'content'. I think another issue in BC is that it's not clear necessarily with our existing curriculum, what the cognitive rigor is aligned to any kind of measurable framework. So it's we've got some content on one side and we've got some learning standards on the other. But how do we put those together to delineate or even just find the progression of increasing cognitive complexity? So that's an issue already.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:15:12] But DOK one essentially is the recall reproduction. It is knowledge acquisition. So we're looking at terms, memorizing terms, remembering what they mean, maybe making a timeline like filling in the blanks. Basic operations in math. So that's DOK one. DOK two is application of that acquisition. So it's anything where you are summarizing, you're explaining your thinking, you're starting to make connections. Okay. So that's knowledge application. Again, I'm breezing over this. That's why I ask you to read those books because they're excellent. DOK three is knowledge analysis. So there's going to be aspects of analysis where you are evaluating a product, for example for how well it did a job. In science, you are evaluating your hypothesis or you are evaluating where your scientific process may have gone wrong. Or you might be testing products in ADST for how well your cub car, how fast your cub car went, and what changes you could make to it. So that is a natural progression already there that requires direct instruction at each level. And that is not a clear framework in our BC curriculum. It's not clear. So it requires us to understand that before we start to develop success criteria and performance evaluations.

Dylan Ismail: [00:16:44] Yeah. Because when we look at things in the curriculum, we have curricular competencies that are written with very specific words. But those words don't tell us, like you said, the rigor or like what level we're working at. Sometimes I've gone through and I've like, I've seen words that sometimes match up. Like in social studies, there's analyzing ideas and communicating findings and decisions. And so I can look at this and say, that's DOK three, but how do I get there? How do I get to DOK three?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:17:13] Oh, I love it. I love it, and that's why it's so important. Again, Karen Hess' work is so crucial. It's so critical because she took a Dorman webs or interpreted the work in terms of an educator's lens with how do I leverage then this for my instruction and assessment? And oh my goodness, it is so powerful because like you just said, you can now look at a standard and go, okay, I can reasonably decipher the fact that this is going to be an analysis. It's going to require analyzing or synthesizing of some sort, which is a higher level task than recalling and reproducing. So now I'm ready to go.

Dylan Ismail: [00:17:53] Yeah. So when it comes to these cross-curricular projects that we're working within, the example that you and I have worked on together is this idea of the student podcast. And we talked about this in a previous episode in grade five. One of the big ideas is immigration and multiculturalism in Canada. And the project that we've worked on with a bunch of teachers is a immigration podcast where the students are asked to interview somebody in their family or in their circle of people that they know who have immigrated to Canada. They conduct that interview. They ask them questions about push and pull factors, where they moved from, where they moved to. Kind of like the stresses of immigration to Canada. And then they take that interview and they translate it into a script for a podcast. So they're retelling the story of someone else's immigration. And this podcast has brought together, like so many different skills because there's all of the information and the content from social studies about immigration. So if I'm looking at the depth of knowledge, there's your acquisition, right?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:19:00] There's acquisition, there's. Yep. You got it.

Dylan Ismail: [00:19:02] And then we have the application of that information in the interview where they're taking those questions and they're applying it to an interview. And then from there, they're taking what they've got from that interview and they're synthesizing it into some sort of script. And that's where I'm looking at my notes here. They're evaluating the information and they're maybe turning it into something a little bit deeper. So that's sort of social studies and language arts.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:19:29] You totally have it. That was brilliant. Okay. That was so brilliant. Absolutely. And again, like we're summarizing for sure, but I just think that if I had to pull back a bit, the project that you're describing is so exciting. Like I'm, I just, I love it so much. I cannot tell you how much I love that and how deep that learning is. Can you imagine, though, if somebody dove into that and sort of waited until the end to try and assess it, and I'm not dissing anybody. I'm telling you, from my experience, I've made mistakes. Once that ball or the stone starts rolling down the hill, it's really hard to get back in front of it.

Dylan Ismail: [00:20:10] It really is.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:20:11] Real because kids will take off and they'll take off in different directions and some at much faster speeds than others. So what's really important, if I could just say three, three things, I just want to get this across to folks. Please use a framework before you do the following things. And the framework I recommend is DOK framework with Karen Hess's work and implementing Mastery Learning with Tom Gorski's work, where he describes the three steps when you're unwrapping the standard. Okay, this is what you're doing first. Okay. Number one, you're going to clearly define the final learning goal. You have to develop a clear picture of the competent student who has mastered the unit concepts and skills and is able to appropriately communicate or demonstrate what was learned. So when you have to reverse engineer, you need to know what does the clear picture of the competent student looks like first. Okay, that's number one. You have to do that. And that sometimes is done in concert with other teachers. When we're looking at that standard, what does competency look like? What does proficiency look like? And we don't have those step performance standards right now in BC Ed. So we have to actually develop them. We just have language. We have emerging, developing, proficient, and extending. So now we have to delineate that. Number two. So that was number one. What's proficient? What does the proficient learner look like to analyze the final learning goal or standard to identify the steps needed to reach the goal or achieve the standard? Many teachers refer to this as unpacking the goal or standard. Now we need to identify steps and you will resonate with that because you teach technology and how to use it and how to implement it. Steps are super duper important and are very good.

Dylan Ismail: [00:22:10] Yes.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:22:11] Are so clear when you're talking about that, where it's so specific, don't ask somebody to jump into podcasting if they don't have some fundamentals.

Dylan Ismail: [00:22:22] So is this scaffolding? Is this what we're talking about?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:22:27] Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it's actually common sense when it comes in a way. Right. It's common sense when it comes to teaching. But that's developing the final learning goal or defining the final learning goal. Clear picture of the competent learner. So you have to know what you're aiming for. Okay. You're analyzing the standard to determine the steps. Okay. So now we know the steps. What are the steps? Now last you're going to determine the optimal order of the steps. So it typically involves deciding on the most meaningful sequence of instructional activities to facilitate that learning. So you're providing essentially regular progress toward mastery. So what you're doing in. That's why with a learning progression, I always go for the top. I look at the top and I have the standard listed at the top or standards or competency. I know I use those interchangeably, but then underneath I imagine it as the unpacking or the unrolling, and it goes in steps. And it's so important to articulate those steps because those are going to be your checkpoints for understanding. Right. And to be very clear on what are the checkpoints, that's your formative assessment. And summative will be when the steps are sort of complete, that's when you're using a rubric.

Dylan Ismail: [00:23:57] Okay. I have one of these rubrics that we've sort of, I shouldn't say we collaborated on you graciously created for us.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:24:05] And you said, yes, I'll take it.

Dylan Ismail: [00:24:07] And I said, yes, I'll take that. Yes, please. No. That's awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna just read out what this rubric has and then you can tell me, like if let's connect all the dots here. This is for perspectives in grade five. Constructing narratives within the social studies curriculum. For grade five, we have taken stakeholders' perspectives on issues, developments, or events by making inferences about their beliefs, values and motivations, Canadian governance and institutions. So this is in the content area. We're talking about immigration and multiculturalism. So the stakeholder in this project is the person they're interviewing. And they're trying to understand their perspective and think about the issues and the events that made their immigration happen. That's what we're working with. Right? So then we have a couple of skills that have been written out. One of them is gathering evidence to make inferences about perspectives, and the other one is exploring diverse perspectives through the interview that they're conducting. And let's take a look at what proficient looks like. So for gathering evidence to make inferences about perspectives, proficient looks like the student is able to collect information from a primary and secondary source to construct narratives that capture attitudes, values, and worldviews with considerable effectiveness. And so what I'm seeing there is that you've taken the curricular competency, the constructing narratives. We've broken it down into this one step of gathering evidence to make inferences. And then you've described what it looks like when that happens successfully, which is that they are able to collect that information and construct the narrative.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:25:53] Right? And so really, what I'm assuming is, and that's the rubric. Is that correct?

Dylan Ismail: [00:26:00] Yes.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:26:00] Okay. So typically with rubrics there are gradations of quality. So it's the summative. So what I'm assuming is in the latter what it's going to do is break that down even further so that kids develop the capacity to be able to do that. Because we talked about students who may not even necessarily know what a perspective is, do you know what I mean? Like, what is the perspective and how would they differ? Which would be a DOK two, how would my perspective differ from somebody who lived 100 years ago? What were world events that were happening? That's depth of knowledge two, and then we're getting into three with any kind of analysis.

Dylan Ismail: [00:26:39] Mhm. Okay. Man, this is amazing because I totally skipped over the latter, but now I have it up in front of me and you've basically just written off or you've read off what's on here. Yeah.

Speaker 3: [00:26:51] Oh, yay! I'm so happy.

Dylan Ismail: [00:26:52] Okay, good. So you have, like you said, knowledge acquisition is defining the terms, perspective, motivation, primary and secondary sources. So there's our knowledge acquisition. So that's what you're talking about at the beginning.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:27:04] Absolutely yes.

Dylan Ismail: [00:27:05] You need.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:27:06] That first.

Dylan Ismail: [00:27:06] Yeah. Yeah. The application and you've written here like the assessment of this is the gradations of quality. And so at this level we have, I can use primary and secondary sources to analyze the perspective and motivations of a historical figure or of an immigrant. So that's what you're talking about. That's the jump up there.

Speaker 3: [00:27:26] Yeah.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:27:26] That would be the jump up because we first have to know what primary and secondary sources are, how to take notes from those. And that again, is just recalling, reproducing, but then using it for something, especially if it's analyzing someone's perspective, that's going to be a DOK 2 or 3. Here's something I should have mentioned at the very beginning of this podcast, and I'm sorry I didn't. A big important thing that I'm about to say. All of our BC curricular competencies are DOK 2 or 3, all of them. So there are no DOK one curricular competencies. And there's a reason for that. It's because DOK one is not aligned with the standard, but it's crucial and critical to building capacity toward that standard. And actually you just hit on it. You said it perfectly that you can't jump in with analysis. Like when I look at that social studies standard, that requires a lot of unpacking. Are you kidding? Like that's tons. That's weeks of a unit, right? And kids would have to practice first with, with even differentiating between a primary and secondary source. That's a DOK1, but it's not necessarily visible within the curriculum. It doesn't say to you, first teach this, then teach this, then build the capacity to DOK three it's not there.

Dylan Ismail: [00:28:49] It assumes right. It assumes that like if you're going to do this, primary and secondary sources, you need to define those things.

Speaker 3: [00:28:57] Yeah.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:28:57] Yeah you do. And again our competencies and this is another critical point. Our DOK two or DOK three aligned, meaning that they require unpacking and they require knowledge acquisition in order to create capacity to be able to assess those properly.

Dylan Ismail: [00:29:17] Yeah. As you say that, I'm kind of reflecting on the other parts of this project. At the beginning of the project, we play a podcast for the class and we talk about what makes a good podcast and what a podcast sounds like, identifying the parts of a podcast. And what I'm realizing is that the first activity is really just defining the parts of a podcast. But I really think it would be helpful to do it a second time later on when we start thinking about putting together their own podcast scripts.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:29:51] I actually love what you just said because essentially what you're doing is one of the crucial steps, the critical steps of what does a proficient podcast sound like? Like what makes it good? And that actually is essentially one of the critical steps, right? What does proficient look like?

Dylan Ismail: [00:30:09] When we've done that in the past, we get things from the students, like they hear things about what a podcast sounds like. But some of those things are like, well, the person spoke clearly, they didn't stumble over their words. The recording sounded really good. There was background music. One of the things too, we hear there's like a beginning intro, there's a middle interview, there's an ending outro. So they're identifying those parts. I think what we're lacking as we're talking through this together, I think what we're lacking is like later on, it would be really great for them to listen to that podcast and listen for the content that they're hearing, not just the structure.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:30:47] Yeah, totally. The quality. What makes something better quality than something else? And that actually is a really good way of teaching the difference between a learning progression or a ladder. Some people call them rubrics. So the latter would be the ingredients in the meal. And rubric is going to be the meal itself, how good the meal is. But the ingredients have to come first.

Dylan Ismail: [00:31:12] Right? I think I've heard you make this analogy before. So the latter is like what happens in the kitchen?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:31:18] Yeah, it's the ingredients and the order in which the ingredients have to happen. And it's important to structure those and where the cognitive complexity increases. So not everything is going to be as difficult to achieve on the bottom of the ladder as at the top. But when you have all those ingredients together, now you've got a meal and that's what your rubric is judging is the final product, the summative product, right?

Dylan Ismail: [00:31:44] How helpful is it for students to see the rubric?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:31:49] I'll be honest again with you. So the rubric is the summative piece. And I used to, I've made the mistake of having that as my end product and sharing it with the students. And I think it's actually very important because you are with the students, you can even co-create it. What does proficient look like? What does excellence look like? And actually this is formative assessment 101. Show students what excellence looks like. First. That's crucial. That's critical. But one mistake I've made is in doing that and saying this is what proficient looks like. This is what we're all aiming for. This is or this is excellent. However, I'm not delineating steps and making sure I'm scaffolding properly. And that was the piece that I missed was the latter. I missed that, and I used to just try and kind of go just on my own capacity and go, okay, well, I think I know what comes next, but it's too easy to miss steps and to have students miss steps and then not know why the final product is subpar.

Dylan Ismail: [00:32:55] That's really interesting. And I imagine that if you don't have that ladder and you're in the classroom and you're trying to guess where every student is, your cognitive load is probably through the roof, right? Because you're trying to keep all of that in your head instead of just having a checklist for everyone to work off of.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:33:13] And that's sort of why it brings us back to what we were talking about with the front end loading. You have to have this ahead of time. And I know that's painful, but it's worth it. It's best bang for your buck because what you're doing now, if you have your ladder in your rubric ahead of time and buy ahead of time, I mean, before you start the project, what you've got is you've got a pathway to proficiency already, you've got checkpoints and you can always change them on the way. That's fine. But you are now going to catch everything as you go so that you're not waiting until the end, and then trying to find some way to qualify it or quantify it into a performance evaluation. I've seen teachers do that. I've gotten lots of phone calls as an assessment coach for years. I had multiple phone calls from teachers saying, I've got to write report cards. We did all these great projects and things, but I'm not sure how to qualify it within our report card language. I want teachers to avoid that at all costs.

Dylan Ismail: [00:34:16] That mind frame of being the teacher at the end and trying to look back at the project like it's so stressful because the evidence is, I mean, more or less gone. Like you're not with the students anymore. Anything that you've written down might lose context after the fact.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:34:33] It totally does. It's not recommended at all. But I might add to that, that if we look at any principles of summative and formative assessment, that's why these books are so crucial to read and to implement these structures to your practice.

Dylan Ismail: [00:34:50] This is also reminding me the latter is reminding me of another thing I heard. I can't remember who it was where they talked about having these successions for students put in front of them, so that when they look at the bottom of the ladder, If some of those things are already done, there's like momentum. I know what perspective is, I know what motivation is, and they can just start higher up the ladder than the very bottom one.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:35:14] Absolutely. And I also really loved Larry Ainsworth's work is excellent. And that was quoted heavily by Karen Haas, which again is why I love her book. But I just can't get the title of the book perfectly right now. So we're just going to make sure we link it below. I've just got it on my Kindle. But what he had said is that any time you develop a ladder or a learning progression, whatever you want to call it, what you have to do as a teacher then is the impetus. It's on you to align your daily instruction with it. So in other words, we're not instructing to the wrong, to the wrong level all the time or keeping things super simple when kids are ready to move forward. I've done that a million times to where they're just, please, can you just not anymore? Can we just move on? But it also really gives you a nice sequence of instruction, and I think teachers don't use learning progressions enough because they don't realize it actually lightens your load in the long term. Right? The front end loading is going to lighten the cognitive load as you move through a project.

Dylan Ismail: [00:36:25] This is reminding me of the structure of a day when you say how your instruction is happening within your classroom. If you have a bunch of students who understand these terms like we're in the knowledge acquisition and that's already been done, like, why are we doing a lesson on what a secondary and primary source are?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:36:43] Absolutely. And then that's where you're, of course, your RTI comes in. If there's students who aren't understanding it or whatever, that's where they get the extra support. You can start to sort of differentiate your instruction. And that's super, super important. And that's something I should have mentioned as well is any kind of learning progression will sort of be an anchor for differentiation as well.

Dylan Ismail: [00:37:05] Yeah, it's so clear. I mean, I know this is hard for listeners because we're talking about this document that's sitting in front of me, but you can pull it up from the show notes. I'll put it in there. Yeah. All of this is, you know, when we talk about it and we kind of align it with a project that's already happened, in my mind, it seems really clear what next steps are, because I know what it looked like when we didn't have this. And so I can think about what it's going to look like when we do have this. We're talking specifically about social studies competencies. How does a teacher manage all of the different content areas that they're teaching in with a project like this? Like we have ELA skills, we have ADST skills. When do I put one depth of knowledge learning progression in front of another one?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:37:50] No that's true. That's actually a very good question. I think our BC competencies are intentionally broad. And so that you can work cross-curricular. Here's something that's actually been created recently. And I think I shared this with you, possibly the learning pathways. So I would use those, I would recommend those right in the BC curriculum on the web page, they're called learning pathways and they're called cross-curricular numeracy I think in numeracy and ELA. So it already is combining disciplines essentially or aligning disciplines with learning or with learning intentions. So that is on the BC Ministry website. They're called learning pathways. The foundational learning pathways are more specific for foundational skill sets the K to four. But past 5 to 12 it's actually considered cross-curricular learning. And so those would be a great place to start. And then from there break them down into DOK levels. And again, the way that you can do that is I again recommend books, read the books. But AI is a very handy tool. It's so handy if you ask if really, honestly, if you use chat prompts and it has to be a good quality level of chat because they make mistakes. It makes mistakes.

Dylan Ismail: [00:39:18] Well, this is why you have to read the books, right? You have to be able to.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:39:21] Do you actually have to understand? I agree and audit your work. But that lifts the heavy load too. You put in 3 or 4 sort of competency outcomes that are quite broad into chat and say, could you develop me learning sequences like three learning sequences, one for the social studies, one for science, one for ELA. It's not that you have to teach them all separately. But you know what though? It's a good bang for your buck. If you are going to assess all three of those and you're assessing them separately, essentially right within the same project. I think it's pretty good to have them at least aligned in parallel and use chat. Chat's great. Honestly it's great.

Dylan Ismail: [00:40:05] So what I'm hearing is you would were creating learning ladders across the three areas. So ADST, ELA, social studies.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:40:13] That's me. That's me. That's how I would do it. The difficulty that you run into a bit. I mean, you don't have to. You could group them together and just use project language. But the problem with that is sometimes it's not specific and measurable enough. In other words, the learning objectives like the I cans become a little bit too projecty. I'll give you an example. I can complete my mapping project with excellent coloring. And you know, like I've seen those, I can complete my mapping project with all correct labels or whatever. I'm just throwing out an example and that there's no DOK aligned with that. For example, that's just a doc one. And a lot of people don't realize that just because something takes a huge amount of time doesn't mean it's a higher order level of thinking, and it's not necessarily aligned with the curriculum. Like it doesn't matter if it took forever, it's still just DOK one. So I see a lot of that language. It's more based on task completion or finishing a project item. I just think it's really important to contextualize the project and leave that as the big picture into learning intentions and be specific about the learning intention. And that's another reason ladders are great because it separates learning intentions, which are what we're actually assessing, right? For mastery from learning activities. Activity is great. The activities are important for developing proficiency, but the learning intention is what you're assessing. And you cripple yourself when you're only using language for learning activities because there's no intention. There's not a specific intention there. A learning activity would be something like yours. Well, I might not use a podcast example, but a learning activity would be something like, you know, created a game with a partner to do with fractions or whatever, like a fractions checkerboard game or something like that. But it's not specific in terms of what were the learning intentions, what were you demonstrating by creating that board game with a partner, with a peer?

Dylan Ismail: [00:42:30] So that would be like, like the activity is here's what we did. Yes. But the intention is here's why we did it.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:42:38] What I'm trying to assess your capacity and by doing the activity. And so when you're too heavily into focusing on not focusing on the activity, but grading the activity, and that's where you get teachers too, who make mistakes like I have, where they look at the activity and go, oh, I love this board game. It's so great. Boy, it's about a social studies concept. It just looks fantastic. That looks like an A, but you don't necessarily have a reasonable way of assessing understanding. Do you know what I mean? The understanding behind it. And so that's why delineating it is a pain in the butt. But I'm telling you, it's a good bang for your buck.

Dylan Ismail: [00:43:16] I'm connecting this to another idea. So if you're only assessing the learning activity and your learning activity is not broken down into these, uh, this learning ladder, this is the same thing as maybe we've designed an activity that could be completed by, say, an AI chatbot and you get.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:43:40] The nail right on the head.

Dylan Ismail: [00:43:41] You get a result that matches the learning activity exactly what you asked. Right. So for this board game, maybe it's like you've completely coded an online game that has to do with fractions, right? But I haven't seen any of the steps going along, and I haven't been able to assess any of those steps. Right. So we're kind of in a world where the learning activity is not enough because of the ways that we can create things now.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:44:08] I totally agree, and that's actually a big conversation in BC as well, is that it's exposed some of our issues. It's exposed some of the issues with assessment. That is a massive issue in assessment that if I can do something with AI or chat or just get the answers, it's not assessing my ability to compare and contrast, to analyze. It doesn't assess that. And that's why it's so important more than ever, now that we are very transparent with what the learning intention is and as best we can, aligning our activities to learning intentions that are measurable.

Dylan Ismail: [00:44:51] Okay, so I want to come back to this idea of these separate learning progressions. So we have our social studies, we have our ELA, our ADST. The very least at the very top of the ones that I'm looking at, there's the, I guess this is like DOK three, which is examine and explain with evidence. And what we have written down here is I can explain how my interview questions illuminated historical perspectives and motivations. And that's like, if you can do that, you validate all the skills that are below it, right?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:45:22] That's a great way of saying it. Yeah.

Dylan Ismail: [00:45:24] This is like the reflection on the learning. So how does that sort of, how does that fit into all of this? How does reflection fit into all of this?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:45:33] Oh, well, reflection is super important because it does elicit skills of analysis. It's looking back and analyzing how effective my method. If it wasn't effective, how can I change it? That buy in and of itself requires the lower, not the lower skill sets, but the supporting or scaffolding skill sets. And that's why again, I would just say, if there's any message people take from this is to learn what DOK is and to apply it to unpacking BC standards, because otherwise you are left with some guesswork. And if you're not creating a meaningful sequence of learning intentions, and you don't have a rubric that measures gradations of quality, and you miss that alignment of the tasks we're asking students to take on with your performance assessment and the expected cognitive depth of the standard, it's really difficult to come up with any kind of reasonable assessment. And I think some of us are, you know,t we're doing our best. With the lack of performance standards in B.C., we're all doing our best. But I think if we can use research, proven frameworks like depth of knowledge, Karen has cognitive rigor matrix, we can use those tools. It's to our advantage.

Dylan Ismail: [00:47:04] This is where you're talking about the use of AI. I'm going to try and weave a little pattern here. So if we read those books that you've mentioned about depth of knowledge, and we look at the BC curriculum, and we have this framework of DOK one, two, three, and four, something that someone could do is they could take one of the curricular competencies from the curriculum. They could prompt an AI chatbot to say, using this depth of knowledge framework, create a sequence of I can statements that are broken down into knowledge acquisition knowledge, application, and knowledge analysis, and you could come up with something pretty quickly.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:47:47] You could. Absolutely. And it would require your eyes on it to, like you said, to audit that.

Dylan Ismail: [00:47:54] Yeah. Read the book. That's why I said read first.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:47:57] Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's a really good way of going about this, because it does reduce the amount of the weight of the work. And then you can just do some editing. And you know what? Ai is a way forward, there's no question, but it requires a learned eye. And that's why, you know, with students, yeah, they can find information no problem. That's why a poster is not necessarily a great summative assessment for science. Like people can cut and paste stuff onto a poster. That's not necessarily saying that you have used any measure of analysis, hypothesizing, you know, any kind of connection. You have made connections in the scientific process or between ideas necessarily. So DOK1 is very easily managed by AI.

Dylan Ismail: [00:48:48] Yeah. I mean, that's what it's good at is, these are called large language models. They take information and they just repackage it in the way that they're asked to do it. So they're doing recall really well because they can recall anything and everything.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:49:03] I know. It's the human touch in the synthesis, in the synthesizing of information. Yeah, I think so.

Dylan Ismail: [00:49:10] I just want to zoom out a little bit. When we are talking about this, we're talking from the perspective of one teacher in a classroom. Are there any structures within a school that can change to better support this type of assessment?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:49:23] Actually, one of the recommendations in implementing mastery learning and in Karen Haas book as well, is to develop a common language in assessment performance assessments through your PLC. So professional learning communities. So if you have any PLC time with the staff, that's one way that you can do that is to get together as a group and say, okay, what are our objectives here? What does success look like? What does proficient look like in social studies, science, at whatever grade level it is really important.

Dylan Ismail: [00:50:00] So the big thing is like community doing it together.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:50:03] Yep. That's what's recommended. Yep.

Dylan Ismail: [00:50:06] This has been fantastic. You are obviously quite busy because you do have a full time job as a resource teacher, and you do have some great interviews with other educators on your YouTube channel. What can people look for if they're looking for getting some of the things that you've put together? What should they look and what can they get from you?

Jennifer Moroz: [00:50:27] Youtube is a great place to start. I'm currently having my free website as well updated. That's going to take a little bit of time getting a little help with that, but you is good because it's got a link to my website, Jennmo.org, where things are free as well. And I think we're linking my email address below. Folks can reach out with questions or, you know, if they want a Zoom call or whatever it is to take a look at possible pro D or just supporting groups of teachers, which is my passion and what I love to do.

Dylan Ismail: [00:51:04] That's great. I mean, I found your work through the way that you share things online. So this is proof that the internet works to connect people. Yeah. Part of the thing that I love about this is that we've talked a bunch of times and we've actually never met in person, but I'm like, I'm excited. One day it will happen, one day it will happen. We'll be at a conference together or.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:51:25] This would be a great conference. By the way.

Dylan Ismail: [00:51:29] Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Jenn.

Jennifer Moroz: [00:51:31] You're so welcome. Have a great day. Dylan.

Dylan Ismail: [00:51:37] You can find Imagine This on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite Podcatcher. Don't forget to follow the show so you'll get new episodes delivered right to you every second Tuesday. If you like this episode, let us know. Leave a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It really helps the show grow. You can check out our show notes for links to the learning progressions and rubrics we discussed in this episode. And we'll also have links to Jenn's YouTube channel, The Assessment Syndicate, and to the books she recommends educators read to better understand mastery learning, depth of knowledge and decoding the BC curriculum. If you have a project that you think could use a fresh injection of creativity, you should let us know on Instagram at classmate.team. You can also reach out to Jennifer for assessment tips at jenwillteach.assess@gmail.com. Thanks for listening.