There is nothing better than sitting with a coffee, two trusted colleagues, an idea for a project and a fine tuning protocol. As part of our Action Research Teams, we have been using the Design Thinking Process to design solutions to questions around formative assessment. In my project, I am going to use realsmart to write success criteria for our simulation and robotics project in Emerging Technology. In particular, I am going to reference these success criteria against the SOLO taxonomy, encouraging students to post evidence of their learning at different levels and, hopefully, demonstrate their learning journey. I will write up the project itself in a later post, but the process I want to share in this post is the fine tuning protocol we are using to help, well, fine tune, our projects.
I was first introduced to this protocol by my good friend Darren Mead who picked it up on his visit to High Tech High in San Diego. Here is my slightly adapted version. The timings of each section may need to be adapted, but they work well for me! For more information on the norms around critique have a look at the excellent infographic produced by another good friend; Martin Said.
Using this protocol really allowed my colleagues Kim and Neil to fine tune their projects into very powerful design ideas which should have real impact on learning.
As an aside, I have also used the protocol with my French students to hone their detailed study projects and I can see a real application in getting students to run these fine tuning sessions themselves in their projects.
