Messy Minutes Assessment Edition Special Proficiency Scale Series Episode 6: If You Build It, They Will Grow

The Embrace the Messy Podcast with Shannon Schinkel

TRANSCRIPT:

Opening:
Welcome back to Messy Minutes: Assessment Edition! I’m your host, Shannon Schinkel, from the Embrace the Messy Podcast. Over the past five episodes, we’ve journeyed through the art and science of building meaningful criteria. We’ve explored backward design, unpacked standards using Bloom’s taxonomy, created task-neutral criteria, refined them with quality language, added “This means that…” to ensure clarity for students and teachers alike, and made them first person so students see themselves in the assessment.

Now, in our final episode of this series, we’re looking at what comes next. We’ll explore how your criteria can drive meaningful learning experiences while empowering students to take ownership of their progress…because “If You Build It, They Will Grow!”
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Here’s the Issue:
We have beautiful criteria. Now what? Criteria aren’t just for you to assess students—they’re for teaching, self-assessment, portfolios, communication and more! But it begins with this criteria. In speaking with educators’ things like retakes and redos, self-assessment, portfolio building and supporting students with disabilities have been difficult to manage. But guess what? The criteria you’ve built can now support you with all of these things! ________________________________________
Let’s Break It Down
1. Make Criteria the Heart of Teaching:
Criteria are not just an endpoint—they form the foundation for planning, instruction, and assessment.
o Design intentional tasks: Learning tasks should align directly with the skills and understandings outlined in the criteria. This ensures that students engage in activities that build toward proficiency rather than just completing unrelated tasks.
o Let go or refabricate old tasks: Move away from activities that no longer serve the criteria. Redesign tasks to focus on developing skills and understandings that align with the criteria, ensuring every task has purpose and relevance.
o Repurpose old rubrics and checklists: While these tools may no longer be central to assessment, they can support students in organizing their work and meeting task-specific expectations. However, they should not override the broader purpose of teaching to the criteria.
o Emphasize skill-building over task completion: Shift the focus from completing assignments to developing and refining skills over time.
2. Feedback That Moves Learning Forward:
Clear criteria simplify feedback, making it specific, actionable, and focused on growth.
o Align feedback with criteria: Because the criteria are clear, strengths and areas for improvement often emerge directly from the criteria itself. This clarity ensures that feedback is targeted, meaningful, and easy for students to understand.
o Celebrate progress and identify next steps: Feedback should both affirm accomplishments and highlight specific areas for continued growth, helping students focus on actionable steps to improve.
o Incorporate feedback into learning: Feedback should not be a one-time event but an ongoing process that supports students as they refine their understanding and skills over time.
3. Support Students with Disabilities and Diverse Needs:
Criteria create clear grade-level expectations while providing opportunities to meet students where they are by designing “windows” that guide them toward the criteria.
o Illuminate and celebrate every level: Meeting students “where they are” does not mean pushing them to the next level immediately. Instead, it means creating pathways that highlight and celebrate their current level of achievement.
o Design windows to the criteria: Windows are more than scaffolding; they provide accessible steps leading up to the criteria, allowing students to see the connections between where they are and where they can go.
o Tailor next steps purposefully: Supporting students’ progress could mean helping a pre-level 1 student build foundational skills to reach level 1, assisting a level 3 student to move to level 4, or ensuring a level 4 student maintains their mastery.
o Build confidence through recognition: By celebrating every level, students gain the confidence to embrace their learning journey.
4. Empower Students Through Self-Assessment:
Clear criteria and “This means that” statements give students the confidence to reflect on their learning in meaningful ways.
o Clarity builds confidence: The “This means that” statements provide students with a clear understanding of what the criteria look like in action, helping them accurately reflect on their progress.
o Self-assessment supports reflection, not control: Self-assessment doesn’t mean students are in charge of determining their level, but it does allow them to speak confidently about their strengths, areas for improvement, and next steps.
o Foster ownership of learning: By guiding students through self-assessment, you help them take an active role in understanding their progress and identifying their goals, without feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of grading themselves.
5. Celebrate the Learning Process:
Criteria should shift the focus from outcomes to the journey of learning, encouraging students to value progress and persistence.
o Highlight growth over time: Use criteria to show students how their skills and understandings have developed, emphasizing that learning happens in steps.
o Create a culture of achievement: Build a classroom environment where progress is celebrated at every stage, ensuring students feel supported and motivated as they advance through the criteria.
6. Be Culturally Responsive and Triangulate Evidence:
Incorporate multiple perspectives and diverse ways of demonstrating learning while ensuring evidence of learning is gathered holistically.
o Respect cultural contexts: Recognize that students may approach learning and demonstrate understanding differently depending on their cultural backgrounds. Design criteria that allow for flexibility in how students show what they know.
o Gather evidence in multiple ways: Use a variety of sources—observations, conversations, and products—to assess learning. This triangulation ensures a fuller picture of student progress and reduces reliance on a single method or task.
o Value all contributions: Include opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding through oral storytelling, collaborative discussions, visual representations, or other culturally relevant modes of expression.
7. Use Standards as New Categories in Your Electronic or Paper Grade Book:
With the shift to criteria-based assessment, standards become the new organizational structure for tracking student progress.
o Focus on evidence of learning for each standard: Instead of categorizing performance by task types (like homework, projects, or tests), track how students demonstrate their understanding and skills for each standard.
o Leverage professional judgment: Use the mode, most recent evidence, and your professional judgment to determine a student’s overall proficiency level for each standard.
o Determine course-level proficiency: These standard-specific proficiency levels become the foundation for determining overall grades or proficiency levels at report card time. This approach shifts the narrative from task completion to meaningful evidence of learning.

Closing:
You’ve spent time crafting criteria that truly matter. Criteria that illuminate the path forward for your students, celebrate every step of their progress, and demand that we, as educators, rise to the challenge of meeting them where they are. But let me remind you of something critically important: criteria aren’t just tools; they’re a promise.
They’re a promise to your students that learning is not about the grade at the top of the paper, the points on a test, or the boxes checked on a rubric. It’s about growth, discovery, and transformation. It’s about building confidence in students who’ve been told they’re “not enough,” while challenging those who’ve always heard they’re “already there.” It’s about making sure every learner sees themselves in your classroom and understands that their success isn’t tied to a one-size-fits-all system—it’s tied to their journey, their persistence, and their unique potential.
This isn’t easy work. It’s messy, it’s uncomfortable, and at times, it’s downright exhausting. But this is the work that changes lives. This is the work that creates a legacy far beyond the classroom walls.
So, as you close the grade book, pause for a moment. Ask yourself: Did I use these criteria to empower students? Did I create windows for them to see their own brilliance, and ladders for them to climb higher? Did I make learning feel possible, valuable, and worthy for every single student?
Because at the end of the day, criteria aren’t just what we use to assess our students—they’re what we use to define who we are as educators. They hold us accountable to a higher standard, to the belief that every student, no matter where they start, deserves to feel seen, celebrated, and capable of reaching heights they never imagined.
This is your moment. Own it. Lead with it. And let your criteria do what they were always meant to do: not just measure learning, but transform it.
Thank for listening to this Special Proficiency Scale Series. If this series has been meaningful to you, like it and share it with other educators.
This is my last episode of the Embrace the Messy Podcast. It has been such a pleasure creating the Messy Minutes Assessment Edition and interviewing people for the Embrace the Messy Podcast. I’ve decide to focus my energy on my Beyond Report Cards Facebook group, teaching, and my work as an assessment lead in my school district. Like Rose said to Jack at the end of Titanic, “I’ll never let go…” Take care everyone.
This is Shannon Schinkel signing off and telling you to embrace the messy!

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Find out more about Shannon Schinkel:

https://linktr.ee/ShannonSchinkel