The strategic plan for the use of rubrics in competency-based education at Parish Episcopal School (Dallas, TX) was completed as a requirement for the Educational Technology course 6223, Strategic Planning through the University of Arkansas’s program in Educational Technology. The scope of the project was determined in conjunction with the administration, Academic Dean, and on-staff educational technology specialist at Parish Episcopal School. The K-12 institution is currently in the middle of transitioning between standards-based education and competency-based education. The administration recognized that such a transition required the use of rubrics for all courses in all grades, something currently not practiced. The goal of the strategic plan was to determine the best practices for the creation and application of rubrics in the classroom, as well as the potential learning management systems available for connecting these rubrics to gradebooks.

Through the creation and circulation of a Google survey, I identified the vast range of ways that teachers at Parish use, format, and score rubrics. This survey was followed up with many small group discussions and one-on-one interviews with teachers and administration. Using these interviews as well as current scholarship on appropriate and advantageous uses of rubrics, the strategic plan proposed a rubric model that used a 60-100 point scale with minimal breaking points. This was a compromised solution between the wide range of scales used by teachers and the 1-4 scale advocated by scholarship and the administration. The strategic plan also identified the key features that teachers desired in the purchase of a new learning management system; the recognition of these features has resulted in the administration working with companies to design a personal system, specifically addressing Parish’s needs. The strategic plan also included an analysis of the overall budget, available facilities, and faculty development needs. Finally, the strategic plan established a timeline and means of evaluation for the two-year implementation of the rubrics at Parish.

The overall process of creating this strategic plan allowed me develop my skills in management, particularly in the management of and communication with multiple stakeholders. I learned about and executed many meetings of different sizes with participants in which we practiced various forms of brainstorming, prioritizing, and problem-solving. I also was exposed to evaluating budgetary needs, development opportunities, and current and available software.

The strategic plan was an important project both for myself and for Parish. Because of my analysis, particularly of teacher preferences, we designed a slower transition process in the integration of rubrics and in their scale. The overall process not only exposed me to new literature on the use of rubrics, but more importantly to the range of ways that teachers are creating and applying rubrics in their courses. Because of this project, I have redesigned a number of my own project rubrics to be more limited in point value, but more informative in expectations. Additionally, I was placed on the committee to evaluate rubric use at Parish Episcopal School and have begun evaluating my summative assessments in Latin to create rubrics that align with our competency-standards. Working in such a collaborative environments with a range of stakeholders was a hugely valuable experience for me; it exposed to a wide-range of organizing meetings and interviews, of creating timelines and evaluative tools, and of internal processes at Parish. I am planning to use the good reputation gained from this process to apply for summer research grant at Parish. Finally, the project also exposed to the significant number of learning Management Systems available. My previous experience in Higher Education had limited me to Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas, but this project introduced me to JumpRope, Schoology, and many more.