Search Learning Targets

New standards-based learning (SBL) educators will often ask on social media,

“I’m new to SBL, does anyone have samples of standards/learning targets for 7th grade Math (or another subject/grade level)?  I’d love to see what other people are using in their classrooms.”   

Typically a few community members will kindly share their knowledge and/or materials.  Educators are typically generous with their expertise.

This got us to thinking about TeacherEase.  It’s full of great educator-created SBL content: learning targets, grading scales, report card templates, etc.  It could greatly benefit our users to browse other districts’ information, and learn from other educators.  In the long run, there’s an opportunity for TeacherEase to become a very useful database of SBL resources -- almost like Pinterest for SBL.  We ran queries on our database, and there are many subject/grade level combinations with hundreds of courses with custom-developed learning targets.

Since we’re accustomed to holding sensitive data protected by law, Common Goal has a strong privacy/security culture.  We would never disclose confidential data (like student data, personal information, academic records, etc), that’s a complete non-starter for any “community” product.  So any new functionality would need to meet our high data protection standards, and share only non-private data.

We do believe that considerable SBL district- or school-level content is *NOT* private and could reasonably be shared among customers for their benefit.  This includes learning targets, grading scales, and report card templates.  This information is already widely shared within school communities.  It’s posted in classrooms, printed on report cards and mailed home to families, hosted on the district website, and available within most parent portals.  Most educators don’t think of it as secret and needing protected.

So our first SBL search feature will be to browse and view learning targets.  The only targets available will be district- or school-level learning targets attached to courses.  This feature will launch in a week or two (look for a follow up news article).  Other non-private SBL content will follow later: grading scales, report card templates, and others.

Since people of good intent can disagree, we’re also implementing an opt-out mechanism.  If your district would rather NOT share its SBL content, feel free to turn off your “SBL Sharing Options” to remove your content from other users’ search results.  Since this feature won’t launch immediately, it gives districts time to remove your content before any user searches occur.

 School District Admin Main > Options > SBL Sharing