Course Report Revision

Reporting What Matters

Semper Reformada--St. Augustin...always reforming...

Beginning in Inquiry

What am I good at?What do I value?

What am I committed to?

Our students educational endeavor should begin and end in inquiry...

...or...

Who am I?Whose am I?

To what am I called to do?

With these kind of high level, whole person questions

we need to adopt a Reporting System, a Catholic values based system that adequately

expresses that whole person experience.

Our current system consists of an inventory of courses and of grades. This system encourages

a grade-centric education system and encourages departmentalization.

What we report and how we report it should be an expression of our most critical values.

Objectives

To communicate (each term) each student’s academic experience and achievement in a given course in a manner that focuses on MC’s academic values and our Catholic Mission.

Objectives

To communicate student academic experience and achievement as a developmental enterprise relative to defined, formal standards in regard to habits of scholarship, skills attainment and refinement, and content understanding.

Objectives

To communicate academic experience and achievement as a reflective endeavor where students use their own words and thoughts to express that experience.

Objectives

To ensure that teachers have clearly designed and published specific course outcomes regarding habits of scholarship, skills development and refinement, and content understanding that have been vetted by both department colleagues, the department chair, and the Assistant Principal for Curriculum and Instruction.

The new reporting system we are proposingwill consist of six components which represent

a more complete expression of the student experience.

Components•Attendance Record•Course Expectations•Student Self Evaluation•Teacher Student Evaluation•Final Course Grade•Christian Service Progress

AttendanceStudents presence in class matters. There is no making up a classroom experience. An emphasis on attendance makes clear the correlation between students presence and academic achievement.

Course Expectations

•Need to reflect “values” like habits of scholarship, effort, and engagement.

•Need to be concise, clear, and mission-driven.

•Need to be no more than five.

Student Self Evaluation

Students should give voice to their experience. This section of the course report would be the publication of a students reflection on what they did well, what they need to work on, and their basic evaluation of the course. Reflection is a critical step toward “knowing”.

Teacher Student Evaluation

Teachers write a brief narrative of the student’s achievement relative to the course expectations. These of course are values based course expectations.

Christian Service Progress

Everything we value should be on the report card.

Christian Service is applied Theology and should be prominently acknowledged on the same report as any other aspect of the student

growth experience.

Guiding Premise of this Proposal

Course Reports are the school’s primary formal communication of student achievement and student experience and therefore have significant influence on Marin Catholic’s culture. Course Reports profoundly influence student, parent, and teacher perceptions of our institutional priorities and how learning best occurs.

Guiding Premise of this Proposal

The academic and experiential information we report and how we report that information are  critical expressions of our values. Therefore, as a Catholic College Preparatory, our reporting system should be a more precise and faithful reflection of what we fundamentally value as a Catholic school and as Catholic educators.

A spiritual vision of education that is humanizing, a curriculum that educates for life for all.

--Thomas Groome

Catholic Education