The use of school-wide rubrics has been part of a comprehensive shift in pedagogy at ConVal Regional High School to address three converging goals:

  1. To accurately differentiate between mastery of knowledge in a content area and patterns of behavior such as attendance, homework completion, or adherence to deadlines which previously had been subsumed under the academic grade.

  2. To promote the understanding that students should always connect subject-specific areas of knowledge with overarching skills such as problem-solving, speaking, collaboration, writing, or use of technology — skills that students must possess in all disciplines in order to be successful.

  3. To provide, across all subject areas, a common language around future-ready student skills and to increase consistency of expectations that are used to measure these skills.

Based on input from teachers, students, parents, business leaders, and community members, the rubrics were developed at Conval Regional High School during the 2013-14 school year by an interdisciplinary Professional Learning Community (PLC) and introduced in the fall of 2014. The school-wide rubrics are being revised and refined on an ongoing basis.

ConVal Regional High School uses a set of school-wide rubrics that are connected to the school's mission statement as well as the CARES language community commitments. The rubrics assess the following skills: