Understanding milestones

So far in our explanation of Compass’ curriculum design theory, we’ve got as far as defining trajectories: strands of student development which have starting and ending points defined according to their sophistication (through Bloom’s taxonomy) and complexity (through an adapted SOLO taxonomy known as STRIP).

Graduate attributes and programme goal statements might be perfectly sculpted ideals, but they’re also big, fluffy, and difficult for the practical teacher to pin down.  Our day-to-day, week-to-week teaching practices are small, concrete, and specific.  The trouble with even great curriculum designs is that there’s been no way to link the overall, fluffy goals with the discrete, contained, specific teaching practices.

In the previous article we drew a diagram with axes of Bloom’s taxonomy and the STRIP taxonomy, and used it to explain the idea of trajectories.  Now we add to that diagram and define milestones along those trajectories, as the yellow points in the diagram below.

The milestones have a location on the diagram, so are associated with their own levels of sophistication and complexity according to our taxonomies, giving us the ability to see how development or progression happens.  Babies go from nothing, to rocking on their hands, to crawling, to toddling, to walking, to running, and each of these steps works best when it is developed in the right order.  To understand something, you need knowledge about it.  In order to apply something, it’s best if you understand it first.  You get the idea.

The third dimension …

Milestones become more than just a point on the map when we use them to add a third dimension: practicality.  The first reason to use Bloom’s and STRIP to show trajectories and milestones is because they are handy ways for the programme planners to describe the stages of students’ development.  But in order for them to be truly practicable, their information must be shown to the teachers as well.  Milestones have two important pieces of information to share with teachers: coordinates and context.

• First, the coordinates of the milestone define – using the taxonomies – the kinds of activities (assessments, class work, etc) which will most help the students’ cognitive development at that point in time.  This is the equivalent of bouncing a crawling baby on their feet to strengthen their legs, so that later they can walk; there would be no point in encouraging them to leap hurdles while they’re still crawling, or to teach them to crawl when they can already run.  Milestones can thus help inform appropriate assessments and activities at their Bloom’s and STRIP coordinate levels.
• Milestones also contain notes from the programme planner to the teacher of the paper which give extra context, background, design notes, and explanations of the expectations which the programme has from that paper.  Where a paper serves as a milestone in multiple programmes (for example, engineering students from all nine engineering programmes share common maths classes), the paper’s teachers can then see better how to balance between everyone’s needs and expectations.

In the above diagram, the yellow dot on the mathematics trajectory has coordinates of application and multi-structural.  Of course, the teacher may interpret these as she or he chooses, but Compass also uses these coordinates to filter a database of assessment types which are categorised by their Bloom’s and STRIP levels. The assessments are linked in turn to appropriate learning activities, and both sets are linked to the access skills on which they depend.  These are explained in the next chapter, where we look at the three A’s of paper planning: Assessment, activities, and access skills and how they’re used to give practical help to teachers.