Create COGS that reflect your culture and community.

What?

Start with COGS that are relevant, understood, and useful to get student buy-in and encourage posts.

You can jump-start the process by using your learning community’s pre-existing materials, such as:

Why?

When COGS reflect pre-existing community, cultural, and classroom values, it makes it easier for learners to self-assess by making it clear how to tie what they are documenting to bigger picture values and goals.

How?

  • Pull together any organizational materials on core values, portrait of a graduate, or DEIB. In addition, brainstorm any values unique to your classroom or learning community.

  • Before school starts, distill these values or competencies into COGS

  • Create the COGS Set in the Unrulr Admin Dashboard.

Lesson Plan

Brainstorm the skills, concepts, ideas, and themes important to your community

Option 1: Teacher-owned

Pull from existing materials and documents

  • Organization/school values 

  • Age relevant skills

  • Syllabus

Look ahead to the end of the course/year.  Ask yourself these key questions, or create your own, in order to identify the key skills particular to your groups:

  • When a learner leaves your class, you hope they’ll take away…

    • What learning targets did the students conquer today?

    • How did the students positively collaborate with peers today?

    • How did the students work with the instructor to better understand or further my learning?

    • How did the students’ effort affect their learning?

    • How did the students communicate this lesson? How did it affect their learning?

    • How did my students’ attitudes affect their learning?

    • How did today’s lesson connect to the overall curriculum?

  • At the end of the year...

    • Can my students explain key learning targets scaffolded throughout the year?

    • Can my students demonstrate key skills scaffolded throughout the year?

    • Did my students identify learning targets, key skills, and themes throughout the year they were learning and/or struggling with?

Tip: Creating too many COGS leads to the paradox of choice.  Unless your learners already know your values and skills intimately, try to limit your first pass to less than 8 COGS total, across all sets.

Option 2: Collaboratively with Students

Set context around what constitutes a key skill/value. One definition we like to use is ____

(Optional) Bring a set of values you’ve already gathered using the teacher-owned steps above

Run an ideation session with students, using one of the following exercises:

  • Learning Wall 

  • Traffic Light Feedback

    • Green: values and skills students value in a classroom

    • Yellow: values and skill students need to value more

    • Red: values and skills students do not value in the classroom

  • Affinity Mapping

Tip: Sometimes groups can struggle to come up with a common definition of culture.  “Trust” or “Compassion” can have multiple definitions.  If your group runs into this, try first defining goals using one or two sentences, and then work backwards to a one or two word definition.