A Pre-Kindergarten - Grade 12 co-educational independent day school in Westchester County, New York

Dr. Eric Carbaugh Leads Faculty Professional Development on Designing Authentic Performance Tasks

On the dedicated professional development day on December 2, Rye Country Day welcomed Dr. Eric Carbaugh of McTighe & Associates to lead faculty through working sessions on designing authentic performance tasks. RCDS is in the second year of a five-year exploration of Competency-Based Learning (CBL), a set of research-based pedagogical practices that help students to develop transferable skills along with content knowledge.

Performance tasks are defined as “learning activities or assessments that ask students to construct a multi-faceted response, create a product, or produce a demonstration,” and they provide students with opportunities to demonstrate their learning through rigorous, meaningful, and authentic work.

During their sessions with Dr. Carbaugh, faculty reflected on how to conceptualize and define rigor and worked through the steps of designing performance tasks for their varied disciplines and how performance tasks can provide students with new pathways to demonstrate mastery. The professional development sessions also explored the topic of transfer goals, or the skills that teachers want students to leverage when they confront new information, issues, challenges, and opportunities across disciplines.

Dr. Carbaugh is an award-winning professor in the Department of Middle, Secondary, and Mathematics Education at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA, where he instructs both undergraduate and graduate courses. As an educational consultant, he has worked with teachers and leaders at over 100 schools and districts on a variety of topics related to curriculum, instruction, and assessment. 

Thank you, Dr. Carbaugh!

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