WIT 2003

Creating certifications for your curriculum

Certifications, like driver's licenses, provide learners with certain rights and responsibilities, and like driver's licenses, are earned through demonstration of a specific set of abilities. Use them to assess your students' developing skills, in a way that will feel naturally related to their interests. In this lesson, you will create a certification for your students.

How certifications work
Elements of a certification
Designing certifications

Certifications in the Passion Curriculum WIT section (includes a rubric for certifications)

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How certifications work

Certifications play two important roles in your curriculum. They allow you to assess your students' skills, and they provide an important kind of motivation -- they reward your students for the toughest work in your curriculum, using a reward related to the interest. Certifications are very much like the Merit Badges earned in Boy and Girl Scouting in that they assess a particular set of skills. By completing a certification, a student earns a title, a set of rights, and a set of responsibilities. Passion curricula usually offer a number of different certifications, each designed to address a specific category of activities and learning objectives.

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What are the elements of a certification?

Each certification structure includes a set of skills to be demonstrated, a clearly defined standard for each skill, and a “completion package” – the title, rights, and responsibilities that students earn upon completion of the certification.

• Skill sets and standards
  The skill set for any certification is organized to constitute a meaningful achievement in the domain of the theme. If a student can demonstrate this entire set of abilities, the student is ready for the rights and responsibilities that accompany the new title in the completion package. Any or every skill in a set can be phrased to require academic learning objectives, in addition to those skills that match the title explicitly. For example, the Camera Operator certification (download) in the Video Crew curriculum requires students to write a professional letter, as well as to demonstrate their knowledge of the camera.

• Completion package
  The completion package consists of a title -- one that fits into the professional life associated with the theme (for authenticity’s sake) -- and a set of rights and responsibilities that make sense in the context of the demonstrated capacities. The rights associated with Video Crew certifications generally focus on unsupervised access to equipment or on creative independence (for example, certified staff writers are permitted to self-approve scripts for production). The responsibilities had to do with training novices, and with supporting other people's projects with their certified skills.

• Completing the certification
  You can let your students decide when they are ready to be certified, or you can give them a certain time to be tested. Some of the time, you might be able to test them informally -- just notice that they are now using a skill that counts for certification. Use a rubric to communicate with your students about how solid their skills need to be. There is no such thing as failure with certifications -- your students simply try again when they are ready. If they pass, create a ceremony at the culminating event, and give them something to demonstrate their new knowledge. In Video Crew, we used something like a driver's license to declare certification -- students could carry this card to show that they had access to certain rights.

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Designing a certification

You will probably want to create an alignment table before you get to this point, and you will definitely want to choose a theme. There are three elements to a certification: Skill set, standards, and completion package. We recommend you start backwards, with the completion package.

What professional titles go along with your theme? For example, in a passion curriculum about dinosaurs, titles might include curator, archeologist, expedition planner, professor. Any or all of these could be certifications. In Video Crew, titles included camera operator, screenwriter, pollster, and storyboarder. What rights will the students care about? You are looking for something that will feel like a reward, and at the same time, be very related to their interest and the identity that goes with the certification. (Click here for more about how this kind of motivation works]. What responsibilities do you need your students to have? For example, you need peer mentors in order to be able to let your students work on different things at the same time?

Which of the skills you have identified relate to each title? For example, if one of the skills in your dinosaur curriculum was identifying dinosaur bones, you might connect that with the archeologist certification. If one skill was writing, you might require anyone working on the archeologist ceritification to write a "funding proposal."

Create a certification sheet that includes a description of each skill and the standard by which it will be assessed (click here for an example from Video Crew).

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