(UPDATED) Crowd-sourcing your Standards Bank

NOTE: This article applies only to users of JumpRope's District Edition and is in reference to our updated interface as of Fall 2016.  Your school or district may use a different edition of JumpRope, in which case please search the help center or reach out to our support team to find relevant information.

In many cases, it makes sense to centrally manage standards in the bank to maintain consistency across grade levels, schools, and content areas (as well as from year to year).  In other situations, schools & districts may wish to allow teachers to create and edit standards in the bank, effectively crowd-sourcing the standards.

Before you proceed with a crowd-sourced bank, please consider the pros and cons:

Advantages to crowd-sourced standards bank:

1. Gives teachers more control of and flexibility with their curriculum and involves them in the planning process.
2. Requires less work on school and district administrators before teachers can effectively use the system and enter scores.
3. Allows for ongoing evolution of the standards without a central approval process

Challenges with a crowd-sourced standards bank:

1. Teachers must be trained on creating standards both technically and pedagogically.
2. It is likely that there will be significant inconsistency from teacher to teacher in terms of the formatting, specificity, quantity, and quality of the standards.  This is often not a big problem in the early stages of an implementation when mastery reports are typically organized by teacher & course, but it can present significant challenges when reporting across grade levels, academic years, content areas, and classrooms.
3. It is possible that teachers create duplicate standards (or very similar standards) by mistake or due to lack of communication.  The system will not recognize that the standards are the same even if they are very similar in wording, which will make cross-classroom reporting very difficult.
4. It may lead to an unsustainable number of standards either due to lack of curation or lack of coordination.  Partner schools that have chosen this strategy have often ended up with 3,000 standards or more in the bank; consider for a moment the practicality of scoring that many standards for a student over time!  It can also cause JumpRope to be slower and more confusing to use when you get to the high end (maximum 5,000 standards).

One successful compromise we have seen used very well is to establish a simple "submission and curation" process at your school or district.  Rather than allowing teachers to create their own standards off-the-cuff, consider a Google Form or similar that teachers must fill out with the details of their proposed standards.  Then, you can designate any number of administrators, coaches, grade team leaders, department heads, etc., to follow this quick process:

1. Perform a quality review of the standard and make or suggest any revisions
2. Proper classification by content area, grade level, and parent standard (if applicable) to improve consistency and reportability
3. Check for duplicates or similar standards.
4. If approved, enter the standard into the system via an administrative interface.

Okay, so you got this far.. how does it work already?

First, you must consult with JumpRope's support and implementation staff to make sure that the crowd-sourced bank is compatible with your existing setup.  Changing to this method may not be possible mid-year and may require an additional fee if a data migration is required.  Once everything is ready, our team will turn on this feature.

As a teacher that is contributing to the bank, first access the plan tab and select a course (if applicable).  Then, click on the Manage Course Standards button:

This will bring the usual popup that allows you to browse, search, and select standards to add to your course.  Before you create a new standard, make sure to check if it already exists by searching the standards that are already in the bank!

If you determine that you need to add a standard, click on Create a new __________ (the language here will differ based on the settings in your account).  Note that before you create a "child standard" (such as "Add or subtract by groups of 10" in the above screenshot) you may first need to create a "parent standard" (such as "NUMBERS AND OPERATIONS BASE TEN" in the above screenshot) if it doesn't already exist.

NOTE: As of October 2016, these steps are only fully supported in Chrome and Firefox.  Safari support is planned.

Creating a child standard has the following fields:

If you are create a parent standard, the fields are slightly different:

To edit an existing standard, locate the standard in the bank and click on the Edit button shown below.  Depending on your school's settings, you may or may not be able to edit standards that you did not create yourself.

Note that this process involves a popup window to JumpRope's updated interface.  Closing the popup should automatically trigger a refresh of the Plan tab to load the existing standards, but in some cases you may be required to refresh JumpRope entirely to see the latest changes (such as after deleting a standard).

As always, please contact JumpRope's support team if you have questions or feedback!