Developing Standards for SBG II

As I mentioned in my last post, all of the chemistry teachers in our district recently got together to flesh out our standards as we move forward in our implementation of standards-based grading. Before we get to the goods, I want to clarify the specific terminology that we've been using, as defined by the district. Each class basically breaks down into three levels, starting with big ideas and narrowing down to more specific ideas.

Reporting Standards 

Reporting standards will appear in the gradebooks, and reflect a combination of priority standards (big picture). We based these on the MN state standards.  

Priority Standards

Priority standards are "absolutely essential for student success". These are a bit more specific, but still general enough that they can be assessed in a variety of ways, and will cover a variety of learning objectives. I'm thinking I may put these into my gradebook as well (or at least have some method of tracking them/having students track them). 

Learning Objectives 

Specific nuggets of information, tailored to individual or sets of lessons. These are set by each individual teacher (although each level should have similar ones) so they were not included in our work, even though they are expected to be used to further clarify the priority standards.

Now that we've got that aired out, here's what we came up with for our standards. These will be continuous for all levels of chemistry (conceptual, general, and HP/AP), with the thought that higher levels may add extras or go more in depth.

The first reporting standard (Nature of Science) will be a continuous thread throughout the entire year, and the others will be only in certain trimesters that we cover that particular standard (probably at least two others per tri). The district would also like us to map out exactly which standards (both reporting and priority) are being covered each trimester, so that theoretically a student could transfer from one HS to another within the district and be in basically the same area of the course... still not sure about that idea.

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, critiques, etc. are more than welcome!