Nudging toward Inquiry. Digital Badges, Part 2

“Nudging toward Inquiry” offers practical strategies for amping up your instructional practice. This year, I fielded questions about inquiry-oriented practice and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

The April 2014 column summarized digital badging as digital offspring of scouting’s merit badges. This month, the discussion continues with guidelines for creating robust badge challenges.

So you’ve decided to try digital badging as an alternative or complement to formal grading. Now it’s time to design a badge. Consider the following questions.

Where will you create, host, and issue badges?

These sites are all OBI-compliant (Mozilla’s Open Badge Initiative): Forallbadges.com; http://makewav.es, a Moodle plug-in; and http://badg.us/. Each can host your challenges and students’ awarded badges. Beginning at age thirteen, students can create a Mozilla badge backpack (http://openbadges.org) into which they can port, sort, and mix badges earned at any OBI-compliant site.

What’s the goal?

Just as one would do in Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design methodology (2005), begin by asking what you want students to know or be able to do in terms of either hard or soft skills. Be specific, descriptive, and clear. Avoid vague wording like “demonstrated an appreciation for biography.” Instead, try, “The badge earner used multiple sources and appropriate citations to create a compelling biographical essay about an American president’s legacy that used evidence to support stated arguments.” This version provides stronger framing while effectively addressing several CCSS. Alternatively, you can separate each CCSS standard into a different badge. Note the avoidance of quantification (e.g., number of sources or citations, word count). Too much counting can accidentally imply limits instead of keeping the focus on caliber.

Badges should represent challenges. If a badge is too easily earned, such as receiving a badge for each book read or reading quiz taken, you will spend excessive time and badges will quickly lose their value to students. Additionally, avoid badging follow-the-leader activities. For example, imagine some students showing their colleagues, step-by-step, how to create an origami balloon. If none of the badge recipients can replicate the folds independently, an end-of-activity “origami balloon” badge is not awarded, because the badge rewards students for following directions, not doing origami.

How did the student show what she/he knew? What and where was the evidence?

In the preceding example, the essay is evidence of achievement, and many systems let you upload or link to it directly. For performed tasks such as monologues, the badging criteria might link to a video or podcast. Alternatively, you can list that the badge issuer observed the performance. A visitor to a student’s badge backpack can click on any badge to view the evidence.

What resources/instruction does the student need to fulfill the challenge?

Sometimes it is useful to identify online resources or face-to-face lessons that will help a student reflect skills necessary for the badge. This is helpful for online or blended learning experiences. As you create a badge, ask yourself:

• Does this badge represent a meaningful accomplishment?
• Does the badge articulate goals, expectations, and resources to the student and future viewers?
• Do students understand the badge’s potential value beyond this library and assignment?
• Could the student replicate this accomplishment independently?

Have fun, and drop me a line with your badging stories.