What are PBAT’s (performance-based assessment tasks)?
First, you’ll need some context. The difference between this school and other schools is that ours is something called “Outward Bound School,” meaning that the focus is shifted from standardized testing to more real-world challenges that’ll help students grow skills needed in the real world. Taking that into consideration, because we don’t have standardized testing, it’s instead replaced by PBAT’s, or performance-based assessment tasks. At the end of each main topic you’re learning in whatever subject, you and your class will be given a main overarching question that encompasses the entire topic you were learning. If it’s math, it’ll be a math problem, science, an experiment, and so on and so forth. The whole point of PBAT’s is to build up your ability to explain and present on a topic you’re knowledgeable about. You will be writing an essay for each topic and presenting it in something called “Roundtables.
What are roundtables?
Roundtables are a thing that occurs near the end of each school semester. After you’ve completed your PBAT and made a summarized presentation on it, you and your class will be divided into groups of mixed grades. You can be presenting to freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Seated in a group, you each go one by one presenting a PBAT, and then you grade them using the provided rubric. However, freshman and sophomore roundtables are just practice for the real deal: mastery passages.
What are mastery passages?
Mastery Passages are basically PBAT’s and roundtables if you multiplied the importance tenfold and replaced your fellow students with a board of teachers, directors, and other important school figures. And instead of sharing your presentation on a small school Chromebook, you do it on the big screen, overlooking your audience. Your audience is the table of important people deciding if you’re ready to pass or not. The difference is the leniency between the two. Your fellow classmates will be lenient with the questions and the grading, while the board of important people will not. They will be drilling you for questions; just make sure you know absolutely everything about your question. As every teacher would give advice, pretend you’re explaining it to a 5-year-old. Be as explicit and clear as possible. Any questions a 5-year-old might have, you should include them.
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