TRANSCRIPT: Welcome back to Messy Minutes: Assessment Edition! I’m your host, Shannon Schinkel, from the Embrace the Messy Podcast. Over the past three episodes, we’ve been hiking our way through the Hiking 101 standard. We started with backward design, unpacked the standard, and explored how to create task-neutral criteria. Today, we’re going to take those task-neutral criteria a step further by making them detailed and actionable: I Feel the Need, the Need for Detailed Criteria! ________________________________________ Here’s the Issue: In In the last episode, we designed criteria using some quality performance indicators. Here’s a recap.   • Level 1: Is beginning to apply strategies and tools for safety, pacing, and environmental awareness. • Level 2: Applies strategies and tools for safety, pacing, and environmental awareness with limited effectiveness. • Level 3: Applies strategies and tools for safety, pacing, and environmental awareness effectively. • Level 4: Demonstrates expert application of strategies and tools with thoughtful precision.   Now we need to address what the difference is between "limited effectiveness" and "effectively," or how "thoughtful precision" can feel too subjective. Using words like this can be an important first step—but they’re often geared only toward the teacher who wrote them and can feel ambiguous to others. Words like "adequate" or "proficient" help establish a baseline for understanding, but without further detail, they can leave too much room for interpretation and make it harder to communicate expectations clearly.   This is where clear and descriptive criteria come in. They provide measurable outcomes, creating a shared understanding of what performance looks like among educators. When criteria are well-defined, they give teachers a consistent framework for evaluating performance, even for more qualitative aspects. Professional judgment plays a critical role in this process, as it does in all professions, but anchoring it in established criteria ensures that it’s professional and evidence-based, not personal or arbitrary. This balance is essential for fostering fairness and ensuring meaningful assessments that reflect the complexities of learning.   So, detailed criteria solve this problem by painting a clear picture of what each level of performance looks like. They give teachers a solid foundation for consistent evaluations and informed decision-making.   Here’s the key takeaway: detailed doesn’t mean complicated. Think of detailed criteria as a roadmap—it needs to be clear, concise, and actionable, not overwhelming. With this approach, educators can bridge the gap between subjective language and measurable results, enabling reliable and professional assessments.   ________________________________________ Visualize This Scenario: So, we are back to our Hiking 101 course and have already revisited the standard, Apply appropriate strategies and tools to complete a hike, ensuring safety, pacing, and environmental awareness. Now we need to shift from concise descriptors to detailed descriptions of performance levels. So I am going to go through each of the four levels as I shared them in episode 3 – concise and then how now in episode 4 they can be written with more detail and I’ll also explain the changes made so you can visualize it.   Level 1   Concise (Episode 3): Is beginning to apply strategies and tools for safety, pacing, and environmental awareness.   Detailed (Episode 4): Is in the beginning stages of identifying and attempting to apply strategies and tools for safety, pacing, and environmental awareness, and is working towards demonstrating understanding and consistency.   Changes made: Additional qualifying language has been added. Beginning stages means “identifying and attempting to apply strategies and tools” and the outcome is they are “working towards demonstrating understanding.”   Level 2   Concise (Episode 3): Applies strategies and tools for safety, p