High-Quality Work

Two Rivers looks for three attributes of high-quality work in alignment with EL Education’s dimensions of student achievement:

• Complexity: demonstrates higher-order thinking, multiple perspectives and transfer of understanding
• Craftsmanship: work that is accurate and beautiful in conception and execution
• Think critically: analyze, evaluate, and synthesize complex ideas and consider multiple perspectives
• Authenticity: demonstrates original thinking and voice, connects to real-world issues and formats, and when possible, is meaningful to the community beyond the school

What This Means at Two Rivers

Critical thinking and problem-solving skills are at the core of our curriculum at Two Rivers, and at the center of what students practice when they create high-quality work. To be effective critical thinkers, students need to be able to evaluate vast amounts of information and formulate well-reasoned claims. In addition, to develop strong problem-solving skills, students need to build the capacity to analyze situations, to devise strategies for solving problems, to implement those strategies, and then to evaluate both their solutions and their processes.

We have identified three components of critical thinking and problem solving.

How do you teach and assess critical thinking and problem solving?

At Two Rivers, we teach students to employ thinking routines as they are working through authentic, real-life tasks. To assess whether students are employing these skills in novel situations and contexts, we have designed short performance tasks that target each of our constructs of critical thinking and problem solving.

Examples of High-Quality Work

Explore examples of real-life high quality work from Two Rivers students!