Beyond Final Products: How Cañon City is Making Learning Visible

Challenges:

Cañon City High School runs exceptional capstone and CTE programs— programs which have been growing and flourishing for over 10 years.  But even exceptional programs face challenges.  

In early 2023, Cañon City found that:

• As an individual student level, much of their program focused on the product at the end (think: what they achieved at their community partner, or what they made in their CTE program), as opposed to what they learned along the way (think: how to communicate in a professional environment, or how to self-learn new joinery techniques).
• As a result, students would often jam all their work into the last week before their capstone presentation…
• At scale, it was difficult for teachers to keep up-to-date with the doings and learnings of all their students as they worked on their own (or in small groups) in the school or out in the community
• At the program level, it was an uphill effort to demonstrate the efficacy of the learning; the skills focused on were rarely covered by the state testing program.

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Goals:

Broadly, Cañon City wanted to address the above challenges by improving student-driven documentation of learning. 

Specifically, they were looking for a student-centered approach which would:

• Track learning on a weekly basis.
• Give students agency over both formative and summative documentation of progress and process.
• Tie student learning to their Portrait of a Graduate and ICAP competencies.

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Implementation:

In the fall of 2024, Cañon City implemented Unrulr across their capstone advisories and work-based learning programs:

• Teachers created individual groups for their capstone advisories, where students posted weekly progress and process reflections.
• Prompts helped guide students and keep them on track.
• Students tagged multimedia posts with COGS (Concepts, Outcomes, Goals, Skills) tied to the school’s Portrait of a Graduate traits & skills and ICAP quality indicators.
• Graded posts were uploaded to the school’s LMS, while semester-end Journeys showcased student growth, capstone fieldwork, career aspirations, and internship experiences.

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Outcomes, by the numbers:

In the fall of 2024 students created:

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Outcomes, in their words

In the pursuit of a quality ICAP Portfolio, Unrulr is accessible, easily implemented, and endures beyond High School. It’s not teacher directed— it’s student authentic.

- Bill Summers, Principal

Unrulr is a way to capture learning more authentically. At Cañon City, it’s all about the process of learning, rather than the end product.

- Madison Tortessi, Teacher Trainer

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The Story, through COGS

An hour southwest of Colorado Springs, Cañon City High School serves a rural community of 970 students; 13% receive special education services, 50% qualify for free or reduced lunch, and 23% identify as minorities.

Let’s see what Cañon City’s most frequently tagged COGS can tell us about their work.

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ICAP’s 8 Quality Indicators

Top COG tagged: Self-awareness

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The ICAP’s 8 Quality Indicators set comes from the Colorado Department of Education.  ICAP (Individual Career and Academic Plan) is Colorado’s initiative to help get students ready for life after school.  Most states have something similar, but probably acronymed different :)

Guidelines for implementing ICAP are fairly loose, and schools have leeway in how they want to tackle it.  So how did Cañon City need to change their curriculum to incorporate ICAP?  Well, turns out they didn’t really need to change much.  Cañon City has, for a long time, focused on helping students develop workforce and 21st century skills, and built some incredible programs around that (and we’ll get to those in a second). And, for them, implementing ICAP was more about tracking the work they were already doing, rather than creating a program from scratch.

Self-awareness was tagged more than twice as much as the next-most tagged ICAP standard.  Which means that, hm, Cañon City students are especially in touch with who they are?

Jokes aside, most of the ICAP standards are fairly specific (e.g. Personal Financial Literacy, Academic Planning, Postsecondary Aspirations).  And Self-awareness is a thread that weaves between much of the work that ICAP promotes – I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that if you know yourself better, you can plan for the future better!  But tagging that particular Self-awareness COG shows that the Cañon City students themselves are cognizant of that, which is an awesome skill to leave high school with.

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Traits & Skills

Top COGS tagged:

1. Innovation & Solution Seeking
2. Tenacity & Reflection

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Traits & Skills is Cañon City’s homegrown framework.  The framework has developed alongside their curriculum, which is heavily geared towards career-connected education.  Their three biggest programs are:

• Work-based internships, through local business partners
• Capstones: an individual or group passion project
• Industry standard certifications, through their in-school CTE program

Both capstones and work-based internships are graduation requirements, while certifications are opt-in, and in the 2023-2024 school year the Cañon City student population (970 students): 

• Earned 430 certifications
• Completed 150 internships

These programs aren’t just bolted-on to a standard high school curriculum.  They are central to the Cañon City experience. Whether they are out in the community working with a non-profit or working in the automotive shop, student projects are largely self-driven. Innovation and Solution Seeking are natural fits for that kind of learning, along with Tenacity.  And Reflection is particularly relevant for the work-based internships:

Whether students love or hate the internship experience, they recognize that they have gained valuable information about a career choice long before spending time and resources training for it.

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The Challenges They Faced

Even though Cañon City’s programs are lauded as wildly successful by a variety of sources, the team, like the star educators they are, continually look for ways to improve.  Bill Summers, principal since 2016, proposed a broad challenge in 2023: build a robust system of documentation to back the already-excellent learning happening. 

Specifically, they wanted to build a system which did a better job of:

1. Capturing Evidence of Learning: The school needed a multimedia-driven system to document skills and competencies over time, rather than relying solely on Colorado’s traditional testing metrics. 
2. Empowering Students: They wanted to give students more ownership of their learning and documentation, enabling them to reflect on their growth and take pride in their work.
3. Chronological Accountability: The school wanted students to document progress throughout long-term projects, rather than rushing to compile reflections at the end.
4. State Compliance: With the firm belief that they were already doing the work, the school wanted to directly tie the existing learning to state programs like ICAP (Individual Career and Academic Plan), which required comprehensive records of internships, career plans, and skills development.
5. Legitimizing Non-Traditional Education: The school sought to highlight the value of its innovative offerings; to celebrate with community members familiar with their programs, and to educate other parties intrigued by their successes.

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Why Cañon City Chose Unrulr

Cañon City found its answer in Unrulr, a platform designed to make learning visible and foster a culture of documentation and reflection. Principal Bill Summers and teacher trainer Madison Tortessi saw the potential of the tool.

They were particularly drawn to Unrulr’s unique combination of features:

• Student-Friendly Design: Content creation patterns mirror social media, flattening the learning curve (for teachers too!).
• Built in accountability: The chronological dating of posts and visibility of progress encourages a consistent progression of work..
• Cross-Class Collaboration: The community centered design allows students and teachers to learn and celebrate with each other
• Presentation Friendly: The media-rich documentation sets students up for success with their summative exhibitions.
• Future-Focused Portfolios: Cañon City partnered with Unrulr to shape its upcoming portfolio feature, ensuring it meets their vision for an end-product that showcases student growth.

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A Phased Implementation

It wasn’t clear from everything else we’ve talked about, Cañon City is savvy.  Rather than implementing Unrulr schoolwide from the start, Cañon City adopted a phased approach. They broke down their implementation into three phases:

• Phase 1: Focus on the senior projects program, training a select group of teachers and advisors.
• Phase 2: Expand usage organically as teachers and students became trainers themselves, helping to spread the culture of documentation and reflection.
• Phase 3: Scale into additional subjects like art and math, driven by organic interest and proven success.

A general aversion to change is a well documented phenomenon in schools (and there are lots of good reasons for it!). Principal Summers and Mrs. Tortessi picked their initial set of teachers based on their enthusiasm for improving the system and their relationships with the rest of the Cañon City staff.  Change management is hard, and they nailed it!

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The Impact of Unrulr

Unrulr has transformed how Cañon City documents and celebrates learning, leading to impactful outcomes:

• Evidence of Competencies: Traits & skills such as innovation, collaboration, leadership, and communication are now documented with multimedia-rich posts.
• State Compliance: The platform supports ICAP requirements, legitimizing internships, work-based learning, and other non-traditional programs.
• Student Empowerment: Students chronicle their journeys in real-time, creating meaningful artifacts of learning they can carry forward post-graduation.
• Accountability and Transparency: Dated posts ensure students work consistently throughout the semester, providing proof of sustained effort.
• Data-Driven Advocacy: Principal Summers uses Unrulr data to show—not just tell—the state what’s happening at Cañon City, which helps garner support for exemptions from testing requirements.

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What’s Next?

Cañon City is already exploring ways to extend Unrulr into the middle school, creating a culture of documentation and reflection across grade levels. Looking ahead, the school is excited about involving community mentors in the platform, fostering deeper connections between students and the real world.

Cañon City’s story is a testament to what’s possible when schools embrace innovation.  The school has been doing amazing work for years.  But by partnering with Unrulr, they’ve not only documented learning, but further legitimized and celebrated it, helping every student’s journey be visible, meaningful, and impactful.

Interested in seeing how Unrulr can work for your school? 

Book a demo today and join the movement toward visible, student-driven learning!