The Tikkun Project
Lesson
5
Evaluating Ideas with Criteria
Concept
A good idea only becomes a good plan once it's been tested, rigorously and specifically, against explicit criteria for impact, feasibility, and measurability.
Focus Question
Which of our ideas are most likely to successfully address the Critical Challenge?
Knowledge & Understanding Goals
Language, Strand A (Literacy Connections and Applications), A1 — Transferable Skills, Grade 4: Apply criteria to evaluate an idea and revise it based on that evaluation.
Mathematics, Financial Literacy Strand F, Grade 4: Identify appropriate ways to measure and represent the outcome of a plan or decision.
Thinking & Learning Skills
ATL — Thinking Skills: Applying multi-part criteria systematically; generating and testing modifications to improve an idea rather than simply accepting or rejecting it.
Learner Profile: Thinkers, Reflective.
Context
The unit's core evaluative routine designed to be reused every time a new candidate action needs testing, not just once. Formalizes the three Challenge Criteria into a repeatable process: impact, feasibility, measurement. This lesson should be revisited explicitly whenever a student's plan changes later in the unit.
Lesson Outline
SELECT THE ACTION(S) TO CONSIDER AND REVIEW THE CRITERIA
Students choose the action they want to evaluate and review the three Challenge Criteria: greatest possible positive impact; feasible to implement; impact can be measured.
Draw the candidate action at the head of a fish diagram (right side), with three main bones labelled Impact, Feasibility, and Measurability. Under each bone, students add sub-bones — specific pieces of evidence, considerations, or concerns that bear on that criterion: under Impact, how well the action meets the criteria built from Rambam's Ladder (adequate support, dignity of the receiver, root-cause work); under Feasibility, whether the class has the resources, time, understanding, and organizational support to do this; under Measurability, what could actually be tracked to know if it worked (e.g., number of meals served, families registered, volunteer hours).
Where students are evaluating more than one candidate action, build one fishbone per action and set them side by side.
REVISE AND RANK THE LIST OF POTENTIAL ACTIONS
After the fishbone analysis, students re-assess their ongoing list of potential actions on the Ranking Ladder, now annotated with the specific evidence surfaced under each bone.
Notes for Teaching and Evaluation
Fishbone (Ishikawa) Diagram: repurposing the three main bones to represent the three Challenge Criteria (rather than a straight causes-of-a-problem diagram) keeps all three criteria visible at once, so students can see how they interact — a change that thickens the Impact bone (e.g., turning a one-time soup-kitchen shift into an ongoing recruitment campaign) often adds a new sub-bone of risk to the Feasibility bone at the same time. A visibly thin or empty bone is an immediate, visual signal of exactly where an idea is weakest — which is precisely what students need to see to propose a targeted modification, rather than a vague "make it better." When comparing actions side by side, the diagram with the fullest, best-supported set of bones across all three criteria is the strongest candidate for the plan.