Why “backward” is best.
A very attached belief in teachers’ minds is the focus on textbooks activities, i.e. input, rather than output which shoud be our goal to reach. In other words, we focus on teaching rather than our students’ learning. This situation only describes the real scenario of a great number of teachers who spend hours thinking what content to teach, what exercises should be chosen to apply the grammar content in a certain unit, what to ask in order to elicit some feedback from students connected to the content of the unit, etc. Finally, we can conclude that the class is not only teacher centered, but also reflects a total neglection towards students.
The challenge of a backward design is to focus first on the desired learnings from which appropriate teaching will logically follow. Only by having specified the desired results we can focus on the content, methods, and activities most likely to achieve those results. On the one hand we have to let “the control” go, and on the other be sensitive and permeable to constraints we may face, our students characteristics and the kind of school we are working at, since they might shape the process but never put at risk the learning goal.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Criteria and Validity
Criteria and Validity
By what criteria should performance be judged and discriminated?
Where should we lookand what should we look for to judge performance success?
How should the different levels of quality, proficiency, or understanding be described and distinguished from one another?
Rubrics
There is an underestimated role of rubrics in the learning process, since we teachers do not make the most of them. Everyday pressures, namely, deadlines, administrative tasks, or simply routine, do not allow us to realize that rubrics are such an important tool for teachers as well as for students.
It is fundamental in the design of any rubric to know the group that is going to be assessed. There is no point in providing our students with a rubric in which the teacher intends to assess something the students are not able to fulfill.
As some of the characteristics of rubrics I can mention the following:
• They help teachers save time when assessing, since by using rubrics we know straight forward what to focus our attention.
• They make it clear for the students what we really want as teacher for a final product or during the process
• In this respect they can focus on what is important and leave what is not useful to acomplish the task
Holistic v/s analytic rubrics
We teachers normally tend to assign a single score for a whole assignment, yet it is not quite clear for the student to identify the nature of his/her score. Holistic rubrics lead students to misinterpretations, as they compare their results with their classmates’. Therefore, they might think that if the nature of their scores are the same if they happen to get the same mark.
Analytic rubrics, on the other hand, help students get a clear perspective of their performance. By making use of this kind of rubrics, we isolate traits which easier to mark for teachers and easy to undersatand for students.
By what criteria should performance be judged and discriminated?
Where should we lookand what should we look for to judge performance success?
How should the different levels of quality, proficiency, or understanding be described and distinguished from one another?
Rubrics
There is an underestimated role of rubrics in the learning process, since we teachers do not make the most of them. Everyday pressures, namely, deadlines, administrative tasks, or simply routine, do not allow us to realize that rubrics are such an important tool for teachers as well as for students.
It is fundamental in the design of any rubric to know the group that is going to be assessed. There is no point in providing our students with a rubric in which the teacher intends to assess something the students are not able to fulfill.
As some of the characteristics of rubrics I can mention the following:
• They help teachers save time when assessing, since by using rubrics we know straight forward what to focus our attention.
• They make it clear for the students what we really want as teacher for a final product or during the process
• In this respect they can focus on what is important and leave what is not useful to acomplish the task
Holistic v/s analytic rubrics
We teachers normally tend to assign a single score for a whole assignment, yet it is not quite clear for the student to identify the nature of his/her score. Holistic rubrics lead students to misinterpretations, as they compare their results with their classmates’. Therefore, they might think that if the nature of their scores are the same if they happen to get the same mark.
Analytic rubrics, on the other hand, help students get a clear perspective of their performance. By making use of this kind of rubrics, we isolate traits which easier to mark for teachers and easy to undersatand for students.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Thinking like an assessor
Thinking like an assessor...
Teachers spend a lot of time testing, evaluating and assessing students because of several reasons: sometimes to measure our students’s abilities to pass a course, to see how well they are doing in the semester, or simply to know how they are doing in a task during the class.
It is impressive how much we can take from assessment and how much we can make out of it. If we stop thinking about assessment as marking and start thinking about it as the most reliable proof of where we and our student are in the learning process, we would be a couple of steps forward in our way to lead our students to understanding. Lets’ not think about difficult- to- make things, for example an assessed homework or unit test (no matter the results) represent ideal learning opportunities, since they contain the information we need to start building from them meaningful tasks, activities, lessons,etc. These oportunities coul be wasted if we put the information gathered away and just continue with the next activity.
Designing around problems not just exercises...
Does the assessment require students to really “perform” wisely with knowledge and skill, in a problematic context of real issues, needs, constraints, and opportunities?
Definitely, there is no point in assessing our students through a task which does not emply a challenge at all. It would be a waste of time for us to assess, but mainly for the students who would get a good result in numbers (marks) but zero learning.
Students must be exposed to problems or situations in which they are challenged to decide and be responsable of what to do after cosidering a number of options.
Are we giving our students the tools to face problems and find the best way to deal with them? Are we helping them create an “English language storage box” in where they can go back to every time they face a communicative situation?
Teachers spend a lot of time testing, evaluating and assessing students because of several reasons: sometimes to measure our students’s abilities to pass a course, to see how well they are doing in the semester, or simply to know how they are doing in a task during the class.
It is impressive how much we can take from assessment and how much we can make out of it. If we stop thinking about assessment as marking and start thinking about it as the most reliable proof of where we and our student are in the learning process, we would be a couple of steps forward in our way to lead our students to understanding. Lets’ not think about difficult- to- make things, for example an assessed homework or unit test (no matter the results) represent ideal learning opportunities, since they contain the information we need to start building from them meaningful tasks, activities, lessons,etc. These oportunities coul be wasted if we put the information gathered away and just continue with the next activity.
Designing around problems not just exercises...
Does the assessment require students to really “perform” wisely with knowledge and skill, in a problematic context of real issues, needs, constraints, and opportunities?
Definitely, there is no point in assessing our students through a task which does not emply a challenge at all. It would be a waste of time for us to assess, but mainly for the students who would get a good result in numbers (marks) but zero learning.
Students must be exposed to problems or situations in which they are challenged to decide and be responsable of what to do after cosidering a number of options.
Are we giving our students the tools to face problems and find the best way to deal with them? Are we helping them create an “English language storage box” in where they can go back to every time they face a communicative situation?
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Gaining clarity on our goals
Gaining clarity on our goals...
By establishing goals we affect our class in its broadest sense, as they define the methodology with which we are going to work with, our disposition towards the group, the tools and strategies we need, the contents we select for our students to achieve the goals, etc.
When there’s no goal, there’s no perspective. Our teaching becomes a bunch of contents without any backbone. Even though we teach a great lesson it is not meaningful, as it cannot be conected to anything else. There is no sequence. It’s obvious for students when there’s no purpose behind a lesson.
“... Helping students to “learn how to learn” and “how to perform” is both a vital mission and a commonly overlooked one...”
Along with specifying where we want our students to get. We must provide the tools for them to accomplish this goal. No goal will be reached if it is not accompanied by a meaningful process. This idea has been a constant throughout the previous chapters, and even though it seems obvious, it is not quite so. We tend to assume our students will get to the point we expect them to, yet we don’t help them.
And what exactly is a big idea?
As a counter act, teachers are called to redeem ourselves by narrowing things down a bit. When planning and designing around goals we help our students indirectly by setting priorities. In this respect, it becomes fair to ask our students to reach the goals, since we go hand-in-hand in the process.
To sum up, let’s not blame our students on our lack of professional rigour. We are the biased part of the cycle, since our plannings are not carefully designed. Our students end up feeling lost and not knowing what to do, the outcome is not what expected and the learning process is definitely not achieved.
By establishing goals we affect our class in its broadest sense, as they define the methodology with which we are going to work with, our disposition towards the group, the tools and strategies we need, the contents we select for our students to achieve the goals, etc.
When there’s no goal, there’s no perspective. Our teaching becomes a bunch of contents without any backbone. Even though we teach a great lesson it is not meaningful, as it cannot be conected to anything else. There is no sequence. It’s obvious for students when there’s no purpose behind a lesson.
“... Helping students to “learn how to learn” and “how to perform” is both a vital mission and a commonly overlooked one...”
Along with specifying where we want our students to get. We must provide the tools for them to accomplish this goal. No goal will be reached if it is not accompanied by a meaningful process. This idea has been a constant throughout the previous chapters, and even though it seems obvious, it is not quite so. We tend to assume our students will get to the point we expect them to, yet we don’t help them.
And what exactly is a big idea?
As a counter act, teachers are called to redeem ourselves by narrowing things down a bit. When planning and designing around goals we help our students indirectly by setting priorities. In this respect, it becomes fair to ask our students to reach the goals, since we go hand-in-hand in the process.
To sum up, let’s not blame our students on our lack of professional rigour. We are the biased part of the cycle, since our plannings are not carefully designed. Our students end up feeling lost and not knowing what to do, the outcome is not what expected and the learning process is definitely not achieved.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Essential Questions
What’s an essencial question?
This chapter addresses the issue of helping our students understand by using essencial questions. Now, if talking about essencial questions, the first ones that come to my mind are What for? Why do I need to make use of essencial questions in my lessons?. After reading this chapter I tried to follow a sequence in order to answer this questions and came to several interpretations of what essencial questions could do for my lessons. To start, they are a key resource in our lessons, yet not the answer to teachers’ quest for student’s understanding. Our lessons should balance fun activities and thoughtful questions that allow our students to go beyond mere topics or contents.
What do I have to think about when producing essencial questions for my students?
When thinking about questions for tests or to introduce a new topic I think about what I want my students to answer to lead the class to the point I want to get. Nevertheless, essencial questions shouldn’t be conceived with an answer. Furthermore, students are not likely to produce similar answers to essencial questions, since they challenge personal perspectives towards a topic, ability to explore and give it a go to innovative theories. If we think about our informational bakground as a system, then essencial questions lead our students to produce and place “units” in such an accurate way that they are going to enable this system not only to continue working but also to perform new functions.
Are essencial questions applicable to all students?
A question that came to my mind after reading this chapter is what happens with my low-level studens?, since I am sure they have an opinion about different topics yet their level of English would not help them put their ideas into words. Should I just ignore their mistakes to encourage production over form? Should I use these mistakes and start a content analysis from them?
To sum up, what seemed essencial to me to point out is that it is so easy to be tempted by textbook questions which only lead to memory and short-term knowledge that we have a hard battle ahead. It’s up to us to stop and think about innovative ways to introduce a topic, evaluate a lesson, foster new theories, etc, by making use of essencial questions.
This chapter addresses the issue of helping our students understand by using essencial questions. Now, if talking about essencial questions, the first ones that come to my mind are What for? Why do I need to make use of essencial questions in my lessons?. After reading this chapter I tried to follow a sequence in order to answer this questions and came to several interpretations of what essencial questions could do for my lessons. To start, they are a key resource in our lessons, yet not the answer to teachers’ quest for student’s understanding. Our lessons should balance fun activities and thoughtful questions that allow our students to go beyond mere topics or contents.
What do I have to think about when producing essencial questions for my students?
When thinking about questions for tests or to introduce a new topic I think about what I want my students to answer to lead the class to the point I want to get. Nevertheless, essencial questions shouldn’t be conceived with an answer. Furthermore, students are not likely to produce similar answers to essencial questions, since they challenge personal perspectives towards a topic, ability to explore and give it a go to innovative theories. If we think about our informational bakground as a system, then essencial questions lead our students to produce and place “units” in such an accurate way that they are going to enable this system not only to continue working but also to perform new functions.
Are essencial questions applicable to all students?
A question that came to my mind after reading this chapter is what happens with my low-level studens?, since I am sure they have an opinion about different topics yet their level of English would not help them put their ideas into words. Should I just ignore their mistakes to encourage production over form? Should I use these mistakes and start a content analysis from them?
To sum up, what seemed essencial to me to point out is that it is so easy to be tempted by textbook questions which only lead to memory and short-term knowledge that we have a hard battle ahead. It’s up to us to stop and think about innovative ways to introduce a topic, evaluate a lesson, foster new theories, etc, by making use of essencial questions.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Our practices are led by the aim of making our students understand what we want them to, yet what if they don´t?, Does that make us “bad teachers”?, Are we wasting our time with bad students?
What if the content we are teaching can be seen from another perspective?. We usually tend to expect possible answers within certain parametres, yet are never open to the possibility that the answer which goes beyond our set limits might be actually correct.
Since we are defined by our expreiences throughout life, it is quite sensible to accept or at least to consider the fact that understanding is a very particular or personal process. The very same content will make sense at a different level to students who have been through different experiences. Therefore it will be applicable in a different way.
It is at this point where we have to make the right decisions. Moreover, it is at this stage where we can make the most of that “new perspective”, or just castrate any further attempt to give it a go and discover by doing the answer to a question.
Summarising, it seems to me the challenges we are to take today start by fostering our students’ attempts in aswering, even though they happen to be “misunderstandings” according to our perspective. To remove the assumption that what is different from expected is simply wrong and there is nothing to do with it is our second and more challenging task by putting on trial our teaching beliefs.
What if the content we are teaching can be seen from another perspective?. We usually tend to expect possible answers within certain parametres, yet are never open to the possibility that the answer which goes beyond our set limits might be actually correct.
Since we are defined by our expreiences throughout life, it is quite sensible to accept or at least to consider the fact that understanding is a very particular or personal process. The very same content will make sense at a different level to students who have been through different experiences. Therefore it will be applicable in a different way.
It is at this point where we have to make the right decisions. Moreover, it is at this stage where we can make the most of that “new perspective”, or just castrate any further attempt to give it a go and discover by doing the answer to a question.
Summarising, it seems to me the challenges we are to take today start by fostering our students’ attempts in aswering, even though they happen to be “misunderstandings” according to our perspective. To remove the assumption that what is different from expected is simply wrong and there is nothing to do with it is our second and more challenging task by putting on trial our teaching beliefs.
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