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.
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