End of Year Reflection on ELA, History and Science: 2013-14
What do I know – my weekly assessments, my unit planning
I have been using Understanding by Design planning for over five years. It’s taken me about that long to use it somewhat effectively. There are things I still need to work on. Here is my planning for last year. I think the connection between my goals (understandings and knowledge) and the assessment (especially the knowledge part). I can see looking back at my plans that not everything gotten to.
The part that I think went well, was meeting the content standards, but this is the part that I have the most concerns about as new Common Core standards roll out. The maps, and plans that I’m seeing are all focused on ELA only, and therefore focus on knowledge and skills rather than understanding. It’s a weakness (and a serious one to my mind) making CCSS like a donut, with skills on the outside, but missing content at the center. I don’t like doing ELA only planning because of this. When you have understandings around ELA, they tend to be large ideas that are too vague tied to themes constructing by the reading text publisher.
What I know I don’t know – thoughts around assessment
This was a testing holiday in the sense that students answered test questions, but they didn’t do a “full” test, the test did not have some of the bells and whistles that will be added in subsequent years (computer adaptive questions, computer scoring of written responses, etc.), but mostly, there are no scores for students. I’ve had folks expressed some concern about “not knowing where their students are at,” but I tell them, I’ve never found these tests to be useful for telling me that. Who improved? I had a number of students that based on my assessments, and their classwork, either did really well, or made great improvements. The first group are students who would do good no matter what. I really Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » End of Year Reflection on ELA, History and Science: 2013-14: