Guilty!

We’ve all done it. Each one of us is guilty. And some of us don’t even know what we are guilty of.

Here’s an example of a time I was unknowingly guilty:  My English students were in the midst of a study of Romeo and Juliet. My main goals during the unit were to familiarize my students with the language of Shakespeare and equip them with the reading strategies they could use to analyze difficult poetic text. In a planning meeting, our team came up with an assignment we thought our students would enjoy completing. We provided four options students could choose from:  

• working with a group to rewrite a scene into more contemporary language and perform their modernized scene for the class
• illustrating a scene from the play in a comic-book-style format
• writing diary entries from the perspective of Romeo or Juliet about the events taking place during the play
• watching or reading a contemporary adaptation of the play and writing an essay about parallels with Shakespeare’s original text

We gave the assignment, the students chose their options, and they set out to work. We crafted a generic rubric that would apply to all four options and awaited the student creativity.

What we were guilty of, even though we had the very best of intentions, was not aligning our assessments with the instructional goals. The goals, as I stated earlier, related to students’ abilities to comprehend Shakespearean poetic language independently. The assessments, depending on what students selected, measured a variety of things. Acting out a modern scene in a group assessed the ability of one person in a group to be able to rewrite a scene from the play and for all the members of the group to perform the script effectively. The comic book tested a student’s ability to draw but not necessarily to have a keen understanding of what the language means, especially if the student paid attention to the scenes from the film I’d showed in class and could render them on paper. The diary required insight into character, an understanding of the plot, and some writing ability. The modern adaptation analysis assessed whether a student could write a compare/contrast essay (or, perhaps, the student’s Google skills).

None of the options we gave our students was terrible. They simply had little to do with the objectives of the unit and were thus not an accurate assessment of student learning. Furthermore, the four assessments didn’t even assess the same skills. A student could strategically select an option that played to his or her strengths and never have to demonstrate actual learning of a curricular objective.  

Every teacher has had a planning brainstorm about something that would engage students and has inserted it into the curriculum without spending the time to think about how the new idea fits with unit objectives. WIth more deliberate planning, however, we can make sure we never commit this instructional crime again.

Two questions developed by WIggins and McTighe in The Understanding By Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units help me think about how assessments align with unit goals:

1. Could students do the proposed assignment(s) well but not really have mastered or understood the content in question?
2. Could students do poorly on the specific assessment(s) but really have mastery of the content in question? (p. 53)

In the case of my Romeo and Juliet assignment explained above, I can answer yes to both questions, which isn’t a good thing.  

Yes, a student could give a convincing and impressive performance of a modernized scene from the play without knowing anything about how to read and interpret Shakespearean verse.

Yes, a learner who knows how to read Shakespeare could make a C if she didn’t have the art skills to draw a comprehensible comic book rendering of a scene.

Yes, a student could write an awesome diary from Juliet’s perspective with only knowledge gained from watching the film or reading the Sparknotes online.

Yes, a kid could analyze West Side Story as a Romeo and Juliet adaptation without reading a word of Shakespeare.  

It’s clear that when we were planning this assignment, we were thinking a lot more about activities than we were thinking about understandings. Though our Romeo and Juliet project gave the students choices of several potentially interesting activities, the activities we designed weren’t valid measures of the student outcomes we claimed to be seeking.  

When we string a bunch of activities together to create a unit, we often commit the crime of not having activities line up with unit objectives. Another crime we could be charged for at the same time is lining up activities that do not work together to ensure student success on the final assessment. In an effectively-designed unit, the activities the students do are carefully planned and sequenced to prepare learners to transfer their learning to the final authentic assessment. Anything that is incongruous with the end goal should probably be avoided.  

When we realize we are guilty of misaligned activities, we have to make some hard, sad decisions to say goodbye to some beloved old friends.

I’d have to say goodbye to that AVID assignment where students researched various colleges and worked in teams to create a scrapbook that showcased their findings and “memories” of their fictional first year in college. In reality, a group could get a good grade for putting together an attractive scrapbook and have learned little about college itself; conversely, a group lacking scrapbooking skills could know a lot and not be able to show it.

I would have to sever ties with that day the kids loved when they brought in Greek food while we were reading Homer’s Odyssey because how does making (or buying) a pan of baklava demonstrate any understanding of Greek epic poetry?

I’d bid a tearful farewell to any quiz or test where I asked the students to recall the speaker of a quotation from a novel, short story, or play because I never taught any unit where the learning objective was, “Memorize a text you read once, maybe twice.”

I’d realize I had to let go of most of my artworks depicting scenes from books, artistic vocabulary posters, anything involving paper mache or a trip to Hobby Lobby, and all other activities and assignments that don’t measure skills I have taught or help students develop skills necessary to be successful on an assessment of their skills and understandings.

People who disagree with me on this are probably thinking, “This buzzkill thinks we need to get rid of everything that is actually fun and enjoyable to the kids!” That’s not the case. I’m a firm believer that fun and authentic learning are not mutually exclusive terms. There is fun in discovering a new book, reading it, and engaging in worthwhile conversation about it with another reader. There is fun in exploring a topic in depth, posing student-derived questions about the learning, and seeking the answers. There is fun in learning how to do something you couldn’t do before and using that new skill to solve a real-world problem. There is fun in debating a topic and using logical support to buoy your argument. With careful planning and attention to learning goals and outcomes, you can make learning fun and engaging.

The next time you are planning for instruction, ask yourself those guiding questions to make sure you’re not guilty of a goal/assignment mismatch. Your instructional coaches will be happy to do our best to help you remain crime-free...at least in terms of curriculum and instruction.  

Rethinking Planning: Asking the Right Questions

I used to think that planning for instruction meant sitting the team down with a blank calendar and a three-ring binder full of lessons from past years and fitting the old activities onto the new calendar, perhaps replacing some activities we’d grown tired of with new ones. After that, we’d delegate duties (who will write the test? photocopy the handouts? count the supplies? reserve computer labs?) and set a meeting date to plan for the next unit. Perhaps we’d have casual conversations from time to time about an upcoming lesson--sometimes one that was coming up next period!--but overall we didn’t have much curricular team talk after the planning meeting.   

We certainly never discussed why we were teaching what we were teaching and how our students would show understanding of unit objectives. In fact, our learning objectives seldom ventured out of the lowest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and there wasn’t an overarching “so what?” to our units.  In English, we taught novels which were ends in themselves (with accompanying character lists, study guides, author background lectures, teacher-provided term lists, and Scantron tests).  The “objective” was to study Of Mice and Men, not to use the novel to teach some concept or skill that had any real-world relevance beyond the walls of the ninth grade English classroom. In the adult world, no one really cares if you can recall the names of the characters in the novel unless you’re on a competitive trivia team.  

I’m not trying to trivialize what we were doing. We had the best of intentions, and our students certainly left our classrooms with more knowledge than they had when they entered. But the world of education has changed since the days when I first started teaching (when Beanie Babies were a new fad, the Spin Doctors were a big thing, and America had not yet become infatuated with Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe). What I believe about instruction today is that students need to learn how to think, how to connect their learning to the world, and how to perform the kinds of skills that will allow them to adapt to a world that is changing rapidly. The content I teach and the texts my students read are merely vehicles to help students uncover what curriculum gurus Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe call “Enduring Understandings.” My lessons, then, should not be a series of isolated activities but a carefully constructed sequence of experiences leading to a final student product that provides evidence of student understanding.         

With that end in mind, I’ve come up with a list of questions that I would use to plan lessons individually or with a team. The questions work equally well whether I’m a teacher following a district curriculum or crafting one of my own.

Why am I teaching this lesson? What are the goals of this lesson?  

This question presupposes there’s already a unit plan in place that is focused on Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings that are relevant, meaningful, and have a degree of complexity. The unit itself will have Learning Targets that are measured by some kind of CAP (Culminating Assessment Product) that requires students to transfer their learning to a new, preferably real-world context.  Once all of that is in place, it’s important for the teacher to examine each specific lesson to see how it contributes to the overarching goals of the unit. If the teacher doesn’t know the overall purpose of the lesson, the lessons will have less meaning and direction for the students and might feel like (or actually be) a series of isolated activities with no end in mind.

How am I going to make the purpose clear to the students?

No matter how well the teacher knows what’s going on, the lesson lacks relevance if the students are left in the dark about how it fits into the bigger scheme of things. Don’t be afraid to let your students know the why behind the lesson. What skills and knowledge are they gathering, and why will this knowledge be useful down the road?

What are the kids going to be doing?

The teacher has probably mastered the content and skills already. The most important thing is to let the students wrestle with the skills and concepts in a safe environment. The kids should be doing most of the thinking and most of the work. This, however, doesn’t happen by accident. The well-prepared teacher preplans questions, collaborative learning opportunities, and deliberate student-focused experiences to assist students in uncovering the Enduring Understandings of the unit. If the teacher has to tell the students what the EUs are and what they should be thinking about them, that pretty much defeats the purpose. If the answer to the question, “What are the kids going to be doing?” is, “Listening and copying down what I say or what is on the PowerPoint,” I’d wager that the teacher is going to be disappointed at the students’ performance of the CAP at the end of the unit.   

How am I going to pull this off smoothly?

Like planning a party, a well-prepared teacher has thought through every aspect of the class period before the bell rings. How will I manage materials effectively? How will I move from one activity to the next? What problems can I foresee, and can I prevent them? What will students do when/if they finish before others? What will I do for students who will need further challenge or enrichment? How can I provide additional scaffolding for struggling students? What types of  movement and state changes can I incorporate to keep my students alert and engaged? Where can I add some AVID WICOR strategies? What examples and models do I need to provide to help students understand expectations? Where are places in the lesson cycle where I need to pause for some reflection or discussion on how the learning is going and how it can improve? Questions like these embody the real art of instruction, and they are well worth the time teachers invest in examining them during planning.

How will I know whether students get it?

The CAP should not be the first moment when you know whether a student knows what’s going on. And students shouldn’t be surprised to discover at the end of the unit that they didn’t understand what they were supposed to have learned. Informal assessments along the way can help you and the students know what they understand and what they need help with. These can be as simple as a thumbs up/thumbs down signal, an exit card, or a quickwrite. Effective formative assessment is a high-impact strategy that can help the teacher know where the instruction needs to go next. Also, make sure your assessments are congruent with your unit goals. There’s no need to give a picky plot-recall test on A Tale of Two Cities if you’re using the novel with the end goal of examining archetypes. It confuses the students because it muddies (or ignores completely) the stated learning targets.

As you’re planning and preparing for lessons with your team or individually, try out these questions and see what difference they make. Our district has instructional coaches in many content areas. Don’t hesitate to call on us for assistance with planning.  It’s part of our job, and we enjoy helping you and your students see results.

If you want to read more about unit planning, I recommend getting your hands on a copy of The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units by Wiggins and McTighe. It’ll help you understand the “why” behind the district’s curriculum design process. There are copies floating around your campus.  

I wish you the best as you maximize your planning to foster the most productive student learning possible.