Back before I finally pulled the plug on my cable TV, I was once a reality TV addict. My favorites were the competition shows, the ones that pitted ordinary people against one another in a weekly competition, eliminating one person at a time until a victor emerged. Today, while I was doing a bit of last-minute rubric analysis with my students to make sure they understood the writing expectations for next week's state assessment, it occurred to me how much I could learn about good instruction--and particularly assessment--from the television I used to watch so avidly.
Let's take Project Runway as an example. On this show, a crop of wannabe designers performed ridiculous weekly challenges in hopes that a celebrity panel of Heidi Klum and her team of fashionistas would deem their garments worthy of remaining "in" the competition for another week. While designers toiled in the workroom, Tim Gunn periodically popped in to monitor progress, dispense advice, ask questions, make faces, and provide helpful suggestions about how the judges might react to the hastily assembled products. When the time limit expired, the designers paraded their outfits in front of the judges who each offered feedback and candid opinions before making a final judgment and declaring one of the designers "out." Throughout all of this, the producers of the show provided viewers with snippets of interviews with the contestants discussing their progress or lack thereof.
This design-and-judge approach is not unlike what goes on in classrooms all over the world. Teachers present challenges to their students, allow the students to work on them to demonstrate mastery, and assess the final products according to a rubric. Too often, though, we leave Tim Gunn and the interview snippets out of the equation. We go from assignment to summative assessment without allowing for formative assessment and student feedback along the way. Then we are frustrated when the final products don't meet our expectations or are surprised at the number of students who didn't succeed. Educators can't forget that it's our duty to check in with our students periodically along the way so we can catch them before they veer too far off track and offer them guidance to get back on course. Without the wisdom of Tim Gunn, the designers on Project Runway would struggle unnecessarily with a tricky seam construction, get bogged down on an insignificant detail, and fail to manage their time adequately, resulting in an unsatisfactory, slapdash, or incomplete final product. The show's interview clips provide opportunities for the contestants to voice their own understandings of the task and their progress. Similarly, we should require students to talk about their understanding of the assignments in their own words, to summarize the elements of the rubric, and to reflect on the work they are doing as they are doing it rather than waiting to reflect on the final product only. By encouraging this metacognition and awareness of the task and expectations, teachers can help students guide their progress, focus on the most important elements, and produce the best results possible.
Another show I miss from my cable television days is The Worst Cooks in America. In this delightful series, a hapless and inept bunch of newbies, who have been nominated by their loved ones due to their lack of culinary skills, enter an industrial kitchen to be mentored by two celebrity chefs who each take a team of non-cooks and attempt to pass them off as trained professionals. Each week, the chefs-in-training learn a new technique--poaching an egg, filleting a fish, making a sauce--and, once they've supposedly mastered it, get to create a meal on their own to showcase their new skill. After the "learning" stage in which the chefs offer guidance in the kitchen, the competitors must complete the final task without supervision while the celebrity chefs cower nervously in the corner and pray that their proteges can perform without their assistance. The final meal is eaten and judged, and one sad loser says goodbye to the TV kitchen and goes home to inflict his or her under-appreciated cooking skills on the family.
The thing I love about thinking about this show in relationship to the classroom is that it emphasizes the importance of supervised practice on specific skills. The celebrity chefs don't just throw an unwieldy task at their trainees and hope it goes well. Instead, they demonstrate the week's focus technique, allow the cooks to practice it with guidance, provide feedback, and then step up the difficulty by asking them to apply their knowledge to a more challenging, complicated task. This is exactly what we should be doing as teachers. Instead of assigning an entire essay, project, or lab report and hoping the students can figure out all the individual components and put them together into a suitable final product, we should allow students to complete a portion of the assignment--or a sample portion of a similar assignment--and offer feedback before we ask them to combine multiple skills into a final masterpiece. An art teacher could ask his students to practice sketching, shading, and texturing in small assignments in a notebook before drawing a still life for a major-grade assessment. Writing students might learn how to develop thesis statements, write introductions, and incorporate research using correct citation in separate lessons before having to pull all those skills together into an entire essay. A PE teacher or coach drills her young athletes in dribbling, shooting, and blocking before putting them on the court to play a full game.
Throughout the year in my class, I've tried to apply these principles to help my students succeed in the various challenges I've placed before them. Recently, that's been true as I've worked to make sure they are prepared for the weirdness of the expository essay on next week's STAAR test. I've allowed them to explain the rubric in their own words. I've modeled effective word choice and revision and have allowed them to practice on their own and on others' writing. I've offered feedback along the way. We've dissected example essays. We've written thesis statements, brainstormed supporting anecdotes, blended sentences together with transitions, outlined, drafted, and assessed our work and the work of others.
Next week, you can find me cowering in the corner and praying that my students can successfully complete whatever challenge the STAAR test makers throw at them.
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