Category Archives: Assessment

Assessment, Issues

Tests: Authentic Assessment?

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Should we revisit testing as a means of assessment?

No doubt, students will need to be prepared for college (or, if you teach middle school high school; if you teach elementary school, middle school), and most colleges still using testing as a primary means of assessing students.  After all, when you have a lecture class with 300 students, it is not feasible to use alternative methods of assessment.  Perhaps the biggest argument in favor of keeping tests is to prepare students for the college environment.

I looked over my unit plans, lessons, and assessments this semester, and I realized something interesting.  I have given very few tests.  Most of the tests I have given have been summer reading assessments.  I have relied primarily on the following means of assessment: quizzes, essays, and “authentic assessments.”

My quizzes are typically five-question, short answer quizzes over reading assignments so I can be sure students are doing the reading I have asked them to do.  Students typically do either well or poorly on them based on how well they have read.

Essays are a staple of the English curriculum, but perhaps even more so at my school, with its competitive college preparatory environment and focus on developing writing skills.  My goal has been to assign at least four essays for each class this semester.  I have mostly realized this goal, largely through better planning using UbD to construct units.  I also allowed most of my classes to choose an essay they wrote this semester to revise for a higher grade, as I believe revision and reflection help students see writing as a process.

My “authentic assessments” have come straight from UbD and include crafting a résumé for Beowulf, writing our own Odyssey in order to demonstrate understanding of Homer’s, writing a letter to Arkansas Representative Steve Harrelson regarding his state’s apostrophe dilemma, and creating a comma usage manual for Rogers Communications (that $2 million comma error had to hurt!).

As I indicated in a previous post, I simply ran out of time this semester in order to truly do what I wanted to do with each unit.  I do have fewer minutes per week with my students than I would like — I average 45 minutes per day with each class, which is substantially less than other schools where I’ve worked.  However, what I have learned about the authentic assessments is that they were not only much closer to the kinds of tasks students will be asked to do when they begin their careers than tests.  How many tests have I taken as part of my job?  I can’t think of any.  I did have to take a test to get my certificate.  I had to take another to exempt from a computer skills course required in my state.  No principal has ever asked me to take a test for any reason.  If you take a look at the kinds of tasks I asked students to do to prove to me they internalized the essential questions we were exploring as part of our units this semester, I think you might discover that the tasks were more engaging than the standard test.  The tasks also asked students to think, internalize, apply, analyze, and synthesize information and present it in a unique fashion.  In short, I think they were taxed to think critically on a much higher level in Bloom’s Taxonomy than a standard test would require.

Are tests going anywhere?  I doubt it.  And I do believe that students should know how to take a test and how to study in order to do well in college, but I also think it behooves us as educators to offer them opportunities to demonstrate their learning with authentic assessments that enable students to truly show us what they know and practice working on the kinds of tasks they will be asked to do as part of their careers one day.  At any rate, it’s something to think about.  Though I have had fewer tests in my class this semester, I don’t think my students have learned less or been less challenged.  If anything, they have been more challenged (particularly with regards to writing).  However, I do still plan to give them a final examination.  Still, I think it would be an interesting challenge for all of us to examine what we are accomplishing through tests and ask ourselves if we are really preparing students for life beyond school.

Assessment, Teaching Literature, Technology

The Odyssey

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I am once again teaching The Odyssey.  I have posted my UbD plan for this unit over at the UbD Educators wiki.  The unit plan is not different from what I’ve done with The Odyssey in the past, but I don’t think I’ve ever framed it with essential questions.  Incidentally, inspired by Tom from Bionic Teaching, I have decided to integrate Google Earth into the project for the first time.  I need to do some more playing with Google Earth so I can figure out how it works, but based on what I’ve seen so far, I think it will be a good tool for us.

The performance assessment is a project detailed in English Journal, “Bringing Homer’s Odyssey Up to Date: An Alternative Assessment,” Vol. 86 No. 1, pp. 65-68, Jan 1997.  I was a student teacher when I first used it (the 1996-1997 year was my student teaching year), and I have always had great success with it.  If you teach The Odyssey, I highly recommend that you get your hands on a copy of that article.  I am going to have the students chart their own Odysseus’ journey using Google Earth.  I am contemplating publication online through a blog or wiki or some other type of website, but we’ll see.

Assessment, Professional Development, Technology, Wikis

UbD Educators Wiki

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Some months down the road after its creation, the UbD Educators wiki has fallen silent. I logged in today to find that neither changes nor discussions had taken place in the last 30 days. Yikes!

I take part of the blame upon myself. Having five preps leaves me, ironically, with not much time to plan, particularly now as National Honor Society business has take up much of my time.

Update, 4:45: I have a draft of the lesson for my Canterbury Tales unit up now.

Well, at any rate, I invite new folks to join in, quiet members to speak up, and previously active members (such as myself) to become active again. I think this kind of professional development, sadly, is much more valuable and important than much of what teachers normally get. I’m only sad I can’t get you PLU credits for it.

I’m going to start with a unit on The Canterbury Tales. Wish me luck, but give me time to finish it before you comment.

See you over there.

Assessment, Teaching Literature

Caveat Emptor… Unless It’s Free

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As I have been working to create UbD plans over the last couple of days, a couple of things have become glaringly obvious to me.

The first is that the quality of available study guides and teachers’ guides varies widely.  Most of them only have a handful of “good” lesson plans.  What I mean by “good” is that I can use the plans without too much modification for my students, it is sufficiently challenging for high school, and it doesn’t involve too much of what I think of as “fluffy” work.   I am totally all for using what I can without reinventing the wheel.  My English Education professors encouraged us to steal, steal, steal.  This was back in the day when listservs were well-populated and would have been great for teachers to share ideas, but teachers weren’t on them, and it was well before the age of blogs, wikis, webquests, etc.  Our best source for ideas, if I recall, was ERIC.  I had to create entire units by myself, stealing where I could, but mostly finding I had to buy anything that was really helpful (Perfection Learning units, Shakespeare Set Free, Novel Guides, etc.)  It was a pain, and I envy new teachers for the fact that they have access to the Internet with this wealth of ideas.  It must be much easier to create plans now than it used to be.

I have found some challenge, however, in finding lessons that are sufficiently challenging.  They are indeed out there, but the best way to find them seems to be real search-engine savvy rather than anything else.  I have not often found that huge repositories of plans have too much to offer.  It’s rare for me to find something usable in those kinds of places, and those I find usually need to be modified somewhat.  Sometimes, for instance, I find parts of the assignment interesting, but most of it is “fluff.”  There seems to be a lot of Shakespeare fluff out there.  I know the current thinking is to teach through performance, and while I do some of that, I think most of the unit plans I’ve seen depend on performance for almost all assessment, and that makes me uncomfortable.  I think the biggest reason why is that I dislike roleplaying myself.  I loathe it when I’m asked to roleplay situations for professional development, for instance.  I never minded doing it for school too much, I guess, but I find lessons in which students have to dig into the language through close-reading text study more compelling.  Students are invariably not attuned enough to Shakespeare’s language to act it out, and I find sharing professional performances more valuable for their learning.

I know plenty of people will disagree with me on the performance aspect of teaching Shakespeare; it seems to be the prevailing wisdom that students need to act out the whole play, complete with costumes and promptbook, in order to understand it.  I would feel different, I’m sure, if I were a drama teacher or had a drama background.  Still, I have never had complaints about not doing performance.

A perfect case in point — something I’d never do again — was something my supervising teacher and I did together in our Romeo and Juliet unit.  It came straight out of Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The idea is that students create masks to wear to class and they learn an Elizabethan dance similar to one that Romeo and Juliet might have danced when they met.  To me, 10 years after I did this with a class, this seems fluffy in the extreme.  We weren’t digging into the text at all.  We weren’t reading about it or writing about it.  On the other hand, some great activities can be found in the same section of the book.  For example, a great activity which asks students to really figure out language is the Love Connection handout on p. 133 of the book.  Students not only have to interpret the text, but also what the text says about the character’s attitude or beliefs, which is a great way for students to move from simple decoding to understanding.  What I am essentially getting at (but it took me this long, blathering the whole time, to figure out how to say it) is that many assignments you’ll find online or in these kinds of unit plan books are activity-based and not authentic assessments, to borrow the language of UbD.  Students have fun, but don’t really learn what you are trying to get them to learn.  I sure had a lot of pretty masks for my bulletin board, and we had fun goofing around in a big circle, dancing, but I don’t think either activity really did much to advance our students’ understanding of Romeo and Juliet, and so many performance-based lesson plans tend to look suspiciously like that lesson.

The great thing about what is available is that you generally don’t have to pay for it, so you’re not out $20 or so after purchasing a book of useless activities.  If you are planning to buy a book, see if there’s a way to look through it to see if it’s useful before you purchase it.  It will probably be worth it if you can use some of the lessons year after year, especially if handouts are provided.

[tags]ubd, shakespeare, lesson plans, unit plans[/tags]

Assessment, Issues, Teaching Literature

School’s in Session

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You sure can tell when school is back in session again around this blog, can’t you?  We started back on August 20, and I am busily evaluating summer reading, grading, and planning.  I am advising National Honor Society again after a hiatus, and I am looking forward to making that a really good, solid organization that is something more than a line on a resumé.

I have five different preps, which is standard for me, but my largest class is currently 17 students.  I have some really great, enthusiastic and just generally kind 9th graders, which always makes it fun.  My 10th grade Writing class is a great group with hard workers.  My 11th grade British Literature class is going to be so much fun.  I have wanted to teach British Literature for my entire career.  My senior class will be smoother and more interesting, I hope, since I have taught the course once.  In other words, I am really excited about my classes and my students.

Meanwhile, my own children have started back to school.  My oldest is in 8th grade, and she seems very happy.  My middle one started 1st grade.  More seat work and less playing.  We are reading Ramona the Pest together, and she really loves it.  Some insight into her particular problems — if you are familiar with Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby, let’s just say my middle one is a lot like her.  My youngest is in special needs pre-K and has a wonderful teacher.  He is making real progress.  Everyone is riding the bus and getting used to the routine of school.

I am really excited about some of the things we are doing this year at my school.  For starters, all of our 9th grade literature is based around the theme of the quest of the hero.  I think it’s going to be great.  I am taking my 9th graders and 11th graders on a field trip to see Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth respectively at the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern.  I have also, as many of you know, been implementing Understanding by Design (UbD) in my planning, and my first UbD units for our summer reading (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Brave New World, and A Lesson Before Dying) are now underway.

[tags]literature, education, ubd, understanding by design, back to school[/tags]

Assessment, Issues, Teaching Grammar

An 8th Grade Education

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You have probably heard elderly family members or friends refer to having an 8th grade education. Going through grammar school, or 8th grade, without continuing on to high school was fairly common in the past. But what exactly was an 8th grade education? Genealogy blogger Randy Seaver posted an 1895 Salina, KS. 8th grade final exam. Here is an excerpt:

Grammar (Time, one hour)

  1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
  2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
  3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
  4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of “lie”, “play”, and “run.”
  5. Define case; illustrate each case.
  6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
  7. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

How would you do?

[tags]grammar, english, education[/tags]

Assessment, Teaching Literature, Technology

Webquests and UbD Units

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I created a UbD unit for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which my seniors read for summer reading.  Please check it and tell me what you think.  The webquest for the unit can be accessed here.

Also, I created the webquest for my UbD unit on Brave New World.

[tags]ubd, brave new world, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, webquest, literature[/tags]

Assessment, Teaching Literature, Web 2.0

A Lesson Before Dying

A Lesson Before DyingOur students at each grade and level read three books over the summer. You can check out our summer reading brochure here (pdf) to see our requirements and recommendations. We have latitude regarding assessment of summer reading, but we are encouraged to evaluate students’ understanding of one book through an objective test and to evaluate a second through an essay. The third book is discussed and studied in class prior to assessment.

My 9th grade students will have to read A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines, The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain. This coming year will be the fourth year I have taught 9th grade at my school (I had previously taught ninth grade for four years in other schools with no summer reading requirement). We changed our selections this year. Last year, incoming freshmen read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway rather than the Gaines and Twain novels. As The Bean Trees was the book I liked best among those three, I have taught that novel prior to discussion the past three years, and indeed, had planned to do the same this year. However, after reading A Lesson Before Dying, I decided this book has some real meat for discussion and might appeal more to both boys and girls (girls tend to favor The Bean Trees, while boys tend not to). You can read my review of the book at my personal blog.

I created a UbD unit plan for A Lesson Before Dying today, and I’d appreciate feedback. I had quite a bit of trouble with Stage 1 (the standards were easy; figuring out what I wanted students to understand and how to frame essential questions was hard).

In my searching today, I found a UbD plan for The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible (pdf). This year will be the first in my high school teaching career that I haven’t taught American literature, but one of you all American literature teachers may want to check it out and see if it is something you are interested in trying.

[tags]ubd, ernest gaines, a lesson before dying, literature, english, education, assessment[/tags]

Assessment, Professional Development, Teaching Grammar, Teaching Literature

UbD Unit Plans

After finishing Understanding by Design, I created two units:

  • Apostrophes (9th grade Grammar, Comp., and Lit.)
  • Beowulf (11th grade British Lit. and Comp.)

If you are familiar with UbD (or even if you aren’t), I’d appreciate feedback.  You can contribute to discussions at UbD Educators wiki without joining the wiki.

I can’t remember if I shared my schedule for next year.  Of course, exact class periods, etc. are still up in the air, but I will be teaching the following courses:

  • 9th College Prep Grammar, Composition, and Literature
  • 9th College Prep II Grammar, Composition, and Literature
  • 10th Writing Seminar II (Writing Seminar I is a ninth grade course)
  • 11th College Prep British Literature and Composition (1st semester)
  • 12th College Prep Short Story and Composition (1st semester)
  • 12th College Prep Drama and Composition (2nd semester)

I will also be advising the National Honor Society and helping with the GISA Literary Meet.

So if you are teaching or advising any similar classes or activities, I will be willing to collaborate and share.

[tags]Beowulf, apostrophe, curriculum, planning, lesson plans, english, ubd, understanding by design[/tags]

Assessment, Professional Development, Recommended Reading

Understanding by Design: “Yes, but…” and Afterword

Understanding by DesignThe final chapter of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design is a summary of the research presented in refutation of three common reasons educators give for why they do not implement UbD: 1) “We have to teach to the test”; 2) “We have too much content to cover”; and 3) “This work [backward design] is too hard and I just don’t have the time” (303, 309, 316).  I heard a few people chime in with that last one, especially.  While this last chapter may convince those who are still on the fence, I’m not sure it is wholly necessary for teachers who are already on board with UbD to read, unless they need to convince others, and I’m not sure those who are thoroughly unconvinced of the efficacy of UbD (and have remained so after reading up to this point) will become convinced.

To me, at least, the largest argument seems to be the last one, and Wiggins and McTighe suggest starting small.  Plan one unit using UbD.  Build UbD planning and peer review into professional development — give teachers the time — and you will find that over time, a large bank of unit plans exists.

In this last chapter and the Afterword, the authors suggest visiting their subscription site, UbD Exchange, and creating curriculum units for peer review.  Access to the site is not free, and indeed, is somewhat out of my personal price range, and probably that of my school (I will check).  I want to thank Grant Wiggins for his stated support of the UbD Educators’ wiki; he could easily have viewed our efforts at establishing a reading/peer review group as a threat, but instead he offered the group access to courses offered through his site Authentic Education, and even said he would build a link to the wiki on his site.  To me, that says what he truly cares about is helping teachers become better at their craft.  I really appreciated his gesture.  In case you didn’t see his supportive comment, it is reproduced here:

Great blog! And I really appreciate the time and thought that is going into your reading. Yes, ubd is not for those looking for a quick fix. Nor is it great to be lonely – I hated that as a teacher myself. But there is actually a lot you can do on your own to sustain the work. The key is to take small steps – try out a few ideas here and there; work on 1 unit a semester – especially a unit that now is so boring it bores you to teach it. Learn the various ‘moves’ but only use the ones that appeal. And, finally, avail yourselves of the various forums and resources we and others have put together to support the work. Go to bigideas.org for starters. Check out the ubdexchange. Go to the virtual symposium on ubd and differentiated instruction run through ascd. And write the poor authors, who rarely get this kind of lovely feedback!*

cheers, Grant

OK, I’m ready to start planning some units and getting some feedback.  This book might be the single most helpful professional development/education-related book I’ve ever read in terms of real strategies that will make me a better teacher.  I feel really excited about the opportunities before me as I begin planning for next year.

* Wiggins’ original comment did not include links; however, I found the sites he mentioned and built hyperlinks to them for the convenience of readers.

Work Cited: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Expanded 2nd Edition. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2005.

[tags]Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, UbD, Understanding by Design, planning, backward design, curriculum, assessment, research[/tags]