What’s the evidence we need? I was trying to figure out what's this. Two things first: Planning, then design. To recognize this so called evidence, or be able to, requires a lot of training and practice and an excellent planning. Even now it takes me a while to make these objectives and outcomes coincide and make them easy to be recognized. This is due to the training we received; I know that we are meant to be critical thinkers, and that we should think like assessors in this respect, yet what we received was such a structured model that got fossilized really quick; therefore, we somehow ended up imitating it. Now, this issue is questioned with the following question, which really emphasizes the problem: Does the test amount to just simplified drill out of context? or does the assessment require students to really "perform" wisely with knowledge and skill, in a problematic context of real issues, needs, constraints, and opportunities?
Based on these questions, we can only see that what we are exposed to is this set of constant drills on little tasks, usually on grammar, fill-ins and so on. I can see this type of exercises in our own books provided by the Ministry, so somehow as teachers, as well, we're perseverating with this undesired model (against the proposed in our text). Now I guess it's teachers turn to design something to overcome this issue, a backward design to improve the exercises presented in our books. Actually, I have never seen a book, which promotes this type of teaching. So certainly at this point material designers are also one of the targets that needs to be improved. Assessment of understanding is enhanced when we make greater use of oral assessments, concept webs, portfolios, and constructed response items of all types to allow students to show their work and reveal their thinking. Here I guess comes another challenge, on how to control also metacognitive skills. Do we have books in which we promote this? And do we know how to plan for these purposes?
I dare to say that this quotation perfectly represents what the aim of education should be: The challenge of teaching understanding is largely the challenge of making the big ideas in the field become big in the mind of the learner. (p. 75). When we think about our reality, our own educational Chilean reality, first of all I see reflected the opposite in most of our actions, in our classes, and I include myself too. I guess if one pays attention to our own classes, we we’ll discover that we’re “sinners”, since we only make lessons to favour content and the aimless coverage as mentioned in the text. I think that we’re not prepared for this. So far for us this is a big issue, as mentioned at some point in the text (regarding standards) that we have too many expectations to achieve that eventually what we only obtain is this so called overload problem; besides, what we end up doing is “covering” them, how? with content, obviously. Where the problem lies in my opinion is on one specific point that is the spinal of a lesson, the lesson plan. If somebody, say, an expert, (or just simply a conscious teacher!), devotes his/her time to GUIDE (not lecture) a proper lesson on how to include all these marvellous points about understanding, big ideas and essential questions and so on, well, I guess the story and this discussion would be different. I’m sure that most of us were left stranded to do whatever we could to obtain the passing mark, as I did in my planning course. One of the problems that affect teachers is that even having well established goals in our curriculum, we still are not able to carry them out, because we’re not skilful enough to turn this goals into a planning that encourages understanding. The counterpart might be that we’re meant to be autonomous, but let’s face it, we’re not, and something must be done to fix this huge intellectual gap. We belong to a generation (a badly planned one), which has been fated to follow the herd and teach content, (I hope that you, dear classmate-reader, don’t belong to that group, probably you don't), and to reverse this problem will take long time until the enlightened ones come to fill those visible cracks we have in our classrooms. So, issues like essential questions, big ideas, core tasks and so forth are not really feasible for most of the current teachers, probably for future generations, they will be.
