“Throw some content and activities against the wall and hope some of it sticks” Fuck! (I’m not gonna say sorry) I think this is the most graphic explanation of what teachers do in the Chilean educational reality nowadays I’ve ever heard. Mind shaking statement this is. It’s quite appalling to read it and see that it is as real as the sarcasm it bears.
This is our system. Well, I don’t believe in the perfect system, and I believe we will never have one. We can certainly improve it, by all means. But a clockwork system, to be honest (even though you can call me nihilist and pessimistic) it’s not possible. Most of us rely on good feelings and good intentions towards the improvement, which is perfect, and I’m very glad that some people put these nice feelings in their efforts. Also, I am really thankful about having read this book because it was eye-opener, yet my final feeling is that we are doomed, at least until someone with common sense directs the education in the country; otherwise, it will take ages to fill all the gaps we need to improve our field.
“Teaching as a means to an end” is one the hardest beliefs to wipe out, and replace Teaching by learning is even harder. For me this is the core issue of the book (or the chapters we’ve read). Some days ago, one heavy-neuroned person told some teachers and me that the only solution is to eliminate all teacher trainers from the universities, and force them to apply again by demanding competence to see whether they deserve teaching at university. It made all the sense of the world. The kings of the activity-base and coverage based education should be eliminated from the system. Once teachers learn to revolve around learning, and kids as the core, within a fair system of course, things will really improve.
Subjectivity in the summative assessment is a difficult to control problem in a objective desired environment let’s say. It is still present no matter how many numbers, scales or rubrics we use when evaluating. Is this in the end judgement guided by criteria or criteria guided by judgment?
My impression is that subjectivity is something we cannot get rid of when talking about validity, especially in this kind of assessment for understanding. There’s a definition within the text that reinforces my puzzled idea about understanding assessment: Validity refers to the meaning we can and cannot properly make of specific evidence. This process of obtaining this desired meaning is the one that makes me think that no matter how “objective” the evaluation instrument is, there will be a judgment behind; bias is always present.
To avoid this subjectivity, we naïvely tend to think that by paying attention to scores we go more objective ”in part because scoring for correctness makes assessment so much easier and seemingly objective”, and consequently, more valid.
Now that we learn that what matters is the interpretation of the score, the previous belief goes discarded. Having these instruments called rubrics discussed, are they really objective? I guess again they can be difficult tools to be conceived, since my criteria might not be reflected into the descriptions meant to appear in my grids.
I have seen that some rubrics (along with several other assessment instruments) are created just for the sake of score. And when evaluating, it’s the subjective appreciation the one that predominates in the end, “because the student did more like a bit more about this than this other point”
In the end it’s your judgement the one that imposes over my seemingly objective rubric.
There is one solution provided by the text, which provides a solution quite plausible: “it doesn’t matter what tests you use as long as they are varied and many” and I would also add that their interpretations need to be shared too with some other colleagues to reduce this blind spot in evaluation.
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.
The most striking statement in the text says that making a question is not about what a question should look like, but about its power in context.
To narrow this down, I don’t think we are really aware, first of all, about the power of words, so let alone questions’. We might first analyse our own vocabulary, as we saw within the revision of our own educational laws, that concepts are not clearly stated. Most of the time, they’re too vast and vague allowing the reader to give them whatever interpretation you may think of. From this basis, we don’t even have clear our “master commandments”.
This is just an analogy to illustrate how difficult it is to settle our initial key concepts. Then, moving towards questions, as the text constantly reminds us, designing questions is a high order skill, an “art”. From this basic step concerning words, the series of suggestions and steps make the process even more complex.
It’s neither surprising then that we are not good at making proper overarching questions, nor do we wonder about being meagre critical thinkers. We must give students work that enables them to have an “aha!” Certainly we can do that, yet to give them a truly and genuine “aha!” it’s such a big task that not many teachers know how carry out.
At this point there’s another concept that I myself have not very clear, that of ‘context’. To achieve this question power, we are meant to control this context, whatever it means. Within the text, the idea of “context of use” appears in our EFL case as a fiction instance, totally opposed to the one an ESL subject may deal with.
As far as I understand, context comes into sight when developing skills, when you are meant to set into action your understanding. Nevertheless, is this a real context? I think it is not as the situations you could get being an ESL subject, and unfortunately, these cannot be reinforced outside the classroom (refering to language learning) So, are we really making good use of this “context” and all the powerful words that allow us to produce powerful questions with their consequent learning?
Mr. Wiggins spotted wisely the means by which we should guide successful, observable; hence, improvable learning, so as to develop effective understanding and not mere forgettable knowledge. Lately, I’ve been dealing with primary teachers who have told me about their experiences and ideas about teaching, and I could make out a few aspects that helped me to understand his ideas in a context. (Understanding?)
During my conversations with these teachers, I could single out some of the problems that in the long run will affect this chapter proposals: planning, assessment and I would add one more, commitment. I’ve noticed that lack of clarity in their knowledge/understanding of class stages, purposes and objectives which are unclear and aimless; in addition, the lack of context in their lessons is also a major flaw. One of these teachers I’m talking about told me about her problems teaching the prepositions to 6th graders. She claimed having explained thoroughly what part of speech prepositions belong to and so on and so forth (without realizing about the implications of this). The problem is not grammar but the contents, and possible values you may come up with while revising, say, prepositions (if there’s any related whatsoever).
Without lessons designed to bring ideas to life, concepts such as honour, manifest destiny, or the water cycle, remain empty phrases to be memorized, depriving learners of the realization that ideas have power (p. 43), which is a serious matter if we think about it carefully. Let alone assessment. If we want to educate our students on a critical thinking basis, crafting assessments to evoke transferability is one of the skills we need to develop by finding out if students can take their learning and use it wisely, flexibly creatively in unknown settings (p.48) in other words: autonomy. Last not least, commitment, which is one of the, or THE issue, which would help to solve some of the curriculum hampers we need to deal with. As mentioned above, ideas have power, and I’m afraid that some teachers virtually ignore the real impact of this idea.
