Thinking like an assessor

What if only happenstance could lead students to understanding?

This is probably one of the most worrying problems we might have in our yearly planning. In fact, we tend to think more as designers of activities rather than as asssors as pointed out by Wiggins in Chapter 7.

This teaching habit has been caused by our urge and external pressure to motivate students. From my point of view, this intention should be regarded as something positive. We have become aware of the importance of students’ centered learning. Addittionaly, we have faced over last decades discipline problems in our students which have encouraged us to come up with highly interesting and amusing lessons. Unfortunately though, assessment has been overlooked. Wiggins explains that by just mere coincidence, happenstance in his own words, students can reach actual understanding.

We, as teachers of English, are likely to fall into the temptation of disregarding assessment. For instance, we might design a very resourceful unit about American culture and history but only design a test including only true and false and multiple choice ítems as an easy way to finísh up a unit. By contrast, if we end up this unit including questions aimed at contrasting, comparing and summarizing the most important ideas, we could guarantee successful understanding.

Wiggins says that “Selective response formats: multiple choice, matching pairs, true or false- in general provide insufficient (and sometimos misleading) evidence about understanding or its absence” (pag. 161). Instead, he proposes oral assessment, concept webs or portafolios which allow students to show their work and reveal their understanding.

In sum, to put it bluntly, shame on us if we, TEFL teachers, keep on thinking just as mere designers and not start viewing things as assesors, as well. We truly sacrifice understanding if we fail to use the backward design. In other words, we should ask ourselves what performances or products we would like to have by end of a unit so as to obtain solid understanding and not depend exclusively on happenstance for achieving successful understanding.

Backward Vs. Forward Planning

This kind of planning could be regarded as revolutionary by many teachers. As opposed to having a forward planning, the authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe propose a backward planning in which there is a dramatic shift towards thinking about the desired results. In other words, we carry out our planning with the aim in mind.

Despite the little time teachers have so as to implement a rather complex planning such as the Ubd template by Wiggins, it could enormously helpful to do it. It grants us the guidance and orientation to avoid the pointless coverage of contents and disconnected and isolated activities which frankly do not lead us to any satisfactory results.

Additionally, Wiggins points out the importance of the big ideas which I find extremely relevant to the planning teachers carry out every year. When planning a course, for example, we might stick to a text-based approach in the sense that decisions may be made based on the selections of readings. We might even end up very satisfied because we were able to cover all the skills required for the course in question. However, we have to pose ourselves the following questions:

Is this selection of texts going to be memorable for my students?
Does it include enduring understandings capable of causing knowledge transfer in them?

It called my attention, as well, the situation labeled by Wiggins as Goldilocks Problem. Inevitably, if the goals are too broad and ambitious, at some point, understandings and assessment will be confusing for students and even for the teacher. To illustrate this, let me give you an example taken from my professional experience. Once I expected my students to be able to recognize and discuss the key aspects from the English Dynasties as from the Anglo-Saxons to the Victorians. Consequently, at the end of the year this objective turned out to be overwhelming for both students and teacher, and worst of all, the historical review ended up being forgettable.

Luckily, by using the Ubd template by Grant Wiggins teachers can incorporate essential questions, transferable big ideas, established goals, key knowledge and skills as far as the desired results are concerned.
It could be intellectually challenging to start working with a planning model like this one. But it is high time we adhered to it.