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.
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This is true my dear; we sometimes are extremely worried about fulfilling UTP’s requirements, planning deadlines, the school principal's, parents' and the students' themselves demands that we do not often focus and lose sight on checking whether students are really learning. In order for this to happen carrying out coherent and effective assessments practice at classrrom level ought to be one essential question to answer. Of course when being immmersed in the daily teaching environment we are somehow forced by internal and external pressure mostly and, in fact, assessment is generally overlooked as you refer. It is always easier to design a yes/no answer test rather than making use of other assessment instruments to get the evidence out of the students that sometimes know, understand and know how to transfer what they learn, but because we do not normally design coherent and effective assessments instruments, we cannot get valuable evidence to check and confirm our assumptions.
ResponderEliminarThe questions you make are of course the ones we should always reflect on, my dear colleague.
Dear Roberto,
ResponderEliminarAs you mention above, it's quite difficult for us to become this sort of 'perfect teacher' who guides his students into real understanding, through exposing them to challenging tasks, such as summarizing, comparing or contrsating ideas. But why is it that difficult? I think one of the reasons is that we were not taught to be that kind of teacher; besides, in public schools the conditions are not given. We have to consider the lack of resources and the lack of motivation most teachers have.
It's a very hard task to fight against all these problems and many teachers are tired of fighting. Anyway, it's a beautiful challenge some teachers are willing to take, and I think we are some of those teachers, we still have hope and we are working hard to become one of those 'good teachers'.
"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"
ResponderEliminarWe will continue doing this until the day policy makers, and school directors decide to really improve the system. Under our work conditions at schools, it is really difficult not to fall into the fill-the-gap temptation. As Scarlette and Eduardo said, it's difficult to carry out this changes alone, it's not imposible, but really hard to convince people to follow new tendencies when our school system is still part of the national business.
Still a long way to go through.
how can we be perfect teacher?, can you even think about how different evereything will be if we have read all these articles while we were undergraduate students?, I think that now we are willing to make a change in our practices, we want to be "the perfect teacher" the one that teach transferavle contents, the one who really question what their students are learning, it does not matter how long it will take us to be "perfects", we must go on trying, never think that it is impossible.
ResponderEliminar