Thinking like an Assessor

UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Grant Wiggins and Jay Mc Tighe
Chapter 7
Thinking like an assessor


“How do I know they really know?”

Well, another important task to carry out: To assess. As all of us know what assessment is, I’d like to start briefly defining this crucial and complex term. According to the author, assessment is “the act of determining the extent to which the desired results are on the way to being achieved and to what extent they have been achieved” (p.6). In other words, we need clear evidence of understanding and we are supposed to gather it somehow. We as teachers sometimes fear assessment and evaluation because we don’t understand it and, therefore, cannot gain control over it. Somehow we have to decide what students must know and how they are to demonstrate knowledge and understanding. And all this process leads us to wonder a couple of questions: How well are students learning? How effectively are teachers teaching? And more importantly, we as teachers must be clear about the following questions: To what extent do the assessments provide valid, reliable and sufficient measures of the desired results? What will students do to show me they understand? What is the most appropriate assessment(s) method? So as we can see, many questions emerge from this very “simple” word that must be crystal clear for us as teachers, and a very general definition of the purpose of assessment has to do with the documents we gather regarding the students’ movement from knowledge and skills to critical reasoning and communication and that it informs instruction and lesson design. Regarding this last word DESING, we teachers tend to be “activity designers” rather than “assessors”, which is crucial to be clear about. And here is a checklist to notice this difference.

Backwards design (assessor) vs. traditional design (activity designer)
Assessor’s design:
Ø Requires sufficient and revealing evidence of understanding
Ø Distinguishes between those who really understand and those who don’t.
Ø Has distinguishing work criteria
Ø Checks for predetermined misunderstandings
Activity designer’s design:
Ø Looks for interesting and engaging activities on topic.
Ø Identifies available resources and materials.
Ø Thinks about what students will be doing in and out of class and what assignments will be given
Ø Wonders if the activities worked – why or why not


We need to know the learner’s thought process along with their answers

Gaining Clarity on our Goals

UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Grant Wiggins and Jay Mc Tighe
Chapter 3
Gaining Clarity on Our Goals


“Teachers = Sinners?”

I would like to start saying that “I believe in God” and that I regret from my sins that probably I have done before since I have realized from a new one: “the aimless content of my lessons”, i.e., there is no guiding intellectual purpose or clear priorities which frame the learning experience. Unfortunately, this is a big and common problem because we as teachers sometimes do not have enough time to prepare everything properly as we have to deal with “coverage” of all the contents meant to be developed through a school period previously established; therefore, we sometimes tend to use isolated activities with no clear aim on its contents or there is no intellectual purpose on it. For example, there is no intellectual purpose when we play games without planning them adequately, let’s say, “The Hangman”, the most useless or aimless one, as somebody mentioned once. However, that’s not an excuse to avoid correct planning for my lessons as a teacher. I have to ask questions and find the answers for them, such as “What is the point? What is the important big idea here? Why should the students learn this? When doing so, I can say that there is a clear purpose of my teaching activities or lessons. Therefore, it is relevant to consider that the remedy for this problem is to consider explicit big ideas as a guide for the teaching process and a concrete plan for ensuring the learning process. And obviously the most relevant aspect is to consider and perform the “Backward design”, which calls for us as teachers to make our goals or standards specific and concrete, in terms of assessment evidence, as we teachers begin to plan a unit or course.