go through Terry Heck
What are the simple challenges of data-based teaching? Two simple problems are teachers’ lack of planning time to create assessments and use the data produced by those assessments, and the reality that many assessments are not designed for teachers or students. That is, they produce anything of real value to the teaching process.
Note: If you don’t have a data plan before taking the evaluation, you’re already behind. Among assessment challenges, this concept—as it applies to formal academic classrooms designed to promote mastery of academic standards—comes close to the top.
Without an instructional design that embeds direct input into a dynamic curriculum map, assessment is just a hurdle for students—one they might clear, or one that might trip them—and you need to do more work.
Let’s talk about how much we (as teachers) love hurdling for others.
This is the third time in a few weeks that I’ve written about an assessment, which usually means that something is bothering me and I can’t figure out what.exist Continuously develop our programwhich I arguably state that “units” and “courses” are personalized learning.
In short, most planning templates in most schools that most teachers use on most days do not allow for easy assimilation of data. They are not designed for students, but for courses. Their audience is not students or the community, but administrators and colleagues.
These are industrial documents.
Depending on the grade level and content area you teach, and how your courses are packaged, how you should and can reasonably handle data may vary. But roughly speaking, teachers administer tests and tests and do their best to “re-teach”. Even in highly functional professional learning communities, teachers fall behind before the first test.
Their teaching is not ready for data.
What should the assessment “do”?
exist The most important questions every assessment should answer, I outline the biggest of many great ideas around tests, quizzes, and other snapshots of understanding—information.In short (depending on assessment format, purpose, context, type, etc.), the main function of assessment in a dynamic learning environment is to Instructions to provide data to modify plans. It will tell you where to go next.
Unfortunately, they’re not always used this way, even if they are. Instead, they are high-level plays that students “pass” or “fail.” They are questions of the professional learning community and artifacts of the “data team”.they are designed Function Instead, go around showing off and making a splash.
In the PLC and data teams, the goal is to establish a standardized process to improve teaching and learning incrementally, but the details and processes in these teaching improvement tools can focus on what they are supposed to do. We learn how to “become proficient” in the PLC and data teams, just as students “become proficient” when taking exams.it’s crazy and backward No wonder education hates innovation.
To teach your students, you have to know what they will and won’t do. What they can or cannot do. “They” also doesn’t refer to the class, but to the students. That student – what do they seem to know? How did you measure it and how much trust do you have in that measurement? This is basic, and in academic institutions, more or less “true”.
However, the constructivist model is incompatible with many existing educational forms and structures. Constructivism relies on learners’ own knowledge creation over time through reflection and iteration—seemingly resisting modern forms of assessment that seek to pop up, snap a snapshot, and pop.
These snapshots are taken in courses or units with no “frame” waiting for them; they are just grades and measurements, with little hope of substantively changing how and when students learn content.
Teachers as Learning Designers
Here are teaching practice questions that work behind the scenes. What teachers believe, and how those beliefs inform their practice, including assessment design and data management.
exist Classroom Assessment Practices and Teacher Self-Assessment SkillsZhicheng Zhang, and Judith A. Burry-Stock separate ‘assessment practice and assessment skills’, explaining that they are ‘related but structured differently. The former is concerned with assessment activities, while the latter reflects an individual’s perception of their skill level for carrying out these activities . This may explain why teachers perceive their assessment skills to be good, even though they were found to be poorly prepared for classroom assessment in several areas.”
Assessment design cannot exist independently of instructional design or curriculum design.
In an Inconvenient Assessment of Truth, I said “Designing precise and personalized assessments is a remarkable job This illuminates the way forward for individual students – perhaps too much for one teacher to do this consistently for every student. ” This is a challenge, not because personalized learning is hard, but because when you use traditional units (e.g., genre-based units in English Language Arts) and basic learning models (e.g., direct instruction, basic grouping, layers, etc.)
If you change tools, you can change machines; if you change machines, you can change tools. The question that can then be asked is: how do we design learning along chronological (time) and conceptual (content) boundaries, so that learning requires data to create itself? Adaptive learning algorithms in some #edtech products are written in these codes. So, how do we carry out this face-to-face, nose-to-book, pen-to-hand operation?
That’s critical, isn’t it, if we stick to a data-driven, research-based model of education reform?
Different Types of Backward Programs
Assessments are data creation tools. Why collect data if you don’t use it? It’s all pretty simple: don’t do an assessment unless the data actually changes *that* student’s future learning.
Think about what an assessment can do. Give students the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge. Acts as a microscope, allowing you to examine what they seem to understand. Make students feel good or bad. Motivate or frustrate students. Decertification of an otherwise authentic learning experience.
Think about what you can do with assessment data as a teacher. Report to others. Assign an arbitrary alphanumeric symbol and hope it symbolizes student achievement, but can we really agree on what it means? Forward it to a colleague, parent or student. Overreacting to this. Misunderstood it. ignore it. Use it to make you feel good or bad about your teaching – like you’re “holding students accountable” with “high standards” or that no matter what you do, it’s still not enough.
Grant Wiggins (whose work I often guzzle about) and colleague Jay McTighe are known for their Understanding by Design template, which relies on backward design thinking.That is, when we design learning, we start with the end in mind heart. These “purposes” are often problems of comprehension – I want students to know this, be able to write or solve this, etc.
But what if we design backwards from the data points? Here, data isn’t necessarily “the end,” but somewhere near the middle, serving a nobler cause. Around this midpoint, we will build mechanisms to receive and react to this information.
We’d have a system that expects a certain amount of “skilled” and “unskilled”.Two weeks into “units” (if we stick to units), we’re waiting for very critical data from a range of different assessments (maybe non-threat assessment? ) so we know what to do and where to go next. We had plans before we even started.We are ready to use data to essentiallymodifying our plans gracefully and humanely. We can’t move forward without this data, otherwise we are ridiculous.
We keep the conveyor belt running while bottles fall off the conveyor belt around us.
Adapted image attributed to flickr user vancouverfilmschool
