Understanding by Design Ch.1 / Modules A + F

I am very much on board with the idea of backwards design and focusing more on essential questions and reaching true understanding. It makes a lot of sense to me that if you want students to get to point X (true understanding/authentic performance) then you need to work backwards to the steps/skills students will need in order to reach your desired goal. It's like in the literacy that I wrote about- you don't just hope that students understand how to sail a strategic race (authentic performance/applicable to other sailing scenarios), but you need to teach them how to get their first- how to have a good start, how to determine which side of the course is favored, and even further back, how to, in a very basic sense, get their boat moving fast.

The notion of an authentic performance/task and an essential understanding seems to me one of the most important goals of education- who cares if you can recall the order of the 1st ten presidents if you can't explain how the American system of checks and balances is prone to an evolving expansion of executive power? After all, after school ends each day there is a whole other world out there; after a student graduates from high school or college, they need to enter the work force. For the critics who would say that the primary goal of education is to prepare students for a job, I would argue that UbD does just that. It gears the educational process towards a goal of skill building and growing thought, things that can be applied to other, non-academic situations.

I think that this aspect of UbD, the goal of performance and skill application ties in very well with the critics of textbook over-reliance. The authors in all three of our readings warned against relying solely on the textbook as curriculum, resource, and assessment tool (a holy trinity for lazy teachers?) but instead urge teachers to supplement their class materials with an array of sources. I think that using other sources besides the textbook will naturally lead the teacher to shift from focusing on content-acquisition to skill-building. I see this in my experience with the middle school girl, Eowyn, that I tutor a few times a week. Her Social Studies teacher does the usual "read this section, answer these questions, our test will be comprised of the content you've read- know who these people are and what happened, but don't worry, if you can memorize things you'll be golden- and if you can't, if maybe you have executive functioning weaknesses or maybe because you act developmentally like a middle schooler, well, you're kind of screwed because I'm just going to tell your parents that you aren't "applying yourself" enough, that you aren't trying hard enough." Nothing about Eowyn's Social Studies class or assignments are appealing or engineered to get her to think about American history as one experience of many that can be analyzed in terms of big themes. And I'm kind of in a difficult spot too- her father pays be to tutor her with the expectation that her grades come up. I know that her teacher is only assessing her on the basic levels of Bloom's- recall/explain/comprehend... do I use the little time we have together to try to teach her to think in the ways that UbD would applaud? Honestly, no, I don't. Because I feel like at her age it is more important that I do the job I've been asked to do, to help her grades come up. She's becoming more and more confident as an academic and a person as I've taught her tips and tricks to study well enough to ace such a basic test. To me it's more important the the relationship between her and her father improves (as the grades go up) and that she starts to think of her self as "smart" (because she gets a good grade). This whole thing may seem insanely cynical and antithetical to all we've been taught here, but I feel like I am just being extremely pragmatic.

Anyways, to shift gears, something that I haven't worked out, however, is the challenge os assessment and grading. This isn't exactly a mental hurdle just about UbD, but a quote in the text brought my issues to the surface. In What is Backward Design? the authors explain that, "because understanding develops as a result of ongoing inquiry and rethinking, the assessment of understanding should be thought of in terms of a collection of evidence over time instead of an event- a single moment-in-time test at the end of instruction- as so often happens in current practice" (13) On my copy of the reading I wrote collection of evidence vs. test @ end  }  what's a grade? growth vs. production. This was a line of thinking that had been sparked by our discussion in last week's class- that we have to give out grades, that we, ultimately, are expected to determine the value of a student's performance in a numeral. But then, after reading this chapter, I'm thinking now that if one of the big ideas of UbD is to get students to think critically and to develop better skills of expression, couldn't you argue that it may be acceptable to grade students based on their growth? Especially at the middle school age, when students are developmentally on the fence of concrete and abstract thinking, playing it safe and taking risks, and when each of your students will be at a different place on that developmental scale, couldn't it make a lot of sense to grade them on their overall growth?  Not sure yet how to continue to justify this, but I'm starting to think I'm onto something.