- Clearly define what students must know/understand/and be able to do from your standards. In other words, determine what your curriculum will be from your standards. First determine it with clarity for yourself, then write student-friendly learning targets for students to make it clear for them.
- After the learning is clarified, write your assessments. This makes sure it is clear to you what students have to do to demonstrate understanding in order to focus your instruction. Be sure to assess what the verbs in your learning targets state that students should do, not assess the memorized minutiae that surrounds the target. Make sure your assessments assess what matters and gathers reliable evidence of understanding.
- Now that what student mastery looks like has been determined in the assessment, you can now design instructional activities and experiences that help students reach mastery.
This is the essence of backwards design, which has been considered best practice for quite a few years now. Determine what the learning is you need students to do, plan for how you will assess the learning, and then plan for how students will do and achieve the learning. It's pretty much the exact opposite of what I used to do as a beginning teacher, which was teach a while bunch of science stuff that was in the book and then make a test after we reached the end of a chapter.
It's also the exact opposite of what PARCC and Smarter Balanced are doing with the Common Core assessment development process. We have some standards that teachers are using to establish a Common Core curriculum and we have teachers designing instruction aligned to that curriculum, but what about the assessment? Sure, we have a handful of sample items on a website and other sites that have developed sample lessons and units. Hell, the State of Illinois is even piloting a Model Math Curriculum right now for the common core in some schools (including the middle school in my current district).
But is anyone really sure what that assessment will actually look like in the end? Illinois is a PARCC state, and, from the sample items I've seen so far, it looks like there's a lot of the same old standardized testing nonsense wrapped up in a pretty and shiny technology wrapper. I am all for the spirit in which the Common Core was written; what I am against is an assessment that doesn't match that spirit. (If the skills in the Common Core can actually be measured in the way that PARCC is envisioning....)
But I'm still stuck on the fact that I don't really know what the test will look like. And if I don't really know what the test will look like, how can I or anyone else for that matter have any sort of clarity regarding what my students will have to know, understand, and be able to do in order to demonstrate mastery?
Where is our assessment? How come PARCC and Smarter Balanced can get away with the poor practice of developing the assessment after instruction has taken place, leaving teachers to guess at what mastery looks like and hope for the best once the tests are administered?
