ANGELS AND DEVILS........

The challenge is to think backwards: What do I do then with the text book imposed by the institution I work for? How can I justify the money parents spent on this textbook if it is not the core of my lessons? Will everybody trust my own criteria if it is not stated in a textbook written by “experts”? I will need more time to think…..it is easier to follow the textbook…..These, among others, are the ideas that the little devil on every teacher shoulder whispers every time we face a new unit.

Wiggins this time plays the role of the little angel, advising us to do the right thing.

In a way I feel that backward design is even easier than the traditional design way. As the author clearly states it, it is a matter of common sense, what do I want from my students? How can they show they understand? And only then What should I do to provide them with the enabling skills to fulfill our goals. My question is…..
If it is that obvious…why is it that we have been working the other way around for centuries? Maybe the evil has been stronger than the poor angel or maybe the angel did not have the right justifications to convince us, teachers.

Talking about sins….maybe teachers are too egocentric…We always focus on teaching when the goal is learning!
Teaching is at the service of learning and not the other way around, and teachers should be at the service of our student’s understanding and of course, out of question…NOT the other way around….
I think it is time to start doing things the right way (this, by the way has been my conclusion in all the chapters).We already read about the importance of clear goal setting, therefore let’s focus on that, then we have to detect evidence of understanding, to do so we need to pull the right strings, meaning the right assessing instruments and finally, methods to obtain understanding.
By following these steps we are replicating the natural order of life, don’t you think?

Discussion: Let’s listen to the angel on our right shoulder; our students will be thankful for that and our consciences too.

My feeling is that we have to move from the world of assessing correctness to the dimension of understanding. The question is HOW can we measure understanding? This chapter provides us with a clear description of what criteria based assessment is.
These criteria must specify the final results that we expect our students to achieve. These criteria have to be presented to them before hand so that they know what the aspects on which they are going to be assessed are and of course after evidence of understanding is shown, the correspondent feedback has to take place, in this way we are leading our students towards a higher level in the understanding continuum.

The chapter also explains what rubrics are and they use we can give them when assessing. They describe degrees of quality, proficiency or understanding along a continuum. That sounds absolutely fair.
I am sure that every single student has faced the frustrating situation of feeling that in spite of having complete control over a determined content, the assessing device used to evaluate his understanding in some way or another went against success. Now that we know that assessing is much more than correctness, we cannot allow that situations like this happen again.
Here is the point where validity and reliability play a very important role when devising an assessment instrument. We have to make sure that “the performances we demand from students are appropriate to the particular understandings sought”, in other words we have to evaluate what we first stated as our goals when planning our lessons, and the inferences we have to make from the results obtained must be based exclusively on what we are aiming at, not more, not less.

Not an easy task , we might think, specially if assessing correctness is far much easier, faster and cleaner than assessing understanding. But we have to do our job correctly. That is what we are paid for, not only in terms of money but in terms of the expectations of those young souls sitting in front of us every day, for some of them education is the only way to have access to a decent life, let’s have that in mind the next time we set our goals.

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying."

“Rather than using a single test, of one type, at the end of teaching, effective teacher-assessors gather lots of evidence along the way, using a variety of methods and formats.”

The first part of this quote made me think about Bachman’s definition of assessment seen in class. We have to GATHER evidence of learning from our students in a systematic way, that is to say all along the process and not only at the end of teaching.
There are multiple ways of gathering this precious evidence, not only the classical test and quizzes we are so used to. In fact, “Understanding is revealed in performance, thus, assessment for understanding must be grounded in authentic performance based tasks.”
We have to face our students to real problems that will trigger transfer from their previous experiences. There is no point in creating false situations where both, teachers and students know that its only aim is to assess a determined content and that its future is to be forgotten and never used by the student.
I am also thinking about formative assessment v/s summative assessment. If our final goal is to really use assessment for learning, then we have to systematically gather our students’ weaknesses and strengths in order to later provide them with the necessary feedback they need to improve their performance. If we only assess them at the end of a period, no feedback is possible and as we can read in this week chapter, “Learning is maximized when cycles of perform-feedback-revise-perform guide the production of high quality products.”
Finally I would like to attempt to answer the question “What kind of evidence do we need to find hallmarks of our goals, including that of understanding?
I think our goals are fulfilled and we can claim that our students really UNDERSTOOD when they are truly able to solve real problems using the contents given in class, when they can manipulate information, techniques and even situations to fulfill a task, when the feeling of having solved a real problem is the final taste of our classes.

Which way shall we go?

“Which way I ought to go from here?
That depends where you want to get to.
I don’t much care where, so long as I get somewhere”

Lewis Caroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Which way shall we take to finally develop valuable, useful and usable skills in our students?
It depends where we want to lead them, and different from careless Alice’s response, we ought to know WHERE we go.

To know where we are going we have to establish clear goals.
Goals must be long-term because in that way we can clarify what to teach and what to leave aside.
Otherwise, as the author states, “Deep understandings of transferable big ideas fall through the cracks of lessons devoted to developing unconnected and unprioritized content”.
The perfect complement for well established goals are Essential Questions, which apart from eliciting true understanding and promoting transferability, have the power of highlighting the big ideas that form the very core of any design.
Clear goals will lead us to set an also clear range of skills to be developed.
Inside this broad concept of skills I found very interesting the analysis of enabling skills. We sometimes take for granted that our students are able to perform tasks that usually go beyond their control or nobody has ever taught them before, like talking in front of an audience, developing computer based tasks, etc. If we want them, let’s say to perform a nice and smooth presentation, we must develop additional skills, not just the content based ones.

In crystallizing our goals inside the classroom, we may encounter different problems, also described in this chapter, where established goals are too big, too small, too vague or too many. As a solution for this, the chapter suggests “unpacking” standards, which means to identify the big ideas and core tasks inside them and combine that with essential questions, giving birth to the precious transfer.
We already know what Essential Questions are; big ideas are the ones in charge of establishing priorities inside our students’ minds, through them they will know what is or is not worth paying attention to making learning effective and efficient.

How can we identify big ideas then? The author proposes tips to do so; I found number four very interesting. If the unit on…is a story, what’s the moral of the story?
The answer to that question necessarily needs from the students to mix his inner world with the topic to be developed, it requires transfer. Straight to the point, efficient, but at the same time elegant and human. Perfect.

Coming back to Wonderland…..I do not want to get somewhere, my goals are clearer and I do care.

Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

We know that questions are the most often used strategy applied by teachers after lecturing and since we have clear that standing in front of a class and do all the talking is the deadliest sin a teacher can commit, let’s eliminate that item from the list.
Now, after lecturing is gone, the first place is for questions. But….any kind of questions? The ones in the textbook? The ones that I am going to include in the next test? No….Essential questions.

What are “essential” questions?

This chapter tells us about this kind of questions and how they can make a difference when teaching. We can transform our class from a dull, non-sense asking and answering machine into an instance of thinking, analyzing , transferring information from previous experiences into the class, so as to make it as close as possible to the “real context” we are always looking for so badly.
Essential questions are the ones that make the minds of our students work, the ones that trigger all the potential inside their brains.

When I read a text like this , my deepest concern is to relate what I am reading with theories I know or have heard about ( I am transferring…GOOD!), and in this opportunity Bloom’s taxonomy and Krashen’s i+1 hypotheses came to my mind.


“Essential questions do not refer to the topic content but to the big ideas that cut across units and courses.”

It is not the same to ask our students what colors are there in the picture? than what do you think colors in the picture mean?. The first one can be answered mechanically, whereas the second requires deep, critical thought, the student is invoking all the ideas in his mind, to give an answer. What a difference right? BUT:

What happens if my student is engaged, he is transferring information from that day when he went to a place with his mother to see what color her soul was and the woman said purple and purple meant sadness and so on and so forth…BUT he can hardly manage basic vocabulary, he will not be able to answer my question in spite of having the answer. I have faced this situation and I can see frustration in that student’s face.
Was it my fault to ask a question unanswerable with the tools that students have?
I know I have to provide my students with input that goes just one step beyond their level of command of the language. (Here is the part where Krashen was haunting me)
My question is…how can I harmonize the level of my students with deep, thought provoking questions?







Regarding Bloom’s taxonomy:

Essential questions require students to evaluate, synthesize and analyze therefore, essential questions can be found at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy.

That made me think about the teachers that came before me in my student’s lives.
If they were never taught to go beyond the simplest level of mind work which is knowledge, they will not be able to answer the essential questions.
Our Chilean culture is shy, always afraid of giving opinions; therefore the challenge is not only to elicit language from my students but also to leave aside that shy side of them.

All I can say is that the text states it very wisely: Asking essential questions is an art and it is a must when developing critical thinking in our students, overcoming language levels and cultural features. How? That is our challenge.

“Understanding is the result of facts acquiring meaning for the learner:
To grasp the meaning of a thing is to see it in its relations to other things: to see how it operates or functions, what uses it can be put to. The relation of means consequence is the center and heart of all understanding.”


When I read this, I immediately thought about the idea of Teaching in context. Again we can see the importance of teaching a language as a whole and by no means as isolated items or grammar formulas as it was thought in the past.
Reasons? Very simple, if we teach pieces of language for our students to memorize, we are developing empty knowledge and not meaningful understanding.




“Doing something correctly, therefore, is not by itself, evidence of understanding: It might have been an accident . TO UNDERSTAND IS TO HAVE DONE IT IN THE RIGHT WAY,OFTEN REFLECTED IN BEING ABLE TO EXPLAIN WHY A PARTICULAR SKILL, APPROACH,OR BODY OF KNOWLEDGE IS OR IS NOT APPROPRIATE IN A PARTICULAR SITUATION.

Of course, a student can memorize thousand of words, formulas or whatever you ask him to, and if you do that, you will possibly also test all those items and mark them.
But what for? That student can easily get a 7, since he memorized everything just as you taught him, but is he going to be able to use those items in situations different from the ones that appeared in his text book? (If any), I don’t think so.



Understanding is about TRANSFER, to be truly able requires the ability to transfer our knowledge effectively involves the capacity to take what we know and use it creatively ,fluently ,in different settings, ON OUR OWN.
That requires an education in how to plug in specific facts or formulas.

On our own, those are the key words. If we want autonomous individuals, with ideas and opinions, critical thinkers able to agree or disagree and willing to express intelligent and coherent ideas then we have to train them on how to use the abilities learned in previous experiences when facing new challenges, in other words, how to TRANSFER.
This concept also reminded me of my neurolinguistic classes in pregrado and the empty slots to be filled with new info. transferred from our mother tongue. That was always an interesting topic for me and now that I find it again here, I am more convinced that teaching English is far beyond teaching about English.







Evidence of misunderstanding is incredibly valuable to teachers, not a mere mistake to be corrected. It signifies an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer. The challenge is to reward the try without reinforcing the mistake or dampening future transfer attempts
Error analysis is a very interesting field that is not very often approached by teachers.

Our student’s errors are a precious source of information for us, again, remembering linguistics in pregrado I was thinking about this concept of “overgeneralization” that I found pretty fascinating. For example, a student thinking that “fishes” is the plural for “ fish” is over generalizing the rule for plurals, that can be considered an error, but if you think about it, the student IS transferring previous knowledge, so the mechanism in his brain is in fact working, so we have to feel satisfied with it and help him internalize the concept of exceptions then.
Pretty interesting……

Testing this thing....