"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.