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.