104 Assignment 3

As I approach the end of my UbD unit on animal adaptations and reflect on my grading and parent-teacher conferences, I am thinking hard about the methods by which I assess my students and how reliable they are. Chapter 7 of Understanding by Design, "Thinking Like An Assessor", pushed my thinking even further on the subject. It really helped me to see the three stages of unit planning once again and where assessments fit into this. I am tempted to plan activities and lessons before I know the end result, but I also need to make sure that the end result provided valid proof of my students' understanding.

For the current UbD unit on animal adaptations, I think the assessment planned (almost entirely by the other third grade teacher) does fit the guidelines as a performance task that pushes critical thinking and requires deeper understanding of the material. We are planning on giving a test where students have to create their own animal and describe its adaptations and describe how they help it to survive. Without ever consciously considering the GRASPS elements before, it fits well into the criteria.

Having a unit test in my plans that illustrates the UbD definition of a valuable assessment is incredibly helpful in digesting the information in this chapter. However, now I need to learn how to create my own assessments based on this model and apply them to different units (not just science and social studies). For example, when I am teaching spelling, grammar and mechanics, I carry the underlying idea that I want my students to be able not only to know these rules but to use them effortlessly in their own writing. However, I have not yet formally assessed their writing along these measures. If I can't be clear about what I want my students to produce with these skills, how can I teach them and how can they learn? And going back to the six facets of understanding, how do I push my students to the ultimate level of self-knowledge about the skills they have learned? This seems particularly crucial in teaching reading, where I want my students to be able to (and they need to be able to, according to the DRA) name the strategies they are using and evaluate themselves on their abilities to do so. It's much harder to know where to start at this point in the year with ongoing standards, unlike in the UbD units that come and go.

As I finished the chapter, the final anecdote reminded me why learning the UbD perspective is so important with this quote: "one thing that has always disturbed me is that the kids tend to focus on their grades rather than on their learning. Perhaps the way I've used assessments--more for grading purposes than to document learning--has contributed to their attitude" (171). When it all comes down to it, I want my students to realize at the end of a unit or the end of the school year that they have come away with valuable knowledge and skills that will stay with them for a long time, instead of just a grade on a paper. I need to teach and assess them in a way that reflects this at all times.