Well, today’s class didn’t go quite as I’d envisioned.  In my mind, I spent too much time talking and, as a result, we didn’t get done all that I had hoped we would.  Anyway, here’s what we did accomplish:

Writing Tasks In

I’ve collected the pieces and will mark them over the next two weeks or so.  There’s a lot of them!

Assessment Q&A

I took some time to address some of the assessment questions that you had posed on exit slips at the end of a previous class.

Unit Planning: Individual Conferences

I’ve cancelled class on Thursday, 10 Feb 2011 to set aside some time for 15-minute conferences about your unit plans.  Also, to ensure that I had times set aside that suited everybody’s schedule, I also will be holding meetings on Tuesday, 15 Feb and Thursday, 24 Feb.  Here’s the schedule (as of 3 Feb):

• LLED 320 Integrated Unit Plan Conferences Schedule

In preparation for this meeting, please prepare the following items and bring them along to the conference:

• Subject and topic of your unit (Science & Water systems, for example)
• Key PLOs related to your topic
• Desired Results / KUD (Knowledge, Understanding, and Do/Skills) for your unit
• Rough ideas on assessment for your unit.
• Ideas on how you might be able to integrate some aspect of LA – writing, representing, reading, viewing, speaking, or listening – into one of the unit’s lessons

Unit Planning: Goals, Performance Tasks, and Differentiated Instruction

I attended a Pro D Workshop last Friday with Cindy Strickland from ASCD.  She is a Differentiated Instruction guru doing work playing with and extending the DI thinking of Carol Tomlinson.  Seeing as the information I picked up was very relevant to our work on unit planning, I thought I’d share it with you in this class.

Here were my goals:

• Demonstrate a way to outline a unit’s goals using a KUD framework
• Show how performance tasks can be developed as a means for students to show their attainment of the KUD
• Illustrate how performance tasks can be differentiated to better meet the needs of all students
• Allow you to apply your understanding of performance tasks and differentiation to a unit you’re developing for the long practicum.

After showing a short PPT on clouds – Clouds PPT Slideshow– to get you up to speed with what information the students working on this weather unit had been working with, I showed you an example of three summative performance tasks for the weather unit and asked you to determine, by looking at the tasks, what you thought the KUD of the unit was.  In other words, what did the teacher expect her students to Know, Understand, and Do that was related to clouds?

After that, you thought of other final product scenarios that the students could complete that would show their KUD but tap into different student interests and abilities.  This is where the differentiation piece came in.

How can we, as teachers, provide varied opportunities for students to show us what they know?  As we answer this question, we can start to find ways to differentiate our instruction and our assessment in ways that are responsive to the needs of all students.

Here’s the handout we used in class:

• Integrated Unit Plan – KUD, Performance Tasks, and DI

Unit Planning: GRASPS Peformance Tasks

Performance tasks are summative assessments that are:

• personalized
• open-ended
• complex
• based on real-world work
• aimed at an identified audience

The Understanding By Design (UBD) unit planning model we’ve been working with in 310 class promotes the design of performance tasks based on the features suggested by the acronym GRASPS:

• G=goal
• R=role
• A=audience
• S=situation
• P=product, performance, & purpose
• S=standards & criteria

We analyzed the cloud unit performance tasks through the lens of the GRASPS aspects and then did one of two things:

1. Looked at other performance tasks to see how they demonstrated the GRASPS elements
2. Developed a GRASPS based performance task for a unit you’ll be teaching on the long prac.

Here’s a handout with all sorts of info related to performance tasks, including a handy dandy list of Possible Student Roles and Audiences in addition to Possible Products and Performances:

• GRASPS Performance Task Package

Haikus Handed In

As a ticket out the door, I collected your 3 haiku poems.  We’ll be revising these in a future lesson seeing as we ran out of time this class.

– Lawrence