Tag Archives: KUD

Little u & BIG U Understandings and Assessment: Update for Wednesday, 16 November 2011

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Administrivia


  • LLED 320 Timetable (Term 2): I proposed an alteration to the LLED 320 timetable.  I’ll confirm that it works for you in next Wednesday’s class
  • 2-Week Prac Unit Plan Conference Schedule: We passed around the sign up sheet.  Conferences are held with your FA.  The goal of this meeting is to help you get your head around your upcoming unit by clarifying your KUD and possible assessment.  Please bring your completed KUD table and any ideas you have on how to assess the degree to which your students grasp the KUD
  • 2-Week Prac Unit Plan Template: Here is a copy of the unit plan template Dave and I suggest that you use: UBD Unit Plan Template – Nov 11

KUD & Assessment

Rather than give you a long blurb on the connection between KUD and assessment, I thought I’d let you see an example of how results and assessment are connected and let you draw some conclusions from that experience.  So, here’s what we did:

  1. Looked over the handout: KUD, Performance Tasks, and Differentiating Instruction found here: KUD, Performance Tasks, and DI Handout.  The example related to a Science unit on weather.
  2. Considered what KUD students would need to have worked with in order to complete the assessment task.
  3. Designed another task based on the same KUD that used a different scenario

My goal here was to further clarify your understanding of KUD and show how it’s connected to assessment.  More to come on this in next Wednesday’s class.

– Lawrence

Classroom Observation Task Talk, Aoki Debrief, Powerful Inquiry Questions, & KUD Formative Assessment: Update for Monday, 14 November 2011

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Hang on tight as there’s a lot to cover here:

Classroom Observation Task Debrief

We used the Inside/Outside Circle strategy to process the information you gathered for the Classroom Observation Task.  At the end, we asked you to debrief the pros and cons of the strategy.

Aoki Debrief

Dave asked you to bring one a short piece of the Aoki text to share in class today.  You did so as part of a small group strategy called The Final Word.  This is a great strategy to use when you desire to develop the active listening skills of your students.

What makes a powerful inquiry question?


Seeing as today was our last inquiry-related reading, we thought we’d get you to look ahead and consider what a powerful inquiry question might look like.  To that end, we asked you to look over some questions from posed by last year’s TCs and the questions that Sims asked.  Then we asked you to complete this graphic organizer – The Frayer Model – as you considered the attributes, examples, non-examples and a graphic that fit with the question “What makes a good inquiry question?”.  Here’s the Frickin’, er… Frayer Model:

KUD Formative Assessment

After a brief review of the KUD definitions and a short blurb about the importance of KUD coherence – making sure each K and D fit with a U – I asked you to jot down your PLO and one item in each of the KUD boxes so I could formatively assess your understanding of the KUD writing process.  We’ll pick this thread up on Wednesday.

– LH

UBD Stage 1 – Desired Results (KUD): Update for Wednesday, 9 November 2011

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We forged ahead with our unit planning piece today starting with a Wordle of your one-word “I feel” responses to the UBD introductory PPT last session.  Here’s the Wordle:

Wordles are simple to create and can be a powerful teaching tool.

KUD Sort

In an effort to help you recognize the difference between:

  • K- know (facts, dates, vocab, definitions)
  • U – understand (“truths”, principles, theories, generalization, big ideas)
  • D – do (skills, behavioural outcomes)

We gave you a set of KUD statements (unidentified as such) and asked you to sort them into the category that they fit best.  Afterward, we did a Gallery Walk and checked your categorization against the Answer Key.

When a C4U indicated that understanding of each element of KUD was high, we developed KUD statements consistent with this Life Sciences: Ecosystems PLO from the Science 7 IRP:

  • Evaluate the human impacts on local ecosystems

We came up with a list of items under each heading and discovered that the PLO itself is actually a D – do, as it focuses on the skill that students should develop.  A K for this outcome would be a definition of ecosystem and a U could be that human actions impact ecosystems and/or organisms in an ecosystems are linked to one another.

To close, we asked you to apply your KUD understanding by choosing a PLO you’ll use on your 2-Week prac and developing a KUD chart for it.  Please bring this KUD chart to class on Monday, 14 November 2011.

Assignement Reminders

  • Reading #5 – Aoki Entrance Slip: Entrance Slip due on Saturday, 12 November 2011
  • Classroom Observation Task: Due via email or hard copy on Monday, 14 November 2011

 

– Lawrence

 

LLED 320 – Unit Plan Conferences, KUD, Performance Tasks & DI: Update for Thursday, 3 Feb 2011

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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):

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:

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:

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