Tag Archives: Writing Assessment

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

LLED 320: Group Presentation Organization & Writing Assessment, Part Two: Update for Tuesday, 25 January 2011

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After s brief presentation from Jenna on FoE Grad Photos by Artona, we got down to the business of LLED.

Group Presentation Organization

We developed the following schedule for the 20-minute presentations:

and here’s the task handout and the rubric for easy reference:

Writing Assessment Task, Part 2

As an intro, I mentioned that some goals for this task were to:

  • Introduce you to the Performance Standards
  • Encourage you to engage in professional conversations about assessment
  • Increase the reliability (repeatability of your measurement) and validity (were you right?) of your writing assessment
  • Examine how to determine weaknesses in writing and consider strategies to address these areas of need

Next, we did a Carousel Brainstorming / Graffiti activity aimed at listing strategies to address weaknesses in student writing.  Here’s how I structured the activity:

  • Each TC received a bullet point from the Not Yet Meeting column of the Grade 8 Writing Personal Essays and Opinions Quick Scale Here’s the list of all 10 bullet points: Gr 8 Writing PE & O QS NYM Bullet Points
  • Find others with your bullet point and get a piece of chart paper and a pen
  • Write your bullet point as the title on your paper
  • Brainstorm a list of ideas you could use in classroom instruction to address bullet point – the weakness in the student’s writing – for 2 minutes.
  • Move to a different paper when given the signal.
  • Add your ideas to the paper you’ve arrived at.
  • Repeat the “move and add” process.
  • When asked to stop moving, highlight the 2 or 3 best ideas on the page you have in front of you.
  • Report those ideas out to the class.

Asessing Your Writing Samples

At last, we got down to the assessment of the writing samples you’d brought to class.  Here’s the process we followed:

Your In-Class Writing Sample Assessment Task is due on Thursday, 3 February 2011.  You may choose to hand me a hard copy of the task in class or you may mail it to me (You’ll need to scan the writing samples into PDFs, I suppose).  Here’s the task handout for your reference:

Here are the parts that you must include when submitting the task:

  • The Task Write Up
    • Part 1: Analysis:
    • Part 2: Reflection
  • The Generic Rubric Sheet that shows your marking of the highest and lowest rated pieces.  Here’s a .doc file of that sheet: Writing Quick Scale Generic Rubric
  • The actual Quick Scale Rubric from the Performance Standard that you used to assessed the pieces
  • The writing samples themselves

Here’s an example of a task that you can look at to see a exactly what each piece of the puzzle should look like and how it should be put together.

I’ll set aside some time in class on Thursday, 27 Jan for assessment task-related questions, if you have them.

Assessment and Reporting Resources

While the assessment process is a complex one, there are many resources available to help you out.  One excellent source of information is the BC Ministry of Education website’s page on Classroom Assessment and Student Reporting.  On this page, you will find the following info:

Key Links and Resources

Other Related Resources

I reckon that’s enough for today.

Cheers,

– Lawrence

LLED 320 – Intro to Group Presentations & Start of the Writing Assessment Task: Update for Thursday, 20 January 2011

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Introduction to the Group Presentation Assignment

To start I showed you a sample handout and video prepared as part of a presentation on the Containers for Characters strategy that was delivered last year.  Here’s the handout:

To follow that up, we took time to:

  • Go over the task
  • Find groups
  • Make a tentative choice of a strategy to use as a presentation topic

Here’s the task sheet and the assignment rubric:

In Tuesday’s class, we will randomly choose the speaking order and formally assign topics.  Please make sure you have a back up topic in case your first choice is scooped up by another group.

Student Writing Assessment Task

The goal of this task and the work around it is to improve your assessment skills and to develop strategies for using assessment to inform instruction.

After looking at the task itself – here’s the handout: LLED 320 Writing Sample Assessment Handout – 2011 – we did the following:

We’ll follow up this class by looking at the connection between the Performance Standard Quick Scales and letter grades and by having you assess samples of the student writing you gathered on practicum.

As an extension to this assessment activity, you might be interested in checking out this short video that raises some interesting questions about the role of rubrics in writing assessment:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH3PSjh2G20[/youtube]

For LLED class on Tuesday, 25 Janurary 2010, please bring:

  • 4 to 6 student writing samples
  • A fully charged laptop

See you on then.

– Lawrence