Reflection for 11/15
Happy Early Thanksgiving! (I will say it now, as we do not have class scheduled for next week. 
Objective Update: I was really pleased to have an opportunity to gather feedback on our objectives last week in class. It’s funny how the objective writing process works…
1. An individual writes the objectives that he/she thinks are flawless and precise.
2. A group of individuals dissects the individual’s objectives and determines that they were neither flawless nor precise.
3. Group of individuals draft new objectives. They feel confident that their objectives are better than the individual’s objectives. The group assumes that this set may not be absolutely precise and may be imperfect.
4. Group of individuals bring objectives to a larger forum. Objectives are found to be imprecise, slightly confusing, and imperfect.
5. Using feedback from the forum, group rewrites objectives and prays that no larger consortium ever spend a block of time analyzing said objectives. Objectives are left in a state of constant revision.
Ok, maybe it wasn’t all that bad.
I am glad that we had time to work together as a group to look over our objectives and really get to the “meat & potatoes” of what we want the kids to know. I am also glad that we were able to rework our objectives with the larger class (and Cynthia’s) feedback to make them more readily understandable and measurable. I am looking forward to meeting up with my group again to do a final (for now) revision of the objectives and see where that leaves us. (Later, I know we will want to review our objectives as we are teaching the unit and upon its completion.)
As I consider the objective creation process, my thoughts wander to the application of this “Unit Objectives Creation Process” in my everyday teaching…
On creating objectives as a group…. I have found that planning with others is a valuable activity. I learn so much about content – and how to teach it – when I work with other professionals to write lesson plans, craft assessments, and evaluate student work. I gravitate toward teachers who also thrive off this model of group planning (for example: Mrs. Buck!).
On our daily teaching/learning objectives… I think that we (Janet, Tonya – our fearless special educator, and I) often orally go through the same objective creation criteria when we meet to plan SS and LA. We think about what we want the kids to know and then come up with a means to reach those ends. We discuss student learning in terms of quantity of information and precise language. We always think about how much kids need to know about a certain topic and what score they will need to achieve on an assessment to prove mastery of a topic or skill. We also try to create scoring rubrics and checklists that tell kids exactly what we want to them to do/know.
So, I guess the objective creation process is not so far from what we do everyday. We just don’t write it down (which seems to make it so much simpler!). I think working on the set of objectives for our writing unit is helping me to create other sets of objectives for current units being taught and those I will teach in the future. It’s nice to have an opportunity to look at a unit in isolation and spend a good amount of quality time hashing out what we want kids to know and be able to do.
In other news… I hope that we will have time to talk more about UD assessment before we are set forth to create assessments for our unit. I understand that we will be using three different types of assessment. I also plan to create a rubric or other grading criteria list for each type of assessment we will use. I think I am most confused about the assessment reporting format you would like us to use. I also hope that we may find time in class to work on this aspect of the project – as finding other opportunities to work together is a quite difficult for our group.
Hope you are having a great week! See you Thursday!
Reflection | Comment (1)One Response to “Reflection for 11/15”
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I’m glad that you are finding the time we’re spending on learning objectives to be valuable. I believe that it’s the most important aspect of curriculum development. Sometime after I got home from class last week my husband asked what we did that evening, and I told him that we critiqued learning objectives. He made some sarcastic comment like, “Oh, how riveting…” But I actually get into it!
I hadn’t broken down the process into the 5 steps you’ve identified, but I suppose you’re right about it. Of course, this only happens in a graduate level course where it’s required and there’s a structure for accomplishing it. I think teachers need to be given more opportunities to go through formal this process. Not every unit, but at least one per year. And, of course, any unit is a continuous work-in-progress. We learn the most not from developing the unit but from implementing it.
I agree with you, too, that collaborative planning through a professional learning community can happen without the 5-step process! Simply talking with other teachers between classes, during a common planning period, or through online discussion opportunities can contribute greatly to our curriculum development and teaching units.
Another nice connection that you made – what you learn in the development of one unit is transferred to others and, over time, the steps become more automated.
Thanks for sharing your concerns about the assessment phase of your unit development. Yes, we will be spending a lot of time here on out on the universal design characteristics of assessment, the differentiation (products & performances, teacher-directed evidence, and observations & conversations). We’ll also strategize and share methods for reporting these in the units you’ll be submitting to me at the end of the semester.
See you back in class!
-Cynthia