Learning Target, Outcomes, Assessments...Oh, DANG

Today I attended professional development that is part of our new teacher evaluation, although we don't call it that :) This is my third year working in this model, and while I definitely despise being taken out of my classroom (did I mention despise?) there is merit to the process. However, I keep thinking the process would be much more effective PRIOR to the school year. Now, if only we could find a way to pay teachers to attend at the start of the school year...

But I digress.  Today was all about assessment. I love assessment. Wait. I don't love assessment, I love creating amazing assessments. As for the mundane assessments that are part of a teacher's life? I could do without them. Except those assessments are necessary, and even though it's a pain, I really do need to know if my students can use our word wall words correctly. I also need to know if they can write complete thoughts, otherwise known as sentences. I need to know, I need to know....well, I need to know a lot.  Therein lies the struggle that I think most educators have. We have so much that we want students to know, that we don't always take the time to decide what is essential for students to know. In some cases, knowing how to act like respectful young people is most definitely at the top of the list. We can't teach in an environment that isn't conducive to learning.

Once we start to tackle that monster, then we have to begin to evaluate our own assessment of student learning. I thank God for Dr. Kitty Green who exposed all of us SMC 2004 grads to Wiggins and McTighe. If you're an educator and you don't know who they are, you need to find out quick. They are the gurus of all things important to quality instruction. I live and die by backwards design.  I know where my students need to go, how I'm going to get them there, and how to check how they're doing along the way. This is also known as formative and summative assessment.  It's also known as great teaching. I could start going on and on about essential questions and statements of enduring understanding, but that belongs in a different post. Kind of.

Back to assessment. I truly believe that beginning with the end in mind is so crucial to great teaching. Curriculum maps are a nice way to start aligning this thinking and are much less intimidating than an entire unit plan.  Yet, I fear that people hear the word curriculum map and they freak out, don't see the merit in it, or think it's just going to change anyway. Ah, but it shouldn't. The beauty of a curriculum map is that it keeps you honest.  If you have decided prior to the beginning of a unit what skills, knowledge, and targets students MUST own, then that becomes the rock of your teaching. Can you add stuff? Of course. However, the nuts and bolts remain the same. It's also how you know whether you're meeting the desired learning targets. It's a beautiful thing.

Our target should always be student learning in some way.  Yet, if we don't know what those targets are in the first place, how will we ever know if they actually got them? We have to be decisive as teachers. We have to know what students need to know, how we will help them learn the material, how we will assess whether they have learned it, and how we will reteach it if they don't. It's a challenging and sometimes daunting task. I know there are times I want to crawl under a rock and come back out in June, but alas that isn't an option. Instead, I keep thinking of ways to challenge myself as an educator, to look for areas of growth in assessing student learning, and trying not to cringe at the stack of important assessments that need to be graded.