Knotty Questions

Skip over to Two Writing Teachers to serve up your
own Slice of Life or to help yourself to seconds. 

Do your learning goals match a scale you use to rate or measure students' understanding? Can you have more than one learning goal a day or do we learn one discrete byte at a time? Could a learning goals carry you through an entire year? How long does it take a student to analyze how a character develops a theme or sets a tone? Is analyzing character the first step there? How many steps are there in that equation?

Are you required to use scales (read rubric if that language is better) to assess students' understandings of learning goals? What types of formative assessments are daily specials in your classroom and which ones appear on the regular menu?

How do you assess what your students know and are able to do? Is what assess at the start of a unit different from what you would assess in the middle or at the end? During a lesson do you  walk around? Do you listen in? Do you record conversations? Do you have a hive of inter-dependent digital documents tagged and organized in Evernote binders by student name or class period? Do you keep anecdotal records in a  journal, on post its or the random napkin, paper towel, Kleenex, open hand space?

 What do your students know? How do you know? Who says? What are your students able to do? How do you know? Who says? Do you have evidence of that?

Image from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Do you pre-test and then post test? Will a set of five multiple-choice questions tell if you a student has independent? How do students tell you what they know before you begin a unit of instruction? Or do you just start everyone at the same place?
mastered a standard? Are those multiple choice questions text-dependent or text-

Do you ask students about content, theme or skills before you start a unit? Is a theme in an English class more important than a set of skills? Can you  teach skills without some sort of themed set of texts? What does research say about the brain and connections? What if we just read a variety of short texts every week and practiced the same set of skills? Is that the same thing as connecting texts and ideas over time? Which matters most?

How much depends on the society we envision or the status quo we keep?