Читать книгу Giving Students a Say - Myron Dueck - Страница 27

Moss and Brookhart (2012) argue that an objective only becomes a learning target when it's shared with students and, furthermore, that students can only aim for a target once they understand it exists. Clearly, we can achieve both these things through sharing and cocreating learning targets with our students. Let's delve further.

Moss and Brookhart (2012) suggest three key aspects of planning for instruction:

1 What are the essential knowledge (facts, concepts, definitions) and skills (procedures) for the lesson?

2 What are the essential reasoning requirements?

3 How do the knowledge, skills, and reasoning items fit into the larger "learning trajectory" (the big picture)?

Elaborating on the knowledge component, McDowell (2017) presents an interesting and applicable model that separates knowledge into three levels: surface, deep, and transfer. It could be effective to have our students understand that at the surface level are the building blocks of learning, whereas the deeper level refers to the learner's ability to relate multiple ideas. The transfer level of knowledge asks learners to apply their understanding within and between contexts. McDowell argues that "the critical challenge is for teachers to find instructional approaches that balance surface and deep learning and also provide opportunities for students to transfer their understanding to real-world problems" (p. 15).

This position aligns closely with the work of Chappuis, Stiggins, Chappuis, and Arter (2012), who separate learning targets into four categories. In my first book, Grading Smarter, Not Harder (Dueck, 2014), I explored a unit plan design for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference based on this structure:

 Knowledge targets (What do I need to know?)

 Reasoning targets (What can I do with what I know?)

 Skill targets (What can I demonstrate?)

 Product targets (What can I make to show my learning?)

An updated version of the Paris Peace Conference unit plan appears in Figure 2.2. What's different about this unit plan is that it provides students with the opportunity to create some of the learning targets while still maintaining the unit's structure and adherence to the standards.