Get feedback on your draft challenge idea!

andrew's picture
Submitted by andrew(1673)November 21, 2011 - 4:08pm

Clear: Can you articulate your challenge as a one-sentance problem statement that is understandable to practicing teachers? For example: "How do you support the development of scientific inquiry skills in the physical sciences?"

Product-Driven: Can you begin to articulate criteria for what participants will need to show in the culminating video or screencast?

Adequately Focused: Is your challenge specific enough to create meaningful focus amongst of a community of practice? For example: "How do you teach inquiry skills?" is likely to be too broad for anyone to know what to do with.

Designed for Multiple Outcomes: Does your challenge avoid being prescriptive to the point of resulting in singular outcomes. For example: "How do you teach Newton's 2nd Law using a bowling ball and a baseball bat?" is probably too limited in terms of subject area, and would be unlikely to result in an interesting or useful array of user-generated solutions.

Relevant: Does your challenge tap a core struggle that your community of educators is struggling with?

Challenges:

Comments

andrew
andrew1 year 24 weeks ago

Outcomes-Based Assessment Systems Challenge

Here's a proposal inspired by the insane popularity of our upcoming Tuesday Blender:

The adoption of an outcomes-based based assessment framework has been proposed as a key shift in a teacher's instructional systems that allows for:

  • Grading practices that provide both teacher and learner more meaningful and actionable feedback on student performance.
  • Ability to offer more personalized (responsive, tailored pace and content) learning pathways for students to acquire and demonstrate skills mastery.
  • A re-definition of student success as the personal pursuit of mastery, rather than a peer ranking.

This challenge will provide a series of resources, suggested actions, and discussion threads to help support practitioners who are interested in adopting or improving their implementation of an outcomes-based grading framework.  Completion of the challege for a badge will require participants to produce a hack that showcases an outcomes-based assessment system, with enough links and attached resources to allow another teacher to pick up and try your solution.  Badge-eligible submissions will demonstrate a functional mastery assessment and feedback framework, systems to track and report learner progress within that framework, articulation of concrete examples in which the system has advanced the goal of personalization of learning, and a discussion of the practical implementation hurdles, tips, and tools to be considered by someone looking to adopt and/or adapt the system being presented.  It is expected that submissions will be understood as works in progress, with a well-framed "Push my thinking question" to invite feedback and spur reflective practice.

kristenswanson
kristenswanson1 year 24 weeks ago

I love the overall concept.

I love the overall concept. My one piece of feedback would be to move away from the phrase "skills mastery." I think students need to master skills, but they also need to be able to synthesize content to answer essential questions about the topic at hand (UBD model). How do you measure students' ability to synthesize while honoring the segmented, sequential nature of "skills mastery"? Just thinking aloud here...

andrew
andrew1 year 24 weeks ago

You must share a brain with Leah McConaughey;)

That feedback was at the heart of Leah's awesome presentation on CBLA at last night's Blender...so perfect.    A couple of thoughts vis a vis the assessment of synthesis and transfer vs. buckets of skills:

  • Most teachers are currently ill-equipped to do EITHER by virtue of the time and sophisticated toolset required to create, align, assess, and track items against either a skills or competencies framework.   While I agree that the latter (focusing on transfer and synthesis) is ideal, and that BOTH are ultimately necessary, in the scarcity of time, supports, and resources facing teachers I worry that we create another paralyzing, false EITHER - OR choice for the teacher.   My question is more about HOW? Which comes first?  Using what tools, frameworks, and instructional techniques?  If we can't answer these questions, CBLA is just another on a long list of amazing ideas that nobody can sustainably implement in a real school setting...
  •  I raised this question at last night's Blender - What does it look like when we teach to transfer?  Vis a vis the overwhelming adherence to PBL as the unit structure within CBLA, I worry that much of the project learning that I have seen is focused on a long arc, embedded in a single context of 'real world' application, and often painstakingly designed around an elusively defined "authenticity" that requires significant investments of class time.   In my experience intensive scaffolding often mediates the "transfer" of knowledge to the point where it is often frankly questionable to what extent the culminating product is student created.   While I find this model inspiring in many ways (and have used it stubbornly and extensively myself), both my experience and my reading of cognitive science suggest that teaching students to TRANSFER skills and concepts requires some fundamentally different thinking around instructional design:
    • Rapidly iterating on an abstract concept across diverse contexts of application so as to understand it's scope, nuances, assumptions, and limits of application.
    • Lots of practice distinguishing key information from distractors in the surface-features in the contexts of application.
    • Representing abstract concepts in multiple, linked ways...again through multiple contexts of application.
    • Learning to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate contexts for applying different tools and concepts through variation and a spiralling return to the same core concepts throughout a course. 

These last four bullets are where I tend to think a big part of the work of CBLA (articulated as teaching for concept and skills transfer) is to be found, even if it in some ways sits at odds with driving all instruction through authentic product.  Thoughts?

kristenswanson
kristenswanson1 year 24 weeks ago

Yes! Focusing on contexts and

Yes! Focusing on contexts and tool variation is a great way to view it.

klewislevin
klewislevin1 year 24 weeks ago

Draft Challenge Idea: LDC Marries The Regents?

A huge issue my teachers have been grappling with is that LDC is very time intensive and they often feel that it's supplemental to their "real" work of prepping kids for Regents.  In reality, the well executed LDC work is better test prep than any "real" test prep could ever be, for social studies, anyway.

 What if the YouPD challenge was around marrying LDC and the regents?  What if we challenged teachers to rethink test prep by taking advantage of the LDC framework?

 The challenge could be something like: Create an LDC module that successfully prepares students to pass the 10th grade Regents. 

 It could potentially create an amazing clearinghouse of modules and screencasts that force teachers to articulate why and how their modules will prepare kids for the test, thus selling LDC as a way better more authentic option.

 What do you think?

andrew
andrew1 year 24 weeks ago

Regents and LDC: Any Lasting Marriage is Work!

Kami,

I think this is a potentially great way to drive the "AND" conversation (as opposed to the "OR") as a response to the pushback that comes with coaching folks to take a leap on a unit design framework that asks them to go beyond the paradigm of "coverage" that the end of year NY State tests offer up as the path of least resistance.  Some probing questions:

  1. Is the grain size for participation too large?  A full module is a big chunk of work to curate for a teacher to feel comfortable posting for public consumption, or for another teacher to find approachable.   I have lots of units on my hard drive that are likely useless to someone else because I kept most of the important details of implementation in my working memory, given the constraints of the job, and because someone else's teaching context is going to require them to do almost as much work adapting it as it might take to start from scratch.  Maybe I'm wrong about this, and the community of practice you've helped build is ready to go public with whole units that can be readily adopted across classrooms, but I'm skeptical.  It's also just plain hard to have meaningful give and take or ready adoption between practitioners around a whole unit.  That said, you are the best person to know what your cadre of teachers is ready for, so don't let me talk you out of it!
  2. If I were to go with sharing whole units, I'd want to think about what the narrative structure for sharing might look like.  In my experience, when I have adopted resources from others, it was because they were packaged in a way that told the story from an instructor's perspective, providing the rationale and possible options for implementing it in X, Y, and Z sequence, which pitfalls to beware of, etc.   How might you structure the challenge (and your coaching practices) to get folks to include this kind of meta-level articulation of their module?
  3. Could folks not directly involved in the LDC pilot, and not teaching in NY State enter this challenge?
  4. How might you, in an introductory screencast to the challenge, convincingly demonstrate that the Regents is an easy test to someone who has encountered LDC-framed instruction? 
  5. In what ways would that idealized vision be bogus?  What are the real areas of compromise between the current Regents framework and a model focused on knowledge transfer and higher order skills, in particular vis a vis a low-skilled student population?  How can you get at this very difficult confluence of challenges in a way that teachers don't say is bull when you are not around to hear them;)

Hope these are helpful questions.   Thanks for a great proposal!

rcwestjr
rcwestjr1 year 24 weeks ago

Lasting Marriages are based on real values

Andrew--

I have to question the premise I read (or misread) in your fifth comment.  In my experience, the students with the strongest Regents exam performance are those who have developed higher order skills and are able to transfer knowledge.  The so-called compromise you describe is never seen in the most advanced classes in NYS or NYC; rather, it is a compromise that is made for the so-classed middle student who "needs test prep" to (just) pass the Regents exam.

By coincidence, I was glancing though Willingham's "Why Don't Kids Like School?" where he notes (pp 115-120) research proving that long-term practice leads to better long-term test performance.

In my own experience with low-skilled mathematics students, the close reading/deeper problems/slow accrual of topics approach did not bring them all the math skills they needed to pass the A2Trig Regents exam.  What it brought them was an understanding of their own skills that would eventually bring exam success--so they became second-time passers of this exam.  What I am trying to point out is that the "compromise" is a short term fix that really help only a few students at best.  

The structure of the LDC module subverts the compormise by demonstrating that students at all skill levels have skills to bring to the assessment at hand--proper teaching/coaching of these skills actually on the team will better help us find the new Bad News Bears.

andrew
andrew1 year 24 weeks ago

Great points!

Sounds like I need to come up to the New Visions charter schools to see this stuff in action.  If your description is happening in practice, I very much want to believe it.  With little to lose, I took a similar leap of faith in Regents Physics at my first school in Bushwick, I was heartened by much higher Regents scores after adopting an instructional framework that focused on higher-order problem-solving skills and conceptual model-development. I'm concerned that there are many educators who are much more risk averse than you and I who need to see something recognizeable embedded in the new framework (and have their concerns honored)  in order to adopt....is this compromize or learner-centered teacher coaching?