BCTELA

After 26 years at UBC, Joe Belanger's best-before date expired and he was off the shelf. Sidelined but not silenced, here he confesses his Achilles' Heel and dispenses avuncular advice.

(Click here to download this article in PDF.)

In 1965, the Commission on English concluded that the teaching of English was not a profession but a predicament. In many ways, particularly evaluating students' compositions, not much has changed in almost a half century. During my 40-year teaching career, ninety-five of every hundred problems have resulted from trying to quantify the performance of human beings. Usually even the students who received the top grades on an assignment felt somehow slighted. In composition evaluation - that most subjective realm - I think I did a reasonably good job of classifying students' papers into "good," "better," "best" - like the old Eaton's catalogue - but when it came to adding plusses and minuses to these grades (as Hazlitt might say, a refinement of malice), or worse, used numbers from 0 to 100, I was asking for trouble. Of course, there is a good deal more to teaching English than grading students' written work, most of it delightful, but this task can be overpowering both because it has an insatiable appetite for time and because it creates barriers between students and teachers.

Four decades of tinkering, researching, reading, consulting experts, observing students and martyrdom left me with memories of a lot of bright ideas that did not meet their promise and an extensive list of grading practices I would try to avoid in the future. That said, I think there are five general problems in assessment that that would benefit from our attention:

 

1. Time Management in a Black Hole
2. The [Al]mighty Grade
3. Teaching Standard English Usage: The Error Trap
4. Attending to Students' Feelings
5. Engaging Students in Reading and Discussing Our Comments

 

1. Time Management in a Black Hole

The major festering sore in the teaching of English is the amount of time English teachers devote to responding to students' written work. Oh, yes, it is tacitly acknowledged that the loads of English teachers are far above average, but the caveat is added that all teachers respond to students' work in one way or another and all come up with grades for report cards. Teachers who do not mark a lot of essays contribute to the school in other ways such as supervising sports, music or drama or sponsoring clubs or graduation. Still, insights into the English teacher's plight come from some odd quarters. In a recent play at the Jericho Arts Centre the teacher pointed out to the parent that it took her twenty minutes to respond to each grade twelve student's English paper. This is only ten hours for a class of thirty, but she had five classes, so she had to find 50 hours each time she assigned a paper, and that was on top of preparing and teaching and supervising the yearbook.

This is not news: We have a long history of trying to deal with the time problem. In the mid-60's, the Conant Report recommended that the maximum load for teachers of English be four classes, that each class be limited to 24 students, and that each teacher of English have one additional "marking" period in his or her timetable. An Edmonton school board which had three university professors from the humanities as members implemented many of these recommendations. Unfortunately, not long after these board members retired, a budget shortfall took away the English teachers' marking periods and increased class sizes. Some British Columbia school districts hired markers to support teachers of English, but budget crunches devoured these, too.

Unfortunately, what's lacking is strong evidence that (a) English teachers are devoting significantly more time to their jobs than other teachers are and (b) providing English teachers with additional time to respond to students' written work would result in better student writing. Perhaps the paucity of such studies results from the fact that they would be very difficult to design and implement; perhaps it's just that we don't want to risk finding out that we are not quite so exploited as we think we are.

Neil Béchervaise contends that this talk of equitable workloads is just a red herring which distracts us from our real task, devising ways to arrive at fair assessments of students' written work which help students to learn. I have not been able to convince myself that he is more than half right.

 

2. The [Al]mighty Grade

Friends tell me that putting a grade on a paper is easy: once they have read through a paper, the grade it warrants jumps right out. That has not been my experience, and indeed I challenge these friends to prove their prowess by conducting a couple of little experiments suggested by Diederich (1974). First, photocopy a set of student papers early in the year, replace the names with random numbers and regrade the papers after four or five months. If you carry out this experiment and discover you have assigned similar grades to eighty percent of the papers, don't grow hoarse singing your praises: that's about the percentage research would predict. Instead, try to figure out what went wrong on the twenty percent in which the two evaluations are a letter grade or more apart. Alternatively, trade stacks of photocopies with a trusted colleague and assign letter grades to the papers. If you assign exactly the same letter grade to each composition, you will have made history and should write books on the subject.

As part of a team of researchers (Belanger, Allingham, and Sloan, 2003, hereafter "think aloud"), I sat with individual secondary school English students and recorded their responses to papers their teachers had evaluated.2 As might have been predicted, all but one student flipped to the back of the paper to see the grade first, but the big surprise in the study was the way that the grade acted as a barrier to further reflection. Many students who received the grades they thought they deserved simply did not read any further. As one grade-twelve boy reported "Since I got it right, there is no point in reading the comments." Even the top grades did not lead the students to read anything more than the sentence or two of praise at the end. The grade-twelve girl who received the highest grade in her class (46 out of 50) lamented that "I would have liked 48 or 49 a lot better." On the other hand, students who received low or failing grades were generally agitated and did not read the comments either. Instead, they focused on ways to convince the teacher to let them rewrite the paper for a higher grade. When asked how she would handle her failing grade in the classroom, one student said "I would just sit and sulk."

As suggested above, assigning a fair and accurate grade to a piece of writing is no simple task. The first issue is reliability: What is the paper's true value? Would a colleague in your school give it a similar grade? Would someone in a different district give it a similar grade? It turns out that individual assessments of students' compositions are not very reliable. Research suggests that one grade in five may be in error one letter grade or more. Diederich, French, and Carlton's (1961) classic study asked 60 raters (30 professors, 10 lawyers, 10 journalists, 10 businessmen) to arrange 300 university-student essays in nine piles according to merit. (Imagine volunteering for this job!) The results were chaotic. Over one-third of the papers received all nine grades; no paper received fewer than five different grades. Work I did in 1978 with two trained and calibrated raters produced similar results. Diederich argues that team grading procedures - the types used on large scale evaluations - should be used at the ends of terms to establish reliable grades on students' written work. (See Belanger (1985) for a rationale, procedures, and examples.)

The second issue is validity. Are we measuring what we say we are? If the paper is written in response to literature, for example, which part of the grade is based on the subject matter - insights into the literature - and which is based on the writing itself? Can you separate the two? Researchers who have assigned separate marks for content and presentation generally report that raters establish in their minds an overall grade for the paper and then fiddle the categories so that the component numbers add up to the grade they think the paper merits. At their best, the Reference Sets encourage rater training and post-grading discussions and thus come up with more valid and reliable grades. However, teachers tell me that applying the Reference Sets simply adds another task to an already overcrowded schedule.

Of course, all of this technical discussion avoids the fundamental question: Are grades necessary? worthwhile? educational? Some argue that grades provide motivation for students; others say that motivation should be intrinsic to the task rather than the product of some fanciful system of ranking and ordering. Some hold to the "next level up" theory which claims that students need records of grades so that those downstream can make decisions about hiring or admission to more exalted schooling. Others argue that in this case English teachers are simply doing the work that others should be doing. Why should high schools classify students for post secondary institutions or corporations? If these groups want to know how well students can write, let them devise measures which show this. Our job is to teach students to write, not to make it easy for universities to pigeon-hole them - and then complain that we don't do a good job of it.

Some of the most revered fields of study have abandoned letter grades in foundations courses. For example, for the past ten years most of the Faculties of Medicine in Canada have graded pass/fail in basic coursework. In education, there was a collective sigh of relief when Marilyn Chapman spearheaded a pass/fail grading system for the teacher education program at UBC. This change had an extensive evaluation component which sought the opinions of all members of this academic community at regular intervals. Evidence collected from instructors and students and the professorate in general has largely been positive. The caveat seems to be that the program must be all one way or all the other. Having some pass/fail and some graded courses turns the pass/fail courses into second-class endeavours: students know where the money is and put their effort into the graded courses. It turns out that grades in the teacher education program are not very necessary after all. In an informal study I conducted, administrators told me that they were very interested in reports on student teaching experiences but that grades in methods and foundations courses didn't predict very well classroom performance. An argument in favor of grades contended that students could use education grades to bring up their averages to be admitted to graduate school. Unfortunately for those with this on their wish-list, faculties outside of education generally do not pay too much attention to grades in teacher education programs when assessing applicants for graduate school.

It's tempting to suggest that if some university faculties can implement pass/fail grading, so can school systems, but I'm not quite that naïve.

 

3. Teaching Standard English Usage: The Error Trap

In responding to and grading student papers, we make a number of assumptions, many of them questionable at best. A major assumption is that students will learn correct usage if we point their errors out to them. Underlying this assumption is the belief that students will actually read our comments, that they will understand them, and that they will know how to avoid the errors in the next pieces of writing they do.

My favourite error quote is a bit of a mirror for me:

When I consider how many hours of my life I have spent trying to root out these errors by a method that clearly did not work, I want to kick myself. Any rat that persisted in pressing the wrong lever 10,000 times would be regarded as stupid. I must have gone on pressing it at least 20,000 times without visible effect.

(The panelist goes on to note that he gave many tests of usage which showed small improvement from year to year but that the drop-out rate more than accounted for this improvement.)

Panelist, Farrell (1970) Deciding the Future, p. 141

Alfred M. Hitchcock (the professor, not the director) advises teachers: "Don't be a ferret. Overlook many errors." He believes that many errors are just "the blunders of youth which will disappear in due time." Others argue that students assume that anything they have written which is not marked as an error is not an error. So, the logic goes, they will persist in using these erroneous constructions if they are not noted.

One of the major difficulties with noting errors on students' papers is maintaining consistency. In a study of grade-twelve papers marked by one teacher several years back, I found that the teacher would mark one example of a particular error, skip the next three or four examples of that error and then mark another. All of the papers had many notations per page, but there was no systematic effort to root out particular errors. The teacher, of course, was very conscientious - one of the leaders in the profession (Belanger 1986). Gary Sloan (1977) analyzed 2000 compositions he had inherited that had been marked by over 50 college instructors. He noted that inconsistencies in marking of individual papers were rife, especially for those who focused on mechanics. The most amusing observation, however, was that the instructors made the same errors in their comments that they were trying to root out of students' papers. It took me a long time to get into the habit of proofreading my comments.

I have also learned not to send home papers with errors which have not been noted because it gives industrious parents the opportunity to mark all of the errors I missed and send the papers to the principal or school board chair. A solution for this is a cover page for each paper which notes the editorial usage items which have been annotated. As a student teacher, Ernie Hall tried a variation of this: he bought a rubber stamp "Draft only; this paper has been marked for [fill in three or four points]" and used a green stamp pad. These items of usage students can be expected to know and use correctly on their papers. Daniels and Zemelman (1985) suggest developing a chart for each student's folder. Down the left side of this chart, items of English editorial usage are listed. Across the top is a list of the papers the student is to write during the term. Teacher and student can determine the focus for each paper and note the number of examples of each error marked on each paper.

Revising students' sentences to show them a better way of writing may not be as effective as I thought. Students in the "think aloud" study - when prompted to read their teacher's revisions - were at best lukewarm to the practice: "I suppose it's a better way of saying it," admitted one grade-twelve girl grudgingly. More often the response was resentful, "Well that's her style but it's not mine" (grade-eleven boy), or blatantly hostile: "It really picks me when someone rewrites my sentences, as if I can't write" (grade-twelve girl). When I think of the thousands of sentences I have rewritten, modeling what my teachers did but having no idea how my students might respond, I resolve to book an appointment with my psychiatrist immediately.

In the "think aloud" study, one of the most effective ways of teaching editorial usage was by a grade twelve teacher who divided editorial usage into ten categories and assigned three students to become experts in each category. Students offered their peers direct instruction and practice in these items and then became the class experts during peer editing sessions. When we examined these students' papers we found that they made fewer of the errors taught than we would generally expect and that in conversations with them they read the teacher's comments and could explain where they went wrong. Many said that as a result of this system they were much more comfortable with editorial usage.

Perhaps a key question in this is "how do we learn to grade papers?" Unfortunately, most of our models are college or university teachers who have a good deal of time, many more resources, and not a lot of students, so they are able to pounce on every error in a paper. Of course, if you have taught English long, you know the burden of responding and you have probably worked out your own system for handling the paper load. Your system works for you, at least marginally, and it gives you a good feeling having done your part. Addressing such questions as are your practices effective? and how could you make them better? It takes time and energy most teachers would rather devote to catching up.

A major barrier to change is overturning a system that works even if it does not work well. The profession is rife with systems, but the extreme cases are often either amusing or frightening. A grad student once shared her father-in-law's practice with the class. Every evening after supper he retired to his study and marked papers for three hours. He took Sundays off. It would be good to design research studies to document the effectiveness of such dedication. Other systems require more skill but less time. Herman Kirchmeier was ambidextrous and would write corrections in the left margin in red and comments on the substance in the right margin in green. When I taught his students the following year they encouraged me to use his system but I was unable to grapple with it, not having two right hands. On the other extreme, the story circulated in rural Alberta years back about a teacher who had his students write every week; he then locked the papers in his cupboard and had not returned one by the end of the year. On June 30 he piled the papers into the trunk of his car and moved on to his next school, somewhere across the province. Word was that he had done this for a decade before his antics became well-known and he had to move to another province.

 

4. Attending to Students' Feelings

Because students invest their personal beliefs and moral codes in their English papers, it is worth evaluating our comments from the point of view of how the student might feel reading such a comment. Unlike math, physics or chemistry where the answers are right or wrong and the student's investment is technical rather than personal, English essays are places where students can test their beliefs and values, hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, and expect a response from a sympathetic but more worldly-wise reader.

I think we are beyond the stupid or arrogant comments which elitist teaching assistants once wrote on student papers ("Is English really your native language?") or the back- handed compliments that well-meaning professors might make ("You do a reasonably competent job of a desultory task" [this was 1963; the professor had awarded me the highest grade in the class on an assignment but, apparently, didn't want it to go to my head]). The problem lies in comments written in good faith, not mean or bullying statements written as if they were Acts of Parliament. The major question, one which is too seldom a part of our discourse and [almost] never found in marking rubrics, must be: how might the student who reads this comment feel?

In a graduate class, Jean-Anne Stene provided students with two types of comments and asked them to answer a series of questions, one of which was

How do you feel after reading what the teacher has written about your work?

This question raised a good deal of discussion about class members' experiences receiving comments and ways to avoid writing comments which inadvertently injure students.

5. Engaging Students in Reading and Discussing Our Comments

As a teacher, one of my faultiest assumptions was that students would hunger for my written advice, read each comment carefully, and be sure to avoid the errors that I had pointed out in the future. It sounded like a reasonable trade-off: I'd spend time reading and commenting; students would spend time reading and benefiting from the annotations.

Of course, it did not take too long to disabuse myself of this delusion, but it took a teacher from Sardis to offer the proof that I really didn't want to hear. He said that his wife and children were off to the beach one Sunday while he stayed home and answered the call of duty. As he wrote comments on students' papers he wondered if they were reading them. He then wrote "one Big Mac" in the margins of twenty papers and went out and bought vouchers for hamburgers. Only three students asked him after class what "one Big Mac" meant. I suspect that for even the students who read his comments "one Big Mac" made about as much sense as the universal "awk" or "frag" or "pro agr."

This is not an argument for abandoning marking but one for engaging students in learning from our comments. One of the major disappointments in the "think aloud" study was the miniscule number of students who actually read their teachers' comments without being prodded by the interviewers. With prompting most read the final comment and some of the marginal annotations, but allowed that this was not their usual practice.

What was worse, when we prodded the students to explain the teachers' annotations, more often than not they seriously misconstrued the substance of the comments. The transcripts are too long to reproduce here but can be found in the Technical Report, Appendix H: http://www.lerc.educ.ubc.ca/fac/belanger/technical.html

In my experience, whether they read the comments or not most students demand more than a letter grade on their papers. I asked a class once if they read the comments I wrote on their papers. "Of course, sir," was the response. However, when I asked the students why they were still making the same errors, most admitted that they didn't read the comments in more than a cursory way. "If you are not reading them," I said, "I won't write them." So I handed the next set of compositions back with mere grades. To save being assaulted, I needed to take the papers back and write comments on them. Another of life's little lessons.

In common with many other teachers of English, I have tried to devise ways to ensure that students read my comments with understanding and learn from them. As a graduate teaching assistant in English, I carefully annotated students' papers, put the grade on a separate sheet of paper, and returned the papers in class, keeping the sheet with the grade on it until students came to my office and discussed the annotations with me. A small number of students seemed to adapt well to this system, but most dragged their heels through our discussion of the annotations and then disappeared as quickly as they could once it was over. A small number didn't bother to come. One said that he would find out what his grade was when his transcript arrived in the mail. My wonderful system took a good deal of time; its major effect seemed to be alienating large numbers of students.

On the other hand, probably the most effective activity I used was to divide the class into groups of three, assigning each group to discuss each annotation, examine the underlying principle and discuss possible corrections. I circulated, asking and answering questions. I learned quickly that since the grades on the papers are personal, they had to be removed before the groups examined the papers. This had the disadvantage of having students wait until the end of the period for the thing that really interested them, the grade. It did, however, keep the grades, especially those lower than the students expected, from becoming a distraction. Unfortunately, I have no evidence that their writing improved as the result of these experiences.
Reflections

Where does all this leave us? I believe that there are steps we can take to address each of the five problem areas above. They are not quick fixes which will herald a new age, but they are steps we can take now to grapple with the massive problem of assessing and evaluating students' written work in English.

1. Gather evidence on the marking loads of English teachers and ways that teachers are coping. A series of graduate student investigations (graduating papers, theses, dissertations) which address various aspects of the problem could provide the evidence needed to begin to lobby our organizations to acknowledge the tremendous time commitment required to teach written communication and to respond effectively to students' written work.
2. Work with colleagues to improve the validity and reliability of grades on students' compositions. This will involve department or district work on scoring guides and rating procedures. Then share the findings through conference presentations, journal articles, and blogs.
3. Teach rules for editorial usage systematically, emphasizing selected rules at each grade level, reviewing the rules at subsequent grade levels, and insisting that students' papers be free of the errors studied. By the end of grade twelve, students should have mastered all of the rules in a college handbook.
4. Research the types of comments that students appreciate in both the affective and cognitive domains. How can constructive criticism be phrased so that it brings errors to the student's attention without offending the student's ego? Balance the comments on substance and presentation. In the "think aloud" study we discovered that students were very interested in comments which dealt with their insights and ideas but were not even mildly interested in those which pointed out errors in usage.
5. Articulate expectations and devise activities which engage students in reading and understanding each of our comments. Students should expect to have class time set aside each time papers are returned to read each comment, to discuss possible changes, and to write responses to the comments. If I had been able to do this, I believe I would have had a much more satisfying teaching career. Instead, during my time at UBC, I marked dutifully, handed papers back at the end of term, and saved in a file cabinet drawer the assignments I had marked but students had not picked up. As I was cleaning my office, I sent them off to the shredder in two cardboard boxes. How many novels or books of poetry could I have read? how many walks on the beach could I have taken? how many rounds of golf could I have played instead of writing advice on papers that went unread to the shredder? If all this advice fails to improve your life as a teacher of English, become a math teacher: marking is quite straight-forward and there isn't too much of it.

 

References

 

Belanger, J. (1978). Reading skill as an influence on writing skill. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Alberta.

Belanger, J. (1985). Conflict between mentor and judge: Being fair and being helpful in composition evaluation. English Quarterly, 18, 79-92.

Belanger, J. (1986). Student Written Errors and Teacher Marking: A Search for Patterns. A report presented to the Educational Research Institute of British Columbia (Project Grant 342).

Belanger, J. Allingham, P. V., & Bécheervaise, N. (2004). When will we ever learn?: The Case for Formative Assessment Supporting Writing Development. English in Australia, 141, 41-48.

Belanger, J. Allingham, P. V., & Sloan, A. (2003). Technical Report: Using think-aloud methods to investigate the processes secondary school students use to respond to their teachers' comments on their written work. http://www.lerc.educ.ubc.ca/fac/belanger/technical.html

Commission on English (1965), Freedom and Discipline in English. Princeton, NJ: College Entrance Examination Board.

Daniels, H. & Zemelman, S. (1985). A Writing Project: Training Teachers of Composition from Kindergarten to College. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Diederich, P. B. (1974). Measuring Growth in English. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Diederich, P. B., French J. W., & Carlton, S., T. (1961). Factors in judgments of writing ability (Research Bulletin RB 61-15) Princeton: Educational Testing Service.

Farrell, E. (1970). Deciding the Future: A forecast of responsibilities of secondary teachers of English, 1970-2000 AD. NCTE Research Report No. 12. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Sloan, G. (1977). The wacky world of theme marking. College Composition and Communication, 28(4), 370-73.

 

Footnotes

1. My teaching experience ranges from the junior high school through the post-secondary technical school to the university level. Therefore, my comments are directed to these levels. My observations of elementary classes and discussions with elementary teachers suggest that they have a different set of problems in responding to students' written work.
2. Eight teachers from five secondary schools provided the researchers with 57 compositions they had marked but not returned to their students. Individual students accompanied the researchers to a separate room where they were asked to "think aloud" as they read their teachers' grades and comments for the first time. The teachers were among the most experienced and dedicated in the province: five were current or previous English department heads; six had served on ministry examination assessment committees; five had served on the executives of specialist councils; two had taught as sessional university methods instructors. Who else might risk taking part in such a project?

 

by Krista Ediger

I've been teaching thematically for the nine years I've been in the classroom, but when I heard Jeff Wilhelm speak at the SFU Literacy Continuum Conference last August, his discussion of the importance of using essential questions to frame and focus units led me to reconsider my unit planning. I had been hearing murmurings of backwards design, and was involved in a group planning process two years ago for Humanities 8 which followed many of the principles of backwards design without my being aware of it, and I worked extensively with a partner on English 11 three years ago tackling big assessment questions, but I knew that it was time to explore the process further. The key difference between the unit planning I was used to and backwards design is the piece where, before deciding on instructional activities, teachers articulate the summative assessments they will use to determine whether or not their students have met their stated enduring understandings or learning outcomes.

Last year, I followed much the same program I taught the year before for English 12, and was feeling increasingly ineffective. In February, I decided I needed to plan the rest of my grade 12 course more purposefully, and so enlisted the help of a district consultant, Joanne Panas. In this article, I'll touch on our planning process, and then outline the unit itself, which grew into a multi-faceted, three month unit on story that touched on literary analysis of poetry and short stories, small group discussion, spoken word and personal narratives. Of course there are things I'll change next year when I teach this again, but it's a unit I will teach again, and some of the principles I practised in this unit in both the planning and implementing stages are ones that I am coming to understand as increasingly important in all my teaching: backwards design (identifying clear enduring understandings, essential questions, summative and formative assessments - all prior to the creation of daily lessons), planning with a partner or team, explicit teaching using modeling, gradual release, and differentiated instruction.

Our Planning Process

Before we began formally planning this unit, we had some conversations that focused on materials and activities. In particular, I was interested in a poetry unit Joanne had done last year with her English 10's that used text sets in a literature circle format. I also wanted to incorporate some spoken-word poetry that had been successful with my students in the past. We had a great conversation about how each of us might open a unit on short stories; from this came one of our big ideas: "Why do people tell stories?" After these informal chats, we set up a meeting to plan with a focus on backwards design. To our first meeting, I brought my copy of Understanding by Design, by Wiggins and McTighe; Joanne brought an activity from her staff meeting the day before, which was a boiled-down version of chapter 1 of Wiggins's and McTighe's book.

We began by determining the enduring understandings we wished to address, and these were based on our knowledge of the new ELA 8-12 IRP and its increased focus on oral language. At the same time, we worked out our essential questions. It's important to note that this was something of a back-and-forth process, not a linear one. We wrestled with phrasing, pared down ideas, checked the book, and moved items from one category to another. Once we had these ideas down, we looked at the skills, knowledge, and attitudes we wanted the students to acquire. Though somewhat "old-school," these last three areas are still valid organizers with their practical and concrete nature, but we realized they should come after the enduring understandings and essential questions are determined.

Our next focus was on assessment. For this part, we decided to go back to our two enduring understandings. We created a chart that helped us see how for each of the enduring understandings, we would have a formative piece and a summative piece. We found it easier to divide the enduring understandings up somewhat, as you can see in our final chart. This gave us a good idea of what we would have students do to demonstrate their acquisition of the big ideas. Again, this was not a linear process; we excitedly came up with ideas for instruction and assessment as we chatted, and wrote them down separately for the next section. At times it was hard to keep focused on just the key assessments. As we worked, we realized that we wanted to weave stories and poetry together; from that came the idea of choosing poems for the literature circles that had something to do with the idea of "story," which linked back to our essential questions.

Next, we needed to get a sense of the flow of the unit-how would we instruct and assess students so as to move them toward these final assessments? Actually, it was by then a fairly simple process. I began by sketching out a flow for the unit, incorporating instruction using modeling and gradual release, as well as formative assessment. Together we brainstormed ways to flesh this out, while continually checking back to our big ideas. Once this flow was pretty well set, we went back through it to make sure we were following a clear pattern of instruction and practice, followed by assessment. When we created the chart from our notes, the purpose of each activity was clear.

We met again about a week and a half later; by that point, I had just begun the unit with a class on "stories" - the history of story, their purpose and power, how their roles have changed. We also talked about narrators and points of view and truth and perspective before sharing some of the stories we tell often from our own lives. Then we looked at three short stories: "Man from the South" by Roald Dahl, "The Bet" by Anton Chekhov and "The Chaser" by John Collier, and did a variety of pre/during/post reading strategies, followed by discussion that linked us back to our opening questions and the essential questions of the unit. Joanne and I began our second formal planning session by brainstorming other possible stories for later in the unit. Then we worked on the shift to poetry. We decided to do a "fishbowl" with three teachers, Joanne, me and Gordon Powell, the teacher-librarian at McRoberts, using a new poem for each of my three English 12 classes; in addition, each of the administrators was invited to participate in the fishbowl sessions, and we ended up having an administrator at each one. We also worked on the poetry literature circle idea, and began to think of suitable poems as well as how to make up the text sets. Because we had done so much work last time on getting a clear idea of our focus for the unit, we were able to spend more time on the actual instruction, materials, and student activities we would use. We were also able to take our initial notes from the first planning day and make changes and additions to them to reflect what was happening in the classroom.

This has been a great process, and has solidified for us a few key points: two minds (or more) are better than one; the process of backward design is very practical, but it's not linear; and there is no "one right way" to incorporate the key concepts of understanding by design into your own planning. It doesn't matter what route you take, as long as you get to the desired destination.

 

The following is the result of our initial work with backwards design.

  

Part 1: THE BIG IDEAS
Enduring Understandings

• Students will understand how to engage with and respond to literature and ideas, and to interact with others around those ideas, orally and in writing.
• Students will understand that stories have a variety of purposes in our lives and society, and a variety of effects on us.
  

Essential Questions

• Why do we tell stories?
• What are the ways we tell stories?
• What stories do I (students) want to tell? Skills:

Students will…

• Respond personally to literature and ideas
• Participate appropriately and thoughtfully in small-group and large-group discussions
• Make appropriate choices in diction, language, rhythm, and structure when presenting
• Write analytical paragraphs and essays about short stories and poems

Knowledge: Students will…

• Review and use the elements of literature and literary devices of short stories and poems

Attitudes: Students will…

• Gain an appreciation of the purpose of stories in our lives and culture n Demonstrate willingness to engage in and explore literature and ideas
  

  

Part 2: Assessment

Enduring Understanding	Formative Assessment	Summative Assessment
Engage with and respond to literature and ideas, and interact with others around those ideas, orally…	■ class discussion of rubric for group discussion; students use rubric to evaluate teachers in fishbowl discussion ■ self-assessment and teacher feedback of small-group discussions (first - poetry lit circles and then short stories)	■ self-evaluation of small-group discussions (poetry lit circles)
…and in writing	■ teacher feedback and self/peer-assessment of analytical paragraphs on poems and essays on stories using teacher rubric	■ teacher evaluation of analytical essay on short story
Understand that stories have a variety of purposes in our lives and society…	■ peer/self-assessment of language and presentation skills for group poem written in response to a story or poem, presented to the class	See below.
… and a variety of effects on us	See above.	■ teacher assessment of spoken-word poem (your own story) written by individuals and presented to the class (Poetry Café)

 

Nicole Widdess teaches in Richmond and is the Curriculum Co-Chair for BCTELA. She is committed to teaching diverse learners and is passionate about literacy. Her current focus is teaching students in the middle years.

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As one of the Curriculum Coordinators, I am pleased to share that our Curriculum Pack sub-committee has developed new submission criteria that reflect current thinking, research and pedagogy. These criteria are also aligned with the ideas and research presented in the pedagogical considerations section of BC’s new K-7 and draft 8-12 English Language Arts IRPs. We hope that the new criteria will support you, our members, in writing up and submitting units of study for publication.

When you submit a curriculum pack, a member of our committee will provide descriptive feedback to assist you in revising and readying your unit for publication. Once accepted for publication, you are eligible for curriculum resource funds ($400). If you are interested in crafting a unit to be published by BCTELA please be sure to review the criteria below. Please send your unit (or proposal for a unit) to Nicole Widdess at NWiddess@richmond.sd38.bc.ca. Once your proposal or unit has been reviewed, we will be sure to get back to you as soon as possible.

 

Overview

• Identifies essential questions and enduring understandings

o These are the big ideas/inquiries that will guide the unit and the skills/strategies (including cognitive and metacognitive) that will be used/developed by students

• This overview should demonstrate links to the 2006 K-7 and/or the 2007 Draft 8-12 ELA IRPs m cuts across outcomes from the 3 organizers and 4 suborganizers of the ELA IRP

Assessment

• formative assessment/metacognitive activities

o formative assessment practices that help students learn to analyze and critique their work and to set personalized goals in relation to shared criteria

o offer students opportunities to generate criteria and strategies that are both contextual and meaningful

o a variety of assessment activities, including performance-based assessment

• summative assessment m performance-based assessment that includes detailed rubrics and links back to enduring understandings

Lesson Sequences

• a clear, detailed outline of suggested lesson sequences including m gradual release of responsibility

o assessment-to-instruction m metacognitive activities (e.g. using and/or generating criteria, self-assessment, goal-setting, and reflection)

o reading, writing, and oral language activities

o well-structured lessons that help students connect, process, and transform and personalize texts, concepts, and/or understandings

Diversity Considerations

• suggestions for adapting based on students' individual strengths and needs

• ways to differentiate based on student interests and context (e.g. text choices, variety of output options, variety of instructional modes)

Additional Documents

• performance rubrics

• handouts used in the lessons

• resources used, and suggestions for alternative resources

Reflection

• what worked especially well

• what came before this and after this in the year

• how this unit built on or was able to be built upon by other inquiries/units

Would you like support in developing a unit that integrates strategic teaching, formative and summative assessment, gradual release and the use of diverse texts using learning outcomes from the new IRP? Consider attending the Saturday Institute at our Fall Conference October 25, 2008. The 2008 Conference will be held at the Delta Hotel in Richmond this year. BCTELA Executive members Krista Ediger, Joanne Panas, Leyton Schnellert, and Nicole Widdess will be facilitating an institute on backwards design tentatively called "Designing Units with the End in Mind." A description of this institute follows:

So many best practices...how do you put them all together to create engaging, pedagogically-sound units that will help your students learn what they need to? Come and spend the day with us-learn about inquiry and backwards design, modeling and gradual release, assessment-to-instruction-and put it all together in a framework for a unit you can use. To get the most out of this session, bring a topic for a unit and sample texts you might use, and any brainstorming you might have already done.

The Curriculum Pack sub-committee members are looking forward to a year of learning together as we explore the new English Language Arts IRPs and develop new curriculum packs to support their implementation.