I really liked this chapter because it makes us reflect again upon our practice. What do we want from our students? What do we want them to be able to do? What type of evidence can we get of their actual understanding? The first challenge is to define what we want our students to understand, then the second challenge is to design an instrument or assessment that can be proof of that understanding. The third challenge is related to the correction of that assessment because we should also be able to use misunderstandings and promote learning from them.
As the author pointed out: "Evidence of misunderstanding is incredibly valuable to teachers, not to a mere mistake to be corrected. It signifies an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer. The challenge is to reward the try without reinforcing the mistake or dampening future transfer attempts"
There are also many dangers when teaching that are pointed out in this chapter. One of these dangers is to cover too many topics too quickly and that will go against learning. This is something that I have learned with practice, one of the levels I teach is 11th grade and I have to prepare them for the FCE. Grammar is very important in the FCE and there are many things to review but I have realized with time that it is impossible to review all the grammar contents that appear in textbooks, so I usually concentrate on a few, but I spend a lot of time going over different ways of approaching those contents and that has been more successful than trying to cover all of them.
The satisfaction is that the grammar contents we review are understood by students and that although we are not able to go over them all, the ones we managed to revise are grasped. In order to do that it is also important to take into account what Whitehead said: "Let the main ideas which are introduced to be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible" (1929) I would say that this is one key to success.
I feel that we as teachers have the control of our classes, therefore when we prepare our classes, depends only on us, if our focus will be covering contents, or real learning.
ResponderEliminarI agree with you Dora that there are many challenges for EFL teachers when it comes to defining understanding in terms of Big ideas and Essential questions. I think this is what authors are proposing with UbD. Moreover, It's difficult to design assessments that aim to such understandings when working with language skills.
ResponderEliminarEven though I agree with Fátima that it's ultimately teachers' responsibility to plan and conduct classes, many of us are also required to comply with standards and curricular objectives that might be difficult to align to the proposed model.