Why Is It Important To Create Quality Assignments?
Barbara McSwain
Feb 16, 2009
LEARNING-FOCUSED is privileged to work with school districts that are making great gains in achievement with all students across the United States. We know that children of all income levels and ethnic backgrounds can and do learn when they are taught. According to the Education Trust, 2007 research, Standards in Practice™ An Instructional Gap Analysis, "Good instruction requires knowledge of content, pedagogy, and respect for and understanding of the student's background and culture." It is not hoping that they have learned the material. Hope is not a strategy. It is deliberate, thoroughly planned lessons and assignments based on standards and researched based strategies.
DataWorks Educational Research evaluates student achievement for over 500 California schools each year using multiple measures. For the II/USP schools' external evaluation, DataWorks wanted to go one step further. They decided to look closely at daily student work. They looked at the actual artifacts, not exemplary work but the real assignments and examples that are day-to-day work. DataWorks faxed a direct request to the school principal: "Collect every single piece of paper that every student does for a solid week. Box it, and ship it to us."
John Hollingsworth and Silvia Ybarra, Ed.D. at DataWorks Educational Research made a table based on the work that they received. The results revealed that kindergarten and first grade students are being taught at grade level. The researchers "concluded that curriculum slippage begins at second grade, where only 77% of the math material and 80% of the language arts material being presented to the students are on grade level. By the fifth grade, only two percent of the work being given to the students is on grade level."
Hollingsworth and Ybarra calibrated every assignment that the students were being asked to do. "By the fifth grade, the student assignments were mostly second- and third-grade material. An ironic note is that these below grade-level assignments were full of happy faces, good work, 'A+', etc. These students knew the material and needed to have the level of instruction ratcheted up," stated Hollingsworth and Ybarra.
The tragedy of this decrease in standards aligned classes is that in high poverty schools, children get a lot of A's on assignments.
There are several questions that teachers must begin to ask themselves to have quality instruction in every classroom. They may want to consider questions such as the following: 1) What is the purpose of this assignment? 2) Is it based on the curriculum standards for my state? 3) What type of thinking/reasoning is required of the students? 4) What type of problem solving must the students do? 5) How will I assess the assignment? 6) Do I need a rubric?
Standards in Practice™ An Instructional Gap Analysis states, "Students can do no better than the assignment that they are given It is not the artifact but the type of reasoning, thinking, and problem solving that is required of the student. In order for this type of thinking to occur, we as teachers must remember that this work is ongoing. It is about continuous progress. As this research suggests, we must be willing to "criticize and correct our own work, while at the same time have the ability to work collaboratively with our coworkers in order to improve." When we collaborate with our team mates, it allows us to have quality conversations regarding researched based strategies that increase achievement through rigorous assignments based on standards. A LEARNING-FOCUSED unit/lesson plan starts with state standards and immediately asks "what do I want the student to KNOW-UNDERSTAND - and - BE ABLE TO DO (K-U-D)?".
Toolbox guides us through the decisions to develop a quality unit/lesson plan. The Learning-Focused Strategies Model Notebooks instruct participants in researched based strategies. It is important that we use these as guides when collaborating on unit/lesson plans.
