Planning Instruction and Assessment

Although I am going to distinguish between them right now, the book points out that this is purely heuristic. Instruction and assessment are supposed to be interwoven to truly be effective.

To plan for instruction, you want to make an instructional plan (which functions like a traditional lesson plan or a teacher's edition of a textbook)~ this is basically a how-to-guide on how to implement your lesson: timing, grouping suggestions, teaching method suggestions, a list of materials/equipment. An instructional plan should also have scaffolding suggestions. To remember what scaffolding refers to think of the literal meaning. Scaffolds are temporary constructs put up around a building that is being built to help workers. So in the education world, scaffolding refers to the temporary modifications teachers can take to help struggling learners- making problems less complicated, esp- until the learner is ready for the scaffolds to be removed, to do the unmodified activities that avg/above average learners can do.

Planning for assessment involves creating a performance criteria, scoring rubrics, self-assessments, and online assessments. All of these are meant to help gauge if the learning objectives have been met. Most of these are pretty self-explanatory, but let's elaborate on what is meant by "performance criteria." Performance criteria refers to what students usually call “what it takes to pass.” It is kind of like what is “par level for the course;” a decent job done. It is good to define this for the students so they know explicitly what you are looking for. For instance, you might instruct them when making a graph, “You need a title, label axes correctly, plot points correctly, show the work it took to find the equation. Write about the similarities and differences of the line” This is the performance criteria. Students should certainly try to go above this. You could give suggestions: color code lines, make your write-up very specific and talk about all that you notice.