Backward Design: Step 2 and 3.

You are coming near the end of your RPAT for this class: the curriculum unit. The checklist for this task is on pages 145 -146. YOU WILL BE BRINGING YOUR WORK (at whatever stage) TO CLASS AT THE NEXT REGULAR CLASS. 

There are 2 steps left and they both need to be aligned with Step 1 and Step 2.  Alignment is one of the biggest requirements for assessment to be valid. (Don't forget that the principles of good assessment are validity, reliability, fairness and alignment - see pages 19 to 21 in the text. A good assessment will meet these principles.)

Step 2: A description of your RPAT can be found at pages 69 to71. You want your RPAT to be similar in nature to project-based learning - the culmination of an inquiry. In the RPAT, students must demonstrate the KDB of your KDB umbrella. Your checklist for the RPAT is on page 71. If you are wondering what a real life RPAT  looks like see  High Tech High  projects from K to 12.  Notice how those RPATS are connected to an Essential Question as your RPAT should connect to yours.

Remember that your RPAT need to be aligned with the KDB. 

The language in your RPAT  should be student friendly to engage students in the task. See pge 70 and page 136 for examples. 

You will need 2 assessment tools. One should be a rubric. See notes on page 83 to 87 for rubric principles. 

Step 3

Essential Questions Web - page 69 and 139. 

Choose ONE Essential Question to flesh out in a chart.

Create Daily instructional Assessment chart. with 3 columns (p. 74 and p. 140. 

Create Learning Goals and Success Criteria.

 Flesh out Activites with Embedded Assessments.  Label the Assessment as AoL, AfL or AaL. Add the expectations addressed and how this activity is connected to the KDB and the RPAT in the next columns.

Add 2 assessment tools. These can be embedded into the instruction See pages 78-82. 

All the above can be found in Chapter 3 or 5 of the text. Additional help is in the Class lecture powerpoints and samples in Sakai under resources. 

Everything needs to be connected to everything else. 

Good luck in your curriculum working night (to be held where you want and on your own time). 

A summary of the curriculum design process

Many of you are well on your way to designing a curriculum that will be your RPAT for this course. That is, it is a rich performance assessment task that should demonstrate that you have accomplished the goals for this course. It will be challenging because to complete this RPAT requires new ways of looking at the world and new skills. BUT you are the kind of students who understand GROWTH MINDSET and appreciate a challenge and how such a challenge will grow the plasticity of your brain. 

Here are the steps for your assignment. 

Pre-Steps -  Know your curriculum

1. Front Matter Scans (One for the Know, Do and Be for each subject area. You can do the Know for English but for this assignment you can focus on the Do and the Be for this subject.  )
2. Front Matter Graphic (Shows the relationships among subjects - optional)
3. Vertical Scans (4 grades for each subject for the Know, Do and Be)
4. Horizontal Scan and Cluster (target grade for Know, Do and Be)
5. KDB Chart (Choose relevant broad-based expectations to deconstruct).  

Backward Design – Step 1: What is most important to know, do and be?

1. KDB Umbrella (Identify the KDB).
2. Exploratory Web (Brainstorm possible activities/assessments. If you have not done this already you will want to return to the KDB Umbrella to identify the Big Question that will drive the unit planning).

Backward Design – Step 2: How do we know when they know it?

1. Rich Performance Assessment Task (RPAT)
2. 2 Assessment Tools

Backward Design: Step 3: 

What do we do each day to ensure students are able to demonstrated the KDB in the RPAT?

1. Essential Questions Web
2. Daily Instructional activities/embedded assessments Chart (with expectations and connection to the KDB and RPAT)
3. 2 Assessment Tools

That's all for now. I will write more if I get more questions that are relevant to everyone. 

Good luck!

Backward Design Stage 1 - Step-by-step

Creating a curriculum unit from scratch is a challenging task – especially when it is new skill.  We all need to be both patient and open as we navigate this tricky new territory because the learning can be huge if you approach it from this point of view. This is a very complex design skill that involves a three-part process called backward design that has many sub-steps. When you completed your required reading for this week you actually did read about all the steps in the process in Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment (Drake, Reid & Kolohon, 2014). It is such a complex skill for first timers that it is a chicken and egg phenomenon. I can tell you about what it looks like and show you examples (in Resources) but it still will be perplexing until you understand a lot of new concepts and try working with them through a trial and error process.

 https://www.google.ca/search?q=images+chicken+or+egg&espv=2&biw=2405&bih=941&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CBsQsARqFQoTCP_4jfS7s8gCFQmjHgodLfEEHw&dpr=0.9#imgrc=bL1ffyN1Kxk6rM%3A
https://www.google.ca/search?


When starting to design this curriculum, this image below explains how you will feel at first – the chicken and the egg again! And I did not make this image up but found it on the Internet so someone else is experiencing it too!  

http://blogs.ibo.org/sharingpyp/2015/09/01/evaluating-and-refining-a-transdisciplinary-programme-of-inquiry_edtw/

What are the steps of the curriculum assignment?

Here is a graphic of the steps for your final curriculum assignment. The front matter is called introductory material and is in the Presteps.  The arrow in the picture indicates that everything must be aligned. The daily instructional activities must align with the KDB and front matter.  Check Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 for examples of a completed curriculum. As well there are some examples in Resources as mentioned already.

Figure 3.3: Drake, Reid & Kolohon (2015). Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment: Engaging the 21^st Century Learner. Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press. P. 60

 What are the step-by-step details for Part 1 of the curriculum assignment?

For the first curriculum assignment you will complete to the end of Stage 1 of the graphic above. You will hand this in for feedback. Here are the details:

Step 1: What is most important for students to Know, Do and Be at the end of this unit?

What is the KDB according to the Front matter of the documents?  P. 125

	Subject	Subject	Subject	Subject
KNOW 5 – 10 Big Ideas
DO 3-5 Interdisciplinary Skills
BE 3

Step 2 – Optional but helpful

Create a web that connects the subjects.

Step 3

Vertical Scan and Cluster p. 128

You are looking for what is most important to Know, Do and Be. This answers the first question of backward design: What is most important for students to know, do and be?

Choose the target grade for which you will create a curriculum unit that involves a subject and language arts.   Chose one strand for your subject area. However, for Language Arts (English) you can include reading, writing and/or speaking/listening as all the areas since are integrated in themselves.  

The vertical scan and cluster is for two grades below the target grade (to know what has been expected of your students) and one grade above (what you need to prepare them for).  If you chose grade one or two just make sure you do four grades for the vertical scan.  The purpose of this is to see where your students have come from as far as the KDB and where they are going after they leave you. You are looking for spiraling curriculum. What KDB repeats in each grade?

Note: The scan is what you do for all the expectations that you have chosen.  You are doing the scan for one strand of a chosen subject area. The scan means the act of “scanning” or a quick read and is not written. In the past students took all the expectations and identified Big Ideas, 21^st Century skills and the BE by highlighting each one in an appropriate colour.  For example if blue was the designated colour for communication then all expectations that involved communication were highlight in blue. This can consume 20 or more pages and you are welcome to do it as it really does clarify things. You do not need to show that work, but you will still need to scan (skim).  Another way to do it is to cut up the expectations and cluster them together. Here is an article that shows primary teachers doing this for designing  IB primary programs . There are over 4000 such schools around the world (so you are not the only ones who are planning this way!  Look at the pictures in this article and they will tell you a lot. 

In any event you need to do two things at once (chicken and egg again). You need to skim to identify Big Ideas, 21^st Century skills and the Be. Once you have you categories you cluster relevant expectations together under the appropriate Know, Do or Be.

The clusters are the expectations that go in these boxes. You need to find 2 to 4 Big Ideas for the KNOW (Science and Social Studies have lots of Big Ideas.) Then you need a few Dos in your subject area. English and math are often considered the process skills for an integrated curriculum. That means the Do can come from English and/math. You still need to teach the skills but the Big Ideas are not necessarily that obvious. (For Math look at the Manitoba curriculum to see how they define the Big Ideas. Look form it in the Index of the text.)

For the BE you may need to use a Be from the Front Matter or read between the lines to see what values, attitudes or behaviours are being promoted. If you read between the lines the Be will be an interpretation and will be implicit.

Subject Area
	Grade 2   Clusters	Grade 3 Clusters	Grade 4 Clusters TARGET GRADE	Grade 5 Clusters
Know 2 to 4 Big Ideas	Big Idea 1 Expectation(s) Big Idea 2 Expectation(s) Big Idea 3 Expectation(s)
Do 2 to 4 Skills	Big Skill Expectation(s) Big Skill Expectation(s) Big Skill Expectation(s)
Be Value/ Attitude/ Behaviour 2 -3	Expectation(s)

For this assignment we will consider the language arts/English as process skills only.  The KNOW will come from the content of the other subject area.

English
	Grade 2   Clusters	Grade 3 Clusters	Grade 4 Clusters TARGET GRADE	Grade 5 Clusters
Do 2 to 4 Skills Make these VERY broad-based so lots of skills can fit in. Can come from any strand.	Big Skill Expectation(s) Big Skill Expectation(s) Big Skill Expectation(s)
Be Value/ Attitude/ Behaviour 2 -3	Expectation(s)

Horizontal Scan and Cluster  (This will be the same as grade 4 in the charts above.) Page 132.  

	Subject Area	Language Arts/ English
KNOW
DO
BE

Unpacking the KDB  - page 133

Choose relevant expectations from grade 4-chart above. Deconstruct expectation for Know, Do and Be. This usually involves the KNOW (noun), Do (verb) and Be (often implicit in Ontario). ONLY put down the actual words from the expectation. Don’t try and find Big Ideas as in the book example unless they are really obvious.

	Know	Do	Be
Expectation

KDB Umbrella  - page 134.

Choose these from the ones available to you from the scan and cluster. Be sure they make sense in terms of what you might be able to do in the classroom to insure an engaging curriculum.

BE – 2 or 3 values, attributes, behaviours

DO – 2 or 3 21^st Century Skills (usually one word)

KNOW – 2 or 3 Big Ideas (usually one word)

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS  - 2 or 3 ( We will look at these next class)

http://freevectordownloadz.com/clip-art-vector/umbrella-clip-art-2/#.VhbnamTBwXA

  

Sample KDB Umbrellas are on page 68 and page 134.   

Choose a name for your unit. 

Exploratory Web – p. 135.   This is exploratory only. In the centre put the name of the unit you have decided upon. Brainstorm for possible activities/assessments. The example shows one subject and English/Language Arts. If you are designing an integrated curriculum you would brainstorm for each different subject. Ultimately you do not want to have a distinct division among subject areas.

Good luck. Remember patience and openness are key to resilience and success in the project. One step at a time! 

Reference

Drake, S.M.,  Reid, J.L.,  & Kolohon, W.  (2015). Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment: Engaging the 21^st Century Learner. Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press. P. 60