Creating and designing curricula is, in my opinion, the art of imparting content through several interventions and practices. A strong curriculum is composed of an array of elements that ought to have a harmonious balance between each. Elements such as formative and summative assessments, lesson plans, rubrics, and differentiated forms for content delivery must align with cognitive practices for the development of understanding. The role of the educator is to be vigilant about assessing for evidence that reflects student understanding. Early in my fellowship, I learned about a concept called, Understanding By Design (UbD) (Wiggings & McTighe, 2005) which invites educators to design units and lessons starting with "big ideas" or the final product in students. In other words, Ubd suggests planning backward, starting with the desired results. Over the summer, Loomis Chaffee was able to invite Jay McTighe for a professional development opportunity. As I was sitting and listening, he mentioned that the UbD method of aiming for a desired result is not unique to his work but rather intuitive when setting goals. 

 

In my journey as an educator through this fellowship, I have engaged in holistic learning practices that include motivation, engagement, assessment, cognitive skills, delivery of content, and student-teacher relation. Including these practices are essential to my philosophy of teaching. Therefore I included these to my "big ideas" when planning for curriculum. Using Ubd, the first stage to plan a unit is to identify desired results which involve settings goals for parameters in the content through the mastery of skills. Such skills require the methods of transfer, meaning, and acquisition content.  The second stage is to define what concrete evidence may be acceptable that proves the achievement of the desired results. To ensure consistency and standards for assessing learning evidence, establishing methods for evaluation are necessary for this stage. The last step is to plan learning experiences that can achieve the evidence for learning. This step achieves to define activity for differentiation in content delivery, cognitive skills to assess comprehension, and student-engagement. 

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Like McTighe expressed in our professional development session, aiming for desired results is innate to who we are. Starting with what I want students to learn at the end of a unit, I can hold myself accountable for designing activities that achieve desired objectives. What I find more rewarding is that with Ubd, I am able to differentiate delivery, giving me creativity and reasons to implement cognitive skills that are so essential to comprehension, understanding, and engagement. This is how I take on the challenge of designing a curriculum and strive for the best self. 

Through the conceptual implementation of UdB, understanding the process of measuring and monitoring levels for competency in the learning evidence my students were producing gave purpose to the use of rubrics. Susan M. Brookhart (2013) defines a rubric as "a coherent set of criteria for students' work that includes description of levels of performance quality on the criteria." (p. 4) More than just measuring evidence that showed a grasp of understanding historical content, I saw rubrics as avenues for reflective practices for students, especially since resubmission was encouraged. Rubrics created parameter that highlighted the different assignments and assessments in my course, and established concrete language for students to understand the historical, collaborate, reflective, creative, and structural goals of each. 

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However, in the chapter The Trouble with Rubrics by Alfie Kohn (2006) worries that rubric have a tendency to promote letter grades that may be informative, thus putting too much emphasis on performance being measured by the grade, and not the feedback provided, he expands "They do nothing to address the terrible reality of students who have been led to focus on getting A's rather than on making sense of ideas." (p.12) This could be true, especially if the rubric is designed to measure multiple components of an assessment that is of higher stakes. I do share the same sentiment, especially if students do not get a chance for a resubmission or get penalized if such resubmission exists. This could also decrease their ability to take risks, as they are fixated into reaching the highest grade, and perhaps not focusing on deeper thinking (p. 12) 

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The view on rubrics, as we have to assess multiply components and then quantify them to give a grade can also cause a one-sided approach to assessing learning. For instance, in my experience grading, and giving feedback, I was too focused on trying to justify my final verdict for stamping the rubric with grade. I even used this a defense mechanism to compensate for my lack of experience in grading and teaching. In chapter 2 of the book Classroom Assessment for Student Learning: Doing it Right – Using it  Well, the authors discuss two general views to distinguish in assessing. The first is assessments for learning which are use to diagnose students needs when it comes to instructions and their reflection on how to reach academic achievements, whereas assessments of learning evaluates the quality of work and levels of competency. (Chappuis, Chappuis, Stiggins & Arter, 2004) The practical way on how to taken on such assessments correspond to formative as this focuses on assessments for learning and summative as assessments of learning. (Chappuis, Chappuis, Stiggins & Arter, 2004)  Looking at these distinctions in grading made me more aware of the rubrics I was creating, my design of assessments and the feedback I was giving to support my students in reaching academic goals. 

My major goal as an instructor is to facilitate learning for my students. I aim to give my pupils a set of skills that can instill curiosity and desire to learn on their own with the hope that my course can better suit them to be lifelong learners. In my instructional design, my desired results are to increase the autonomy to develop comprehension in students through inquiry based learning, reflection and application of content to the real world. The power of essential questions stands at the core of my teaching, emphasizing original thought and interpretation, instead of a binary right or wrong response. 

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Therefore, I have adopted the popular practice of flipped classroom where students are first exposed to the content outside of the classroom, then the instructor guides the students through activities to assess, debrief, and synthesize that information in the classroom ( Lang 2014) This model is quite popular in the world of pedagogy. In fact, this was already an estaablished culture in my history department, as various teachers used syllabus that promoted a flipped classroom. However, a flipped classroom does not necessarily equate to an autonomous learning experience, as it needs to be carefully crafted and implemented with activities that check for understanding and measure growth with frequency. Robert Talbert, (2014) warns of the effects of flipped classroom, "The flipped classroom does not automatically provide outstanding learning experiences. What it provides is space and time for instructors to design learning activities and carry them out, by relocating the transfer information to outside the classroom." (Talbert 2014)  Therefore, instructors have the responsibility to use the limited time they have just carved out to carefully carry out tasks that will check for the effectiveness of the flipped classroom design. 

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I argue that flipped classroom does indeed create the space and time  to carry out activities to check for understanding. However, the time and space can be limited to carry out such task, which can then lead to the brief activities that only skim the surface. I saw this effect in my first year of my fellowship, I found myself planing my flipped classroom where students would have individual questions that I would try to address over email before arriving to the classroom. Once arriving to the classroom, I had activities planned out to cover the 70 minutes of classroom time, but often, I either ran out of time, cut short a genuine conversation, discussion or learning activity my students enjoyed, or my activities showed little interest to students. 

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With gamification, my instructional teaching differed the traditional flipped classroom. I cannot say it solved the issue of limited space and time. But I was able to instruct student with means that would expand learning that went the 70 minutes of allotted class time  through quests, individual support, and personalize learning that allowed students to produce evidence for learning and competency.