Chapter 3-What Really Matters In Learning? (Content)

Abstract


The main point that this chapter was touching upon was the fact that there is a content overload. There is just too much to teach and not enough time to even come close to covering everything without tagging on several extra years of schooling. It has come to the point that teachers are having to decide what to cover and what to leave out with the time barrier. We have the MLR and NCLB to follow, but these have not helped to solve the problem. Also in this chapter, the idea of backward planning design is introduced. This was developed by McTighe and Wiggins. It is made up of three stages that will help with figuring out the desired results. In stage one of the backward planning design, the teachers need to make it clear as to what the students should learn and also essential questions. The second stage of this is when the teachers determine how they will know that they have met the standards or desired results. In the third and final stage, the teacher will do the actually planning of the lesson and have activities to help meet the objectives. This backward planning design is very helpful in providing structure for planning, teaching, and assessing. This is useful for not only the students, but the content as well. This helps to deal with two problems that often come up when trying to plan activities and lessons. These problems are that sometimes teachers are too focused on activities and have too many and that there are teachers that are too focused on covering the textbook. Textbooks are often too fixated on standards so they tend to have way too much information in them and it is just an overload for students to try and comprehend everything that is in a textbook. Template planning is also introduced in this chapter. This chapter makes a point about responsive teaching is important and to have desired understandings and questions. Also, it is important to make sure that the judging is the same all around. The idea of relating this backward planning design to a classroom with differentiation is also explained. This is incorporated by how you deal with assessment in your classroom. As mentioned above, the way that you grade and judge needs to remain the same, but there may be students in the classroom that need to do testing orally instead of written.


Reflection

Most people mentioned that they went into this reading with not much of an understanding about the idea behind the backward planning design. Everyone agreed that there really is just too much material to try and cover and not enough time to even come close to covering it all. Once people finished with this chapter they were able to have a much better understanding of the design and how content is really the major part of teaching. It all starts with content and what students will need to know at the end. Keeping the end result in mind was a key concept in this chapter. It was interesting in the beginning of the chapter with the findings that Robert Marzano and John Kendall had about how many extra hours we would need to have a half hour for every benchmark. This chapter helped to break down each of the stages in this design for a more clear idea of how this works. Most people could relate to the idea of having teachers that were too focused on covering the material in the textbook. This caused problems for everyone because they either could not comprehend everything in the textbook or missed out on certain things. There were plenty of times that things were left out because teachers were feeling rushed and students had to miss out on certain content areas. Many people can relate to the idea of backward planning design, especially those of us in college. We think about the end result first with deciding what we want to major in and what we want to do later in life. After that we have to decide what classes we have to take to be able to accomplish it. In the end we will have learned what we needed to learn to be able and do what we set a goal for. Once through this chapter, everyone was feeling much more confident with a better understanding of the design and are looking forward to using it in the classroom.