Assessment and Backward Planning

To address the backward planning that Natalia mentioned in her blog last week, we decided to complete our final project descriptions and evaluation for this week.  I hope that by completing this relatively near the beginning of unit work I will save myself from doing excessive revision and redoing later.  Now that I have(more or less) what my final project will be assessing the students on, I need to begin figuring out how I will prepare them for that.  It actually seems less daunting than I expected.  I know the four main things I need to prepare students for and the major grades they will receive throughout the unit so I just need to figure out where and how to get those onto a calendar.

What seems more difficult than organization for me right now is the amount of work left to do.  I am sure I’m not alone in finding that each part I’ve completed has taken me a really long time! So I am a little worried about how many more pieces I still have to complete…but I guess I’ll just take it one bit at a time for now.

One other thing that I am trying to resolve is assessment for my final project verses for the unit as a whole.  I have four activities I would like to assess students on that I think would make their grade more holistic than just the grade reflected in the final project.  I am trying to differentiate for myself those activities and how they each will be related to my unit goals and EQs.  I think if I can get those to line up producing my lessons and rational shouldn’t be too difficult, one can hope anyways!