Learning targets and Assessment
What part of deriving a learning target was challenging for you? What connection does the learning target have with assessment?
I believe the most difficult part of crafting a learning target is creating a target that is not only concise but accurate. My instinct is often to overwrite things. What I mean by this is I tend to not know exactly when to stop writing. I often find myself having to go back and edit down emails and papers because my natural instinct is to over-explain. With learning targets, you need to create something that is easy for students to understand. it should only be one sentence. This is doable, however, it will often take me a few tries before I get the verbiage in the target just right. I tend to overthink what I'm writing a lot of the time as well. So often I'll construct something perfectly passible but I won't be able to shake the feeling there is something wrong with it. So I try and give myself a limited number of re-reads otherwise I'll just want to scrap all of it. I think I'm so hypercritical when it comes to creating a learning target because it is the base of our assessment. Assessments determine whether students were able to meet and understand their targets. Say my learning target is "Students will be able to demonstrate their understanding of Haiku poetry" and at the end of the lesson I have students craft their own Haiku's. That would be a form of assessment that directly ties into the learning target. Students demonstrated their understanding by crafting a Haiku and therefore met the target.
I believe the most difficult part of crafting a learning target is creating a target that is not only concise but accurate. My instinct is often to overwrite things. What I mean by this is I tend to not know exactly when to stop writing. I often find myself having to go back and edit down emails and papers because my natural instinct is to over-explain. With learning targets, you need to create something that is easy for students to understand. it should only be one sentence. This is doable, however, it will often take me a few tries before I get the verbiage in the target just right. I tend to overthink what I'm writing a lot of the time as well. So often I'll construct something perfectly passible but I won't be able to shake the feeling there is something wrong with it. So I try and give myself a limited number of re-reads otherwise I'll just want to scrap all of it. I think I'm so hypercritical when it comes to creating a learning target because it is the base of our assessment. Assessments determine whether students were able to meet and understand their targets. Say my learning target is "Students will be able to demonstrate their understanding of Haiku poetry" and at the end of the lesson I have students craft their own Haiku's. That would be a form of assessment that directly ties into the learning target. Students demonstrated their understanding by crafting a Haiku and therefore met the target.
I like how you are creating your assessments that can reenact the learning target as closely as possible. Keeping the connections from what is learned in the lesson to the assessment close and and easy to understand.
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