The Grand Design

The Unbound Project has gone from a district-funded experiment to a less formal group of like-minded reformers working mostly on their own time, but that doesn't mean we can't do some real good for this district. The next stage for us is to continue putting our money where our mouths are and to put some of our best conceptual work into practice.

A big part of our central philosophy is our faith in public, formal, specific self-assessment and subsequent collaboration. We do it with the kids, and we do it ourselves. To push ourselves to reflect more formally and specifically, we've developed a large-scale, formal self-assessment for teachers that's designed to help them set up a unit or any large-scale chunk of teaching and then to look back at it afterwards in order to improve future teaching.

It takes you through pre-assessment, setting goals and assigning material, focusing on process, assessing midway, assessing at the end, and connecting the material to the next steps in the class. It tries to help you understand kids' learning as a longer-term process, to push you to put as much as possible into the kids' hands, to shift student and teacher focus to mastery instead of scores, and to encourage all stakeholders to be reflecting on the ways in which habits and process affect outcomes.

To that end, I'll be publishing sections of the self-assessment, one at a time, and using them to reflect on my real-world teaching. We'll see if the assessment leads to better teaching and have an opportunity to improve it at the same time. There should be other Unbound folks doing the same thing, so we'll be able to see it work across different disciplines. I'll give an overview of it this week and begin posting my real-world results as soon as next week, assuming everything plays out as expected. My plan, as of now, is to use the self-assessment on the first major analytical paper for my 10th graders. It's perfect, because there are pre-assessment elements, discussions of process, midway assignments (parts of the paper), a summative assessment (a full draft and a rewrite), and a connection to the next paper.

You can find our current version of the assessment right here as a Google Doc. I've enabled Unbound members to edit the document and I've opened it up as read-only to the whole world. So take a look, and if you have ideas, leave me a comment.