"Stage 3"--sounds serious

Hi group!

Emily, Samantha, and Melissa all highlight important ideas from Wiggins' and McTighe's stage 2 of curriculum design--the emphasis on creating performance tasks, summative assessments, rubrics, etc., prior to planning daily learning activities also resonates with me. Reflecting on my student teaching the past two semesters, it's evident that, more often than not, I skipped from stage 1 to stage 3, which, as Wiggins and McTighe point out, is the most common mistake a teacher makes in designing curricula. In hindsight, skipping stage 2 indeed resulted in less coherent units.

Not lost on the irony, I want to skip ahead to discuss stage 3 and the part of chapter 9 that covers "purposeful work" and how "design must transform goals into intelligible, practical tasks and criteria that the student can grasp as soon as possible" (198). The authors exemplify these ideas through a unit on The Catcher in the Rye, in which the teacher "begins the unit with a performance challenge and essential question to make clear where the work is headed, how the reading should be approached, and how the students' culminating performance will be judged" (198). So far so good. I'm with Wiggins and McTighe. In theory, these are all the items I would want to present to my students on the first day of a unit. However, when I read the actual prompt, which begins on page 198 and continues on 199, I was taken aback, and I am wondering if anyone else was as well. I do not like the idea of giving students the question "What is wrong with Holden" before they even begin the novel. It's a leading question and will undoubtedly bias their reading. If you are truly "teaching from the sidelines" and hoping that your students will uncover understandings, wouldn't we want our students to come up with that question on their own? (It could be that I simply don't like this question, or it could be that when the unit is a novel, I disagree with introducing essential questions before the student has had a chance to read.) Also, the performance task is so specific--write a diagnostic report for the hospital and a prescriptive letter to Holden's parent's--which gives students a context for reading, but what does this do to the student who loves to read for reading's sake? And, again, as much as UbD demands that "teaching" is only one learning activity, the design of the activities in this example are so specifically (overly) constructed they have teacher written all over them. My complaint/question, then, is where is there room for students' voices? Anyone have thoughts on this?