Assignments Matter Book Summary Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

Please choose whether or not you want other users to be able to see on your profile that this library is a favorite of yours. @en schema:description why assignments matter the basics crafting an assignment instruction sequencing assignments to design units and courses anchor assignments environments that make assignments matter assignments as data. @en please choose whether or not you want other users to be able to see on your profile that this library is a favorite of yours. Assignments matter making the connections that help students meet standards schema:about effective teaching schema:about education aims and objectives schema:creator eleanor dougherty schema:description this book explains the critical differences among assignments, activities, assessments, and thoroughly describes the key elements of an assignment: prompts, rubrics, products, and instructional plans. @en on mar 6, 13 bull by jania hoover bull with comments bull eleanor dougherty’s assignments matter is a great book.

She encourages teachers to analyze the process so they are choosing assignments that provide an authentic measure of what students know.  if you’ve ever wondered how to create assignments that truly reflect what your students know and are able to do, assignments matter is the book for you. If you are accustomed to choosing assignments based on what chapter you’re on in the textbook, this book is not for you. assignments matter made me question every assignment i’ve ever given to my students. she provides a clear step by step process to help teachers create meaningful assignments for students. dougherty explains several resources available to help teachers design effective assignments. I found myself stopping at several points to take notes and make immediate changes in my own classroom.

Every teacher, from first year teachers to veterans, can take something away from this book to enhance instruction.  a major point is to design instruction around the rubric instead of doing it the other way around. I’m definitely guilty of sometimes planning my instruction, and then coming up with an assignment to assess what i’ve taught. Dougherty adds to the canon of research based practices that encourage teachers to be more intentional about the work they assign. This work is a must read for practicing teachers, instructional coaches, curriculum directors and anyone else that has a stake in the work students actually complete in the classroom. The book explains the critical differences between assignments, activities, and assessments and thoroughly describes the key elements of an assignment: prompts, rubrics, products, and instructional plans. Readers will learn how to follow a seven step process for crafting effective assignments link assignments into units and courses devise anchor assignments for collaboration and consistency across grades tap into instructional touchstones that can enrich any assignment create classroom and school environments that support assignment making and use assignments as a source of data about teaching and learning. Equipped with the knowledge and expertise gained from assignments matter, readers will be able to create meaningful learning experiences for their students and come to appreciate the author's belief that assignments may well be the missing link in school reform efforts to improve student achievement.

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see the book's table of contents and read excerpts. i want to be as emphatic as possible: the impact of the actual, taught curriculum on school quality, on student learning, is indescribably important. When considering the prospect of creating assignments, some people might ask, why bother? ruth mitchell, who designed a protocol for analyzing tasks in her book front end alignment 1996 , has a good answer to this question and is well known by her colleagues for saying, students can do no better than the assignments they are given. Just any assignment admittedly will not improve achievement, but well crafted assignments hold the potential to make learning and teaching more focused and relevant because in the crafting process teachers must be deliberate and highly aware of the context, content, and charge involved in an assignment.

Indeed, my work with colleagues over the years in educational settings, including schools, districts, and states, suggests that assignments may well be the missing link in school reform efforts to improve student achievement. More than a decade ago, i cowrote an article that discussed the lack of challenging tasks in classrooms and the impact that deficiency has on student performance, and how, unfortunately, this pattern of weak tasks without content and clear purpose continues barth amp dougherty, 1997. Too many students, my colleagues and i observed, spent classroom time on activities, such as filling in worksheets, coloring maps, underlining textbook chapters, and listening to computer activated lessons and read alouds. In these settings, students were engaged in tasks with little relevant content, and often teachers could not tell us why they were teaching these tasks or what was actually at work in the tasks. For example, a task we saw repeatedly asked students to create book covers, an activity i still see today at all grade levels although its cousin, the poster, may be more prevalent.

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As teachers analyzed what was learned and taught in this task, it became clear that the task asked students to spend more time on creating borders and lettering for their covers than on analyzing the themes and characters in the book. By using mitchell's protocol involving a process of analysis called standards in practice. The teachers were able to understand that their tasks were unaligned to standards and did not help students learn the topics, issues, and questions embedded in a rigorous curriculum education trust, 2006 mitchell, 1996. According to robert marzano, high expectations and pressure to achieve refer to establishing challenging goals for students 2003, p. The reverse is also true, in that low expectations and little pressure to achieve cause poor achievement. When teachers present students with low rigor tasks, they create low achievement even when students do well on these tasks.

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In addition, such tasks contribute to the boredom students so often complain about when they spend too many hours on work that is routine and bland, often centered on discrete skills. In these situations, students miss opportunities to acquire basic skills in an intellectual environment that would allow them to apply those skills. When students perform low rigor tasks, they are unsure of why they are doing them and how they will benefit, even if standards are posted on the wall. Such teaching results in damaging experiences for struggling students as well as their more skilled peers.

According to national and international data, even strong students aren't progressing as much as they can or should education trust, 2008. If, on the other hand, assignments are taught with high expectations and pressure to achieve, then students gain the knowledge and skills they need to take on a wide range of environments and opportunities. When assignments are not taught or are not taught explicitly, students lose out on the academic and intellectual experiences that assignments offer. According to harvard researchers who have studied classroom dynamics, the task predicts performance city, elmore, fieman, amp teitel, 2009, p. If assignments are not of high quality and are not relevant to the curriculum, then learning will also be of low quality and loosely connected to the curriculum, if at all. Ineffective instruction is often distinguished by a loosely regulated plan, and students spend classroom time going through the motions of learning but not producing solid evidence of that learning.

In these classrooms, the purpose for doing activities is lost, and learning loses energy and meaning. To coin a phrase, a lesson without an assignment is a lot like a carriage with no horse and no place to go. In contrast, a well crafted assignment ensures that instruction will provide students with a goal and the power to get there, enabling them to engage in rigorous and interesting academic contexts as they acquire the content and skills necessary to participate in academic coursework. Most important, assignments create teaching and learning opportunities to think and learn about ideas, topics, events, and questions about specific content in the curriculum. H.'s classroom is an example of intentional teaching with assignments playing an important role. Is a middle school english teacher who employs assignments to teach specific content and skills. In this example, she asked students to recommend a book to their peers, an assignment aligned to the common core state standards ccss for english language arts ela the standards are discussed at length in the next section of this chapter.

Her purpose was to teach students how to write a critical book review, which is an assignment built around skills of critical thinking and argumentation. On the surface this seems to be a simple enough task, and in another classroom it may well have been given as homework, with very little direct teaching. As a result, students typically produce a long paragraph retelling parts of the book they liked but not producing a critical review.

Used a template from the literacy design collaborative or ldc, an effort funded by the gates foundation in 2009–11 to develop a national literacy strategy to develop the following prompt: would you recommend green angel. A novel, to your peers? after reading and analyzing this modern day fairy tale, write a critical review in which you address the question. She then taught the students, step by step, the skills and strategies they needed to employ to produce a critical review. The result was that students learned the difference between retelling and a critical review: how to make a claim and support it with a set of reasons based on the genre and elements of fiction. Having learned how to construct a basic argumentative essay in the language of the discipline, these students were positioned to take on even more challenging prompts. H.'s thoughtful instruction more than suggests that the value of assignments as a way to manage and deliver instruction serves both teachers and students.

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