The conventional lesson plan includes three components:
1) Objectives for student learning
2) Teaching/learning activities
3) Strategies to check student understanding
In Part One of a series on lesson planning, I contrasted traditional learning objectives with an open-ended “feast-preparation” mindset. In Part Two, I told a story about learning activities. This is Part Three, where we’ll talk about evaluation.
I’m going to cheat a little on the lesson-planning thing, partly because my daily evaluation doesn’t vary too much. Charlotte Mason educators accomplish lesson-level comprehension checks using narration, asking students to “tell back” what they have heard or read or seen. Some other time I’ll write about narration, why I use it, and my experiences with it. Right now, though, let us talk about evaluation in broad terms.
I know a young woman who has struggled to read for comprehension all her life. When she reads a line of text, she does not finish with an image in her mind. She has to read out loud. She has to translate words into things. When this young woman got to college, she developed reading-comprehension strategies to prep for quizzes and tests. She color-coded articles, drew diagrams in margins, made stacks of elaborate notecards, and covered her walls with oversized timelines and quotes.
She would spend 2 hours with an article another student might have skimmed for 10 minutes. She sank into things. Yet, after all her careful representation of information, she failed tests. At test time, she was once again faced with just words, with reading the same line over and over hoping that it would eventually form itself into a physical thing that could be manipulated in the physical world.
“Look,” she would say, shaking a graded test on artistic movements in one hand and an oversized chart with the movements and their key artists all cleverly arranged and color-coded in the other. “I don’t see why I can’t turn in my study materials instead of taking a test. I just want my professors to see that I wasn’t lazy. I didn’t slack off. You want to know about Romanticism? Look right here.”
She would jab her finger at the list on the chart. Belief in natural goodness of man. Love of nature. Revolt against neo-classicism.
“It’s right there,” she would say. “I don’t see why that doesn’t count.”
A part of me agrees with her. If academic merit was a matter of dedication and engagement, she would have been at the top of her class. And isn’t relationship with the material what matters?
But for all that, there is a difference between being able to explain Romanticism on a blank sheet of paper and NOT being able to explain it.
I have the reverse problem; just as the world of ideas made no sense to her unless she made it concrete, I struggle to interact with the physical world unless I abstract it first.
When I chop an onion, unless I concentrate hard and go slowly, it goes like this: I misjudge how many layers of skin to peel off beforehand. I make crooked cuts with the knife I sharpened incorrectly and too long ago, the edge slipping on the onion’s slick membrane. I nick my fingers. The pieces I toss into the pot with too little or too much olive oil are irregularly sized, and so are not all caramelized at the same rate.
I can tell you about sustainably farming onions. I can talk about the spiritual exercise of attending to the onion’s essence, à la Robert Farrar Capon. I can describe the process of correctly chopping and sautéing an onion.
Yes, but there’s a difference between being able to neatly chop an onion and NOT being able. And I see that difference all around me; the physical world does not grade on a curve.
Sometimes I wish that my uncoordinated efforts had the same results as those of people who have the particular kind of steady, linear attention that the physical world requires of its shapers. My intentions are good, and I expend a great deal of effort in daily living. I wish the results looked sharp and shiny. I wish I sewed straight seams and had neat handwriting.
But other times, I know that the truth is better. My uneven homemade skirt makes a well-made piece of clothing shine all the brighter, but is beautiful too, in its way. And it’s not my final word. Accurate knowledge of our own relationships with ideas and with things and with people is a grace.
As a teacher, I feel conflicted about evaluation. I’m equally drawn to no evaluation and rigorous evaluation, to requiring open-ended demonstration of relationship with material and to requiring mastery of specific information. It’s easy to get lost in those weeds, but if I take a step back and think about evaluation as one manifestation of the grace of accurate self-knowledge, it usually helps me sort things out.