Nov 13 – Feedback to trainee teachers on designing constructive alignment in her course design

Feedback:

– excellent consistency with the verbs you have bolded in your ILOs, TLAs, and ATs!

– you have a shortage of high-level verbs in your ILOs: your only Relational level behaviors are compare and contrast in sessions 2 and 5, and analyze in session 6.    You NEVER challenge your students to reach for that highest level of understanding: you have NO verbs asking for Extended Abstract behavior!

One easy way to address that is to look for higher-order thinking in the Individual Designing Project: surely in a DESIGN project your students will perform behaviors higher than perform serial skills by running an app!  What about analyzing the requirements of the digital story, relating advertising techniques together to design a coherent commercial, and creating an original advertising commercial to persuade (justify?) viewers of the value of a product?   I would put design, create, persuade, and justify on the Relational / Extended Abstract border, depending on how original the thinking is!   See this link for an extended list of SOLO verbs beyond the basic ones: http://study.ln.edu.hk/obatl/sites/default/files/SOLOTaxonomyVerbs.pdf

– major error: you are asking your students to reflect in your ATs in sessions 1, 2, and 6, but you don’t always have reflect in those session TLAs, and you never put reflect in your ILOs!   If you are going to assess reflection,  you MUST teach it in an TLA, and why not include it in your ILO as part of your course plan?  This is a great way to get high-level thinking going and create long-termlearning, but you need to list reflection consistently in all 3 elements: TLA, ILO, and AT (and bold it)!

Yes, when you want your students to go for deeper understanding, use higher-level SOLO verbs in your ILOs, and then follow that plan up with TLAs and ATs.    Reflecting on prior learning is a great way to make your students aware of the strategies they used, and this will help them create long-term learning they can build on in the future.