The 2nd meeting in PETA class, I learned so many things. I wanna share about “twin sins” of the conventional teaching, understanding by design (UbD), and we were given four cases about education. Two of them were the fact, they happened in the world and the rest were fake. I only remember one case that the fact and the fake one.
For the fact case, it’s about a question for 8th grade on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for math assessment. The question is “how many buses does the army need to transport 1,128 soldiers if each bus holds 36 soldiers?” and only 1/3 of the class answered correctly.
What do you think about it? I think for the 8th grade, it’s not very hard because we only need divide 1,128 by 36 and then we will get the remainder, but why so many students answered incorrectly? What’s wrong with them? Had the teacher taught them? I don’t think so because since we were in Elementary we had learned it. Hemmmm we have to reflect on it and do something better if we are becoming a teacher.
For the fake case, it’s about a history teacher who panic because so many materials in text book that have not been taught yet. So he decided to finish that book by cancelling some activities that time consuming such as a mock UN debate, vote and discussion, and also eliminating some parts of the material, and then he will teach 40 pages per day until the end of semester.
What do you think about that? Hem actually it really fake, but I think in Indonesia it happened even not as bad as the case. Many teachers in Indonesia do a similar thing, the teachers only teach the students by following the books, page-by-page, and the teachers only lecturing in class. This is what we call “coverage” approach, one of “twin sins”.
For the fact case, it’s about a question for 8th grade on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for math assessment. The question is “how many buses does the army need to transport 1,128 soldiers if each bus holds 36 soldiers?” and only 1/3 of the class answered correctly.
What do you think about it? I think for the 8th grade, it’s not very hard because we only need divide 1,128 by 36 and then we will get the remainder, but why so many students answered incorrectly? What’s wrong with them? Had the teacher taught them? I don’t think so because since we were in Elementary we had learned it. Hemmmm we have to reflect on it and do something better if we are becoming a teacher.
For the fake case, it’s about a history teacher who panic because so many materials in text book that have not been taught yet. So he decided to finish that book by cancelling some activities that time consuming such as a mock UN debate, vote and discussion, and also eliminating some parts of the material, and then he will teach 40 pages per day until the end of semester.
What do you think about that? Hem actually it really fake, but I think in Indonesia it happened even not as bad as the case. Many teachers in Indonesia do a similar thing, the teachers only teach the students by following the books, page-by-page, and the teachers only lecturing in class. This is what we call “coverage” approach, one of “twin sins”.
Actually we were given another case which describes another “twin sins.” Another of “twin sins” is “activity-focused” which only focus on the activities that make students happy but intellectual meaningless. The activities can be very interesting for the students, but after the class they will get nothing, just fun. It also happened in Indonesia. That’s our job to do not use those “twin sins” anymore.
After that I learned about UbD, it’s the method which used to overcome “twin sins”.UbD is a backward design, so we identify the desired result first. By identifying desired result, we have a target and then we can set a lesson plan that can reach our target, but before we make a lesson plan we have to determine acceptable evidence. By determining the evidence, it helps us to make clearer lesson plan accordance to our target. After that we make a plan on learning experiences and instruction based on our target and evidence that we have made. Finally we can make a lesson plan based on UbD which expected to overcome “twin sins”.
That’s really fun learning, after we learned UbD, we experienced in make a lesson plan by UbD methods. We still don’t know yet about the result because we will discuss it in the next meeting. Yeaaaaay, can’t wait it any longer. :D
