Smagorinsky ch. 4 “Planning Backwards:  How Endpoints Suggest Pathways”

After reading chapter four of Peter Smagorinsky’s Teaching English through Principled Practice, there are actually two final assessment approaches that best fit my teaching style: the analytic essay and the multimedia project.  In fact, I already use both of these in the courses that I teach.  What I gained from this reading was the idea of planning backwards and choosing an overarching concept for an entire semester, rather than for each literary work that I teach.

Smagorinsky asserts that creating the final assessment at the beginning of a unit plan helps ensure that the teaching and assessment will be not only be more closely aligned, but also help students feel that each class period is working towards a long-term goal.  When I first began designing the courses that I teach, I did have an idea of what I wanted students to gain by the end of the reading, but I always wrote the final assessment a few days prior to giving it.  I still do this.  I’ve done this because although I’ve taught the same works for several years now, each year I choose to teach it slightly differently.  It may be because I want connect the classic literature with something in current events or because I learned something new or because my students and I had a discussion that led us in a different direction than I had planned.  My assessments reflect what was covered or discovered in that specific course with those specific students.  No two assessments are ever the same for that reason.  That being said, as I was reading about choosing an overarching concept, my American literature course kept popping into my head.  That course combines a study of the American literary movements (which is primarily done during class time) with outside readings of great American novels, plays, and short stories.  I didn’t think there was a way to choose an overarching concept for such a course, but by the time I had finished the chapter, I realized that it was possible to connect the outside readings for this semester with a theme:  alienation.  Having an overarching theme for these works has inspired the analytical essay that I will assign for the final exam and has changed the approach that I will take in presenting these four works this semester.