I was eager to read this book, but am left with an empty feeling that I cannot explain. I think I expected more, but I found this book to mostly be a review of what I already knew. To summarize the book, Brookhart suggests that higher order thinking includes transferring information, applying critical thinking skills, and being able to problem solve. When planning an assessment, a teacher needs to:
1.
Specify clearly and exactly what it is you want to assess
2. Design tasks or test items that require students to demonstrate this skill
3. Decide what you will take as evidence of the degree to which students have shown this skill
She also suggests making blueprints for higher order thinking based on Bloom’s levels to make sure that a teacher is assessing his/her target points and goals. What I took away from this book was that a teacher should supply feedback that “is important to apply criteria about the quality of thinking” (30), hold conversations with students discussing their thinking skills, use rubrics that assess targets, not tasks, focus on one idea, separate the grade for thinking and writing, have students self-assess, make sure students and teacher understand what the results of an assessment means about the students’ thinking skills, and to use Bloom’s taxonomy or some form of it. This stuff I already knew and I think I do pretty well. I guess I was hoping for a perfect rubric, but I guess that does not exist because of different assessments, standards, classes, etc.
Brookhart also suggested making test questions that are deductive and inductive and to have students on an assessment identifying assumptions and premises, reasoning from data, and reasoning by analogy. I appreciated the example assessments and have a better idea on how to write tests. I appreciated the idea with multiple choice tests. For time sake, I cannot also provide feedback and assign papers. With a multiple choice test, though, I can have students prove their thinking skills as part of the grade.
I personally struggle with assigning a grade to creativity. Brookhart helped me with this. According to some, creativity shouldn’t be part of a grade, but instead be graded through critical thinking. I realize now that I was thinking that creativity is something pretty and interesting to me, but not to everyone. I was wrong. When and if grading creativity, one should think of creativity as new ideas, reflective, reasonable, and productive practices. I also like how the author suggests the creativity needs to:
·
Recognize the importance of a deep knowledge base and continually work to learn new things
· Open to new ideas and actively seek them out
· Find materials for ideas in a wide variety of media, people, and events
· Look for ways to organize and reorganize ideas into different categories and combinations, and then evaluate whether the results are interesting, new, or helpful.
· Use trial and error (128-129).
The last thing I took away from this book was the acronym, IDEAL. I think I will teach my students this with my first unit that is project based the ideas of solving the problem in these five steps:
IDEAL-
1. Identify the problem
2. Define and represent the problem
3. Explore possible strategies
4. Act on the strategies
5. Look back and evaluate the effects of your activities.
I also like the idea of solving problems backward, which is something I can have my students do with Speak once they know the whole situation. They will be able to come up with alternative ways to handle the situation with different outcomes.
Overall, this book was decent. It sparked some new ideas for me with assessments.
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