Facts
● Since being introduced in the assessment workshop WALT and WILF became a familiar term used by teachers to help them to design assessment task by using backward by design approach.
● Throughout the time, this is being used to drive the teaching learning and also the design of the assessment of the units.
● The WALT and WILF used in PYP planner cover knowledge, skills, concepts and attitudes; therefore in each of those element, teacher easily design learning engagement as well as assessment task based on learning objective (WALT) and success criteria or (WILF)
● Furthermore, we decide to split the WALT and WILF table (what so called) and PYP Planner. and due to this issue, we got recommendation on how we use the planner especially in terms of assessment (Stage 3) and learning engagement (stage 4)
Positive:
● it’s been helpful to design the assessment task
● it’s familiar terms and easy to use for teachers and students
● it can be used to design comprehensive assessment task for knowledge, skills, concepts, or even attitudes
● it drives teaching learning in the classroom. Teachers used it as their lesson plan and somehow it makes the lesson more structured.
Negative:
● The use of it is being misunderstood. Based on certain research WALT and WILF actually used for daily teaching learning, where teacher share the learning objective to students and discuss the success criteria with them. Instead of doing this, so far what happen at school is teachers already design set of assessment tasks with its fixed criteria for the students to do. This cause issue with the implementation of inquiry based learning, where students didn’t get chance to participate in designing assessment task.
● While the teachers felt being helped by the use of WALT and WILF, there is sense of fragmented learning happen throughout the unit. This cause teacher to lose opportunity to do more inquiry and to explore more conceptual understanding by students. This became worse when the WALT and WILF is set aligned with the lines of inquiry and it became timeframe e.g. we need to finish first lines of inquiry in week 3 of the unit.
● The existence of assessment tasks at the end of each WALT (learning objective) seemed like they are just mini summative tasks that happen throughout the unit.
● Many even still use WALT and WILF only for the sake of documentation instead of an effective tool to design learning engagement and assessment
● There are two separate planners being used the WALT and WILF and PYP planner.
● Teacher’s questions were not being addressed well throughout the unit.
Possible solutions:
● We will still use WALT and WILF for daily lesson purpose. Teacher will share the WALT (learning objective) during the lesson and discuss the WILF (success criteria) with students when designing assessment tasks.
● We will try to use other format of designing assessment task and learning engagement by empowering teachers questions and more focus on the conceptual understanding of the units.
● Focus more on the conceptual understanding by mapping the key concepts and related concepts. We then create learning objectives, teacher question, learning engagement and assessment based on this mapping.
Download example of concept map below:
example_of_using_concept_mapping_for_pyp_planner.docx |