Assessment,+Evaluation,+and+Overall+Progression


 * The Culminating Project: (Note: while this covers the intent and focus of this culminating project it is by no means the only information that students would be given – these assignments are demonstrated in our lesson handout to an extent, however, a full exploration of this project could and would be a lesson all of its own.)**

Students will work in groups of three to create a variety of creative projects based around a synthesis of the hero’s journey in __The Hobbit__. These projects will be uploaded by the students to a class wiki designed specifically for the purpose. Students will get to explore the finished wiki, and parents will also be invited to see it. Students will be allowed to choose which project they work on and what groups they work in. The choices for wiki projects include:

1. **Storyboard**: Students will create a story board of scenes that are important to the hero’s journey. Each student in the group will be responsible for a minimum of three scenes. As this is a group project, the scenes chosen should make sense when viewed together, and the students will each be expected to write a 1 page paper explaining how their scenes relate to the hero’s journey and why they chose those scenes above others. What makes these scenes memorable and important? Why did you choose to represent them the way you did?

2. **Encyclopedia**: Students will create illustrated encyclopedia entries of creatures, places, and items that are important to both __The Hobbit__ and to the hero’s journey. Each student in the group will be responsible for a minimum of three entries. As this is a group project, the entries should make sense when viewed together and should be organized in some logical way (some examples might be by alphabetical order, by type, by chronological appearance in the story, etc). Students will each be expected to write a 1 page paper explaining how their encyclopedia entries relate to the hero’s journey and why they chose to focus on those entries. Many of the potential entries are not explicitly given an easy definition, our understanding of what is characteristic of dwarves shifts, just as our understanding of what is possible of hobbits does. With that in mind, and while students must remain true to the text and not contradict anything explicitly stated, this project leaves room for a strong creative element. What makes dragons desire gold so fiercely? What story in the background of that species made them that way? Above all else, students should be inventive and have fun with it (as long as it does not contradict the text and can make sense in context).


 * 3.** **Movie**: Students will work together to film a movie of scenes from __The Hobbit__ that are important to the hero’s journey. Each student will be responsible for one stage of the hero’s journey. As students will be working together to do the filming and acting, this division of work will be made clear in their 1 page papers as they outline which scenes they chose to demonstrate their stage, why they chose them above others, and how they relate to the hero’s journey. The movie should be a minimum of three minutes, one minute per stage. Students are also expected to provide some indication and explanation of the stages as they occur in their movie as a means of giving their scenes a logical framework where they might otherwise seem disjointed. These movies need not be Hollywood quality, but should demonstrate a high level of effort.

4. **Photo Album**: Students will create a photo album of key characters fro__m The Hobbit__. Each student will be responsible for three characters. Each character should have their own page that includes illustration(s) of the character at key moments and one or two accompanying quotes from the character, and should provide some reference to what matters most to that character (A student making one for Bard might include a picture of him retrieving the lucky arrow that he has kept with him for so long back from Smaug with a caption “more important than a trophy”). Students will each be expected to write a 1 page paper explaining what part their characters played in the hero’s journey (obstacle, helper, etc) as well as why they added in what they did to the album. As this is a group project, students will be expected to order their collective album pages in some logical way (the order they appear, the role that they play, etc).


 * Note:** As these projects are being posted for an audience (your classmates and parents), and as this is a major project, these projects should be polished to the best of your ability before turning them in. Edit your written work, color in illustrations where appropriate, use props in your videos, etc.


 * Evaluation Plan:**

There are many running themes and assignments throughout our unit, and as this culminating activity has been developed in reaction to these focuses, we feel it is important to first discuss what those running themes and objectives are: When forming our evaluation we first considered a particular quote from Jago, “the challenge to those who object to such [objective] tests is to devise ways of assessing student’s reading that actually teach them more about what they have read. I want to stretch their understanding” (Jago 101). We knew that we did not want to just create a multiple choice test on facts that our students would not remember 10 months from then, let alone 10 years. So rather than focus our assessment on fact driven tests, we wanted to focus the assessment on a project that would allow students to use some of the tools they had been practicing with throughout the unit, while simultaneously allowing them to create something together as a class, thus giving them an audience for their hard work. We wanted them to stretch their abilities, and use them to make decisions about what is important about the text. We knew that there should be a focus on the hero’s journey, as that was the framework of the unit, but we also knew that we needed to incorporate other skills. Our assessment is designed to support Sunshine State Standard “The student identifies, analyzes, and applies knowledge of the elements of a variety of fiction and literary texts to develop a thoughtful response to a literary selection” and the specific benchmark of LA.910.2.1.4 – “The student will identify and analyze universal themes and symbols across genres and historical periods, and explain their significance” (www.floridastandards.org). The hero’s journey is universal, and just as relevant today as it was in the time of //Beowulf//, but before students can apply a universal theme across genre and historical period they must first gain a concrete understanding of that theme – which has been one of the main focuses of this unit, and is therefore an important aspect of any evaluation of this unit.
 * 1) Students will be able to analyze the progression and maturation of characters
 * 2) Students will be able to determine actions and motivations of characters
 * 3) Students will be able to discuss the construction and rules of various worlds (//The Hobbit,// their home, their social groups, etc)
 * 4) Students will be able to examine //The Hobbit// through the framework of the hero’s journey and apply that framework in multiple ways and across multiple texts.
 * 5) Students will be able to examine events and issues from alternate perspectives
 * 6) Students will be able to make connections between their personal lives and the story they are reading.
 * 7) Students will be able to use tools such as art as an entryway into a specific focus on and understanding of the text.

The writing requirement, while small, was included because “the writing requirement ensures that more than Ben’s artistic ability is measured” (Burke 289) and also gave students a prompt to think further about the decisions they were making. In addition, while we loved the idea of an artistic and creative focus, we wanted to ensure that the learning was not lost and that we had a concrete example of individual student work outside of the group effort as a basis for assessment. This was one of our reasons for having students be assigned certain aspects of the project, while still having them come together to create something cohesive.

One goal for this culminating project was for students to demonstrate a concrete understanding of the hero’s journey while applying it to characters and situations that may not have been apparent through our class discussion or through their own individual readings. We promote this by having a focus larger than just one or two main characters, which is why we decided on three characters per student – between nine characters per group, students must branch out further than Bilbo and Gandalf alone. We also wanted students to return to the text for a closer look and encouraged this by using an art activity where students would go back to the text and look through it closely for visual cues before then creating their own artistic choices and interpretations. This practice of using art as a reflection upon text is something that multiple activities within //Teaching Literature to Adolescents// address, and this book states that “students can also create artwork that reflects their experiences with texts” in their section on rewriting texts (TLA 110), which matches our intention to have students review their own experience with the text as a part of their culminating project.

The use of art is also addressed by Burke in his book as he states “Students think in visual terms more than ever thanks to computers. The integration of words, images, and sounds is a skill many already have and others need the opportunity to develop” (Burke 254). This is immensely important, because by including visual work we give students proficient in it the chance to excel where they might not with text based assessment alone, but we also give students unused to such applications the opportunity to develop that skill within themselves.

In addition to the benefits of taking an additional, closer look at the text and of completing a slower reading encouraged by the accompanying artistic activities, there is also the fact that “In today’s high school English classes, where as many as half of your class might be reading significantly below grade level, students need different tools to learn what they need to know and to demonstrate their knowledge in a medium familiar to them.” (Burke 258). This culminating project provides multiple types of projects that can give students who have difficulty with writing assignments and alternate means of expressing their understanding.

We support the skills required for this evaluation through many of our smaller ongoing assignment in our unit plan, where we have students experiment with each of the options above for a specific scene as part of the lesson. While we did not have students video tape themselves, we did have them engage in some enactment activities like a reading walkthrough where students enact the actions of their characters as they read from the book (no memorization required).

In addition, the use of a wiki to show case their culminating project acts to not only provide students with an audience for their work, but also to support sunshine state standard LA.910.6.4.2 –“Technology - The student develops the essential technology skills for using and understanding conventional and current tools, materials and processes” ([|www.floridastandards.org]).

Students will be assessed based on the completeness of their prompt and if they met all of the specifications of the assignment, as well as overall effort, presentation, the incorporation of the hero’s journey, and if they go beyond just what has been already done in class discussion and work to this point. Students will also be assessed on how well their use of visuals match their explanatory essays and support the claims they are making.


 * Questions to Evaluate Student Learning:**

What makes a person a hero? How is the hero’s journey relevant today? Describe a hero’s journey that you or someone you know has been on. Is the hero always a dynamic character? Why or why not?


 * Evaluation of Teacher Effectiveness:**

One of the largest measures of teacher effectiveness for our unit will be one of the concluding activities – taking the hero’s journey and applying it to another text, or in this case, the movie “Up” (2009). If students can take what they have learned and apply to a completely unfamiliar text, then that is a good sign that they have absorbed the material and are not just parroting the content of class discussion or something they searched for on Google. One specific activity listed as a final project in TLA reflects just this, as it discusses having students “extend approaches and ideas from the unit to create their own interpretations of texts” by taking a form of analysis and applying it to “texts not read in the unit” (TLA 59). We felt that this activity would be a very good test of how students succeed at applying their new skills to an unfamiliar work, but felt that it should not stand alone as a culminating activity as we preferred to use something that better integrated more than just the hero’s journey. The combination of this activity, which will take place in the final week before the culminating project, and of the culminating project, should provide a clear picture of how well students have absorbed the different aspects of our instruction.

Ultimately though, the evaluation of teacher effectiveness is not something that should only occur at the end of the unit, but should instead be an ongoing process consisting of a combination of formative assessment and teacher reflection. “As you engage in immersing, orienting, facilitating, and modeling, you are continually reflecting on your teaching to anticipate subsequent teaching activities and changes in your plan” (TLA 55). It is great to know how a unit succeeded or failed to better improve future units, but it is also important to pay attention to the smaller lessons that take up the majority of the students’ time.


 * Assessment and the Progression of our Unit:**

Before this unit, students had already received instruction on creating wikis. They had successfully demonstrated their knowledge on wikis through their past individual wiki assignments which they were assessed on. In their first weeks, they were taught characterization using short stories and their summer reading, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, where they were also introduced to the genre of fantasy. Students also have experience with quick writes and relevance quotes. They have an ongoing journal in which they keep all of their responses to daily prompts and quotations, as well as select thought assignments they receive for homework.

Their first unit, the coming of age unit, acquainted them with various texts pertaining to individual struggle and maturation. During this unit, students also read personal narrative accounts of coming of age, and practiced writing their own personal narratives. As Bilbo's story is in many ways a story of coming into oneself, and as heroes are often a vital part of personal development and maturation, we thought that this was an appropriate point to segue into our unit on the hero's journey.

During the first three lesson plans, an instance of student assessment would be during their group work. Students will be provided with graphic organizers that require them to put in their own information as well as their group’s information. Students’ understandings will be assessed based on their individual responses on their sheets. Students’ understandings will also be assessed based on their quick writes and responses to relevance quotes, if their answers provide adequate detail and supportive facts.

After my lessons, students will continue with their character development time line, where they choose two to three major events per chapter and discuss how they are related to Bilbo's development. They will also continue their quick writes to spark creative thinking before the day's lesson. These prompts will be relevant to the unit and will require students to pull from their understanding of the material and their background knowledge to discuss the topics. Starting the week after my lesson, students will be reintroduced to relevance quotes, which will be given to them once or twice a week. Students will be asked thought-provoking questions about a specific quote to "stretch their understanding" (Jago 101). Students will not be notified in advance because this will determine if the student is keeping up with his or her readings. Ongoing lessons will be conducted to engage students and ensure their understanding of the text and overarching unit.

Throughout the middle of the unit, students will be assessed on a variety of activities including but not limited to the ongoing character development timeline, relevance quotes, their ongoing journaling efforts, participating in class discussion (as more than just agreeing with someone, but rather in a way that furthers the discussion). These will not all be formally graded, but will rather receive completion grades such as check, check minus, check plus, with teacher intervention if students seem to be losing the point of the lessons. Their most recent assignment was to go through the book and collect data on the attitudes and natures of the different races (i.e. Dwarfs are good as long as you don’t expect too much from them). Moving into the second focus section, students will be expected to have completed their character development charts with their reading of chapter 19 that they had for homework. Students should have also attempted to complete their hero’s journey charts and should have a rationale in mind for the upcoming discussion of them.

In the last series of focus lessons (week 6 of 7), one instance of student assessment would be a writing assignment that students do as a reflection/reaction to the final chapter. We will have a class discussion about Bilbo’s return home and the reaction his family has toward him, and will reflect as a class over how the character development time lines have progressed. Students will brainstorm a list of changes that Bilbo has undergone, and will go on to write a short narrative from the p.o.v. of Bilbo’s relatives, depicting the changes that Bilbo has undergone through the altered perception that these relatives have of him. They can go back to the rules of notice for help thinking of details for the relatives to notice. Students will be assessed on how well they include different aspects of characterization (clothing, dialogue, attitude, reactions etc) and on staying true to the point of view of the relative that they choose to write from. A Took’s p.o.v. would be very different from that of a Sackville-Baggins. Another form of assessment is a chart that students will fill out about the hero’s journey as they watch the movie “Up” (2009). Students will be assessed on their short paragraph justifications of their classification of the parts of the hero’s journey that are contained in “Up.”

After those concluding focus lessons, the unit would end with the presentation of the class wiki projects. They would be presented in class to their fellow students, and possibly to their parents if an event could be arranged. Students will have the opportunity to work together for several periods finalizing their projects and posting them up to the class wiki before these presentations took place.