A Culminating Performance task to Demonstrate Skills A culminating performance task designed to demonstrate understandings, skills, and dispositions in relation to the big idea essential question. Order Instructions: Develop a narrative that explains a unit of some length in which your students are expected to meet standards by addressing an essential question.
Your paper will use the following headings: ? Essential Questions o The big-idea essential question and how it was determined. o The content topical essential questions. ? Performance Task o A culminating performance task designed to demonstrate understandings, skills, and dispositions in relation to the big idea essential question. ? Differentiated Instruction o How you will scaffold instruction to assist your students to learn the content and skills leading to answering the essential question and successfully completing the performance task. ? Standards o How standards are met through this unit. ? Link to Theoretical Framework. o Provide a brief rationale for how this unit is aligned to your own educational philosophy. Please include citations from course materials in support of your work.
Develop a narrative that explains a unit of some length in which your students are expected to meet standards by addressing an essential question. Your paper will use the following headings: ? Essential Questions o The big-idea essential question and how it was determined. o The content topical essential questions. ? Performance Task o A culminating performance task designed to demonstrate understandings, skills, and dispositions in relation to the big idea essential question. ? Differentiated Instruction o How you will scaffold instruction to assist your students to learn the content and skills leading to answering the essential question and successfully completing the performance task. ? Standards o How standards are met through this unit. ? Link to Theoretical Framework. o Provide a brief rationale for how this unit is aligned to your own educational philosophy.
Please include citations from course materials in support of your work.
A Culminating Performance task to Demonstrate Skills Sample Answer
Introduction
Jon Krakauer adopted the 1993 ‘death of an innocent’ article written by Christopher McCandless ‘into the wild.’ McClandless, a small yet active man appeals to many teenagers and young adults. His journey in the novel addresses issues such as how to be accepted into one’s own community and the society at large. In this extensive unit, the story explains how finding one’s identity sometimes conflicts with being a valuable member of our societies. To seek some form of enlightenment, McCandless leaves to find his way in the wild. His spirited risk taking in the story leads to a better understanding of the spirit and nature of America and its literature during the transcendentalist period in time (Krakauer, 2007). The knowledge gained from this unit by the literature review of the nonfictional texts, short stories, significant essays and a variety of poems has helped in the formulation of Essential Questions. These questions relate to the self, society and happiness and they are:
- What is success?
- How is identity constructed through our values and beliefs?
- How is a community essential to happiness?
- What is the link between the self and society?
The Literature that was extensively reviewed to assist in the composition of this culminating assessment added an extra appeal to the adventure and survival notions in the story. This essay, therefore, uses the fundamental questions generated in this unit as the basis of the argument. The evidence collected from the literature reviewed assists in the exploration of answers to these questions. This unit has created a compelling investigation of the American spirit, culture, traditions and community. Therefore, the fundamental questions are discussed and the process of how they were determined analyzed. The desired outcomes of the narrative also involve learning outcomes for the students, links to the theoretical framework and evaluation of performance tasks in relation to the content topical issues.
A Culminating Performance task to Demonstrate Skills and Analysis of essential questions
The big-idea primary question in this paper is ‘what is success?’ the problem was resolved by creating a list of goals that an individual aspired to complete before they die. This list had the effect of allowing students to have a chance at reflecting and defining their life goals. After completion of their own bucket lists, the students brainstorm and reflect on them. After critical individual brainstorming, students are allowed to share details of their lists with their fellow classmates and peers. They share ideas, add and remove ideas into their lists as they learn from each other. From these ideas, a primary benchmark of what success entails will be measured and students will be able to answer the principal question of ‘what is success?’
To further look into this question, a comparison of Chris McClandless experience and that of Richard Pine in Stephen King’s story ‘”Survivor Type”’ is made. In this comparison, the extent to which Richard Pine lives up to his name is analyzed. The performance tasks to achieve this comparison involves having the students pre-read the issues about success including issues such as what is success, how is it measured and the key indicators that someone is successful. An analysis to the initial reaction to the story is necessary before other questions to evaluate the degree of success can be asked. These questions would include the definition of failure, what does failure entail and how does one know that they have failed or succeeded. A discussion on whether Richard Pine was successful by his own standards in getting out of poverty, qualifying as a physician and his ability to survive for a time (Spignesi, 2001).
The students can be assisted in learning the content and skills needed in answering the fundamental questions and performance tasks, a plan of desired outcomes consisting of priority standards needs to be made. These measures include analyzing and measuring the merits of each student’s arguments by examining the evidence obtained from the literature review. Meeting this standard, the different author’s own ideas need to be analyzed by the student’s as supported by evidence in the text. The students will also need to draw conclusions about the author’s primary belief’s values and life’s perspectives. For a successful outcome, the students will also demonstrate their familiarity with various forms of American literary periods including the various authors and the differing topics that they engaged in. to answer the essential questions, students also need to analyze the way in which the themes, issues, events and political movements at the particular historical period affect literary works. For proper presentation, the students need to come out with clear and concise ideas, demonstrate competency, develop a proper thesis, cite sources appropriately and draw supported inferences from the works of literature to be able to compete the performance tasks successfully (Mueller, 1996).
A successful evaluation will ensure that students understand that American literature reviewed in this unit seeks to understand the relationship between personal identity and nature. An understanding of the skills and the dispositions in this unit is demonstrated by the setting and pace also shape identity. The literal and metaphorical approaches are also used in relation to answering the big idea essential questions. In answering these questions, the students, therefore, get to be involved in their own journey and are therefore able to understand the process of constructing personal identities (Clayton, 2003). They also develop the ability to synthesize texts around a theme and define and measure the gap between where they are now and where they would be in the future.
To meet the standards required in this unit, it is essential that students choose at least two or three relevant passages that include sentences or paragraphs that relate to the essential questions. For each passage chosen as a reference point, the necessary questions to which the passage relates is selected and the passage number in which it appears recorded. The student will then write a note explaining the thoughts that the passage brings about in regard to a particular primary question that is being answered. These notes provide the evidence and the referencing material to use while constructing a synthesis essay. So, for example, to answer the question about what is success, an extract from Richard Pine’s story about not liking football, but having to play it for the necessary goal of winning an athletic scholarship says a lot about the character and determination of Richard Pine. From the passage, it is evident that he was determined and hardworking to be able to obtain that scholarship.
Educational philosophies focus on the nature of knowledge. The philosophical perspectives in education are perennialism, progressivism, Reconstructionism and essentialism. My own beliefs and my own educational philosophy are tagged on perennialism where the aim of education and acquisition of knowledge is to ensure that students get an understanding about ideas construed in western civilization. Perennialism attempts to teach everlasting ideas and the constant truths about the natural and human world. The fundamental understanding of this theory is that human beings should attain cultural literacy(Lai, 2006). Since human accomplishments are emphasized, great works and literature and art are taught to enforce the understanding of the relationship between nature and identity and understanding of success and what it means to an individual or society are based on the individual’s or society’s unique value depositions. The connections that students make between Richard Pine and McCandless outline universal ideas.
A Culminating Performance task to Demonstrate Skills References
Clayton, S. D. (2003). Identity and the natural environment the psychological significance of nature Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Krakauer, J. (2007). Into the wild New York: Anchor Books.
Lal, B. M. (2006). Educational philosophy New Delhi: Pragun Publications.
Mueller, L. (1996). Alive together: new and selected poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Spignesi, S. J. (2001). The essential Stephen King: a ranking of the greatest novels, short stories, movies, and other creations of the world’s most popular writer. Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books.
