Good Intentions Gone Awry

The more I am back the K-12 school system the more I see good intentions gone awry and good information misinterpreted and misrepresented. Most of it relates to the Common Core, which was led by two non-teachers (don't even get me started on those two folks). As I was preparing to work on my first set of lesson plans for the new semester I found myself "missing" my DOK chart. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with it--in my 10 years as a teacher educator I had NEVER come across such a thing--it is a chart (really it is a wheel) with 4 levels of knowledge and tasks (verbs) associated with them. It is similar to Bloom's Taxonomy. Anyway, we have to use the top two levels of this chart to write objectives and guiding questions for all daily lessons. Since I had misplaced mine I of course went to the Internet to find another. Imagine my surprise when I came across a blog that showed that Webb did not create this wheel and, even worse, he has "explicitly stated that he considers the wheel chart misleading and has always discouraged its use."

According to David Walkup, who talked to Webb, "The problem with the DOK wheel chart rests on the fundamental, but completely false, premise that teachers can simply select certain action verbs to raise and lower the DOK level of their instruction." A link to Walkup's blog is below. http://granted-solutions.blogspot.com/2013/12/bad-dok-chart-sabotages-understanding.html