Alignment to Assessment Standards and Purpose of Lesson

• RI.6.1 – Work Time A: Students participate in the Voices of American Indian Boarding Schools Audio Museum event. They answer questions about their classmate’s performance task recordings, using evidence from the recording to support their analysis.
• RI.6.6 – Work Time A: Students analyze the point of view and purpose of their classmates’ prefaces, selected texts, and reflections.
• SL.6.2 – Work Time A: Students listen to their classmates’ performance task recordings. They review the key ideas expressed in the recordings and demonstrate understanding on their audio museum: Responses and Reflections note-catchers.
• SL.6.1 – Closing and Assessment A: Students engage in a discussion to reflect upon and draw connections between the performance task and the module overall, and synthesize and celebrate learning.
• L.6.6 – Closing and Assessment A: Students use appropriate academic language during a class discussion.
• In this lesson, the habit of character focus is on working to become an ethical person. Students show respect and compassion when they listen to and reflect upon the recordings of their classmates during the audio museum. Through this performance task, students contribute to a better world by sharing their learning with a larger community.

Opportunities to Extend Learning

• One aim of this performance task is to help students make heard and known the stories of students who attended American Indian boarding schools. To heighten the impact of students’ work and broaden the audience who will benefit from the students’ work, consider making the recordings available as a resource for other students (i.e., by providing copies of recordings in the school library or sharing them with a local historical organization).
• Students who excel at graphic design could be tasked with creating promotional materials for the audio museum, such as fliers, posters, and programs. Allow students to experiment with a free online, design tool, such as Canva, to create these materials.

How It Builds on Previous Work

• This performance task is a culminating celebration of learning across Module 3. In Unit 1, students built their background knowledge of American Indian boarding schools by reading supplemental texts that highlighted the experiences of former students. For the performance task, students independently selected excerpts from similar texts to share in a recording during the audio museum. In Unit 2, students practiced using recording equipment to record themselves reading aloud their narrative letters; students prepare and present more developed and polished recordings as part of the performance task. The module reflection that concludes the lesson invites students to draw connections among the performance task, the anchor text, and the module overall.

Support All Students

• Some students may feel nervous imagining others listen to their recordings; this anxiety may be felt especially by ELLs, for whom it may feel especially threatening to imagine that their language is being evaluated, even if just privately and implicitly. Validate students’ feelings and concerns, if they come up. Take time to guide students through the questions on the Performance Task: Audio Museum Responses and Reflections handout to reinforce that performance task is not an assessment; the questions on the handout invite listeners’ responses to the content, but do not ask for listeners to critique the recordings themselves. ▲
• If ELLs need extra support as they listen to their classmates’ recordings, invite them to listen to recordings multiple times at the same listening station. This repetition is beneficial to ELLs, who are more likely to comprehend the recordings if they hear them more than once. ▲

Assessment Guidance

• The performance tasks at the end of every module are neither formative nor summative assessments. They are not formative since they come at the end of the module, concluding students’ learning about the module topic and the literacy skills they have built over eight or nine weeks. However, they are also not summative because they are heavily scaffolded to help students create high-quality work, and so are not a strong measure of what students can do independently. For these reasons, we do not recommend analyzing performance tasks with the same lens used to analyze assessments. Look at students’ performance tasks through the lens of the attributes of high-quality student work (authenticity, complexity, craftsmanship).

Down the Road

• This lesson concludes Module 3. In Module 4, students explore the topic of space science and examine the scientific and social contributions of “hidden figures” in the field, whose stories are often untold in historical accounts of key scientific events.