Performance Tasks and Assessments

        The introduction to the Common Core State Standards for ELA briefly mentions ways to assess all of these standards:  "While the Standards delineate specific expectations in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language, each standard need not be a separate focus for instruction and assessment.  Often, several standards can be addressed by a single rich task" (5).  Here, the document is introducing us to the idea of performance tasks and performance assessments, which I believe will start to play bigger and bigger roles in our instruction.
        I had my first, confusing encounter with these tasks and assessments this past year, as NYC schools were slowly starting to integrate aspects of the Common Core.  The assessments are used before a unit, basically to see how students currently perform on a given task.  The task is given after a unit (or units) to show how students have learned new skills.  Here is what I like and dislike about these performance tools:
        The task that we used for our third graders in reading and writing was designed by Teacher's College to align with our curriculum and reflect the new standards.  To describe it briefly, students had to read two informational texts on restaurants: an long-ish article about nutrition at Wendy's and a menu/advertisement from a healthy family restaurant.  After reading and taking notes on the two restaurants, students had to write a persuasive review about one of them.  This activity is a good example about how multiple standards can be assessed through a rather challenging task.  Students have to be able to read different kinds of texts, they need to draw specific types of information in their notes, and they need to synthesize some of that information into a specific genre of opinion writing.  I think doing a task like this is actually a much more logical and authentic way to see student's skill level, as opposed to multiple choice exams.
        One major issue that I had with the task was the time demands that we placed on doing it.  We bought into this task (apparently there were other choices we could use) because it was created by Teachers College and we figured it would be best aligned with our ELA curriculum.  I found it ironic that the task was created by Teachers College, however, because A.) the reading demands of the task were above most of our students level (where TC always preaches that students should read at their level) and B.) the writing part demanded that students produce a polished piece in one class period, while we normally spend a full month polishing writing pieces through the TC writing process.  A lot of the whole thing seemed to go against everything we had been teaching all year, and in the end the task proved very difficult for even our highest-performing students.
        I believe that these tasks and assessments will play a very large role in our curriculum planning and expectations as they become implemented more and more.  It will help to become more familiar with the demands and Standards, as I couldn't have been less prepared as they were thrown at me out of nowhere last year.  I remember feeling a lot of pressure to get these assessments right but in the end, I don't even think anyone collected them from us...perhaps it was just a trial run.