For the past few weeks I've have been putting together my first lesson and unit plan, and I would like to share some of it with you to discuss GRASPS. GRASPS is an acronym for goal, role, audience, situation, performance, and standards and teachers may use these to refine and orient their assessments. This helps in avoiding activities over performance tasks, which will actually present problems in a life-manner situation for students to utilize their skills and understandings to solve.
    I am studying to become a sixth grade English teacher, and my unit focuses on connecting current information to future outcomes in the form of predictions. This unit is meant to teach students the skills of identifying important present conditions or information in their own lives and identifying possible outcomes that may result in their own lives. This in turn will help them form goals and strategies to prepare for future expectations by their homes, their jobs, their communities, and their world. From preparing the best defense/offense strategy for a football game, to weighing the impacts a new law might play on your country, prediction is a key skill an individual might use to prepare for any possible situation.
    So having explained the main concept of my unit plan, I must consider what performance task I might assign my students to best assess their understanding and mastery of this concept. To do this, I will use GRASPS.GRASPS stands for goal, role, audience, situation, performance, and standards. Here is a GRASP I have been considering for my unit plan:

Goal: Plan a camping event on the football field for your peers.
Role: You are Ms. Miller’s sixth grade English class.
Audience: Your audience contains the Principal, your parents, and fellow teachers.
Situation: You want to have a camp night on the football field and need the principal to sign off on your event. You also need to convince your parents and teachers to volunteer as chaperons. To do this you are expected to have rules, a list of necessities, and a response plan in case of misbehavior or bad weather.
Performance/Product: You will form a thorough plan and list of necessities for a one night stay on the football field. In order to convince the principal and your teachers, you must present a well formulated list of necessities and rules to address possible needs and issues which you must predict. You must provide evidence for your predictions and a response plan should any of your predictions come true.