Going Deeper with Data

We have been using data more than ever to understand our student's progress and reflect on our teaching. Benchmark assessments, formative assessments, mid-module assessments, progress monitoring, and unit assessments all tell a story about the gaps in student learning. Teaching to fill the gaps - teaching to mastery - is still a mystery to many of us. Digging deep enough to use that data to see a clearer picture into children's understanding and misconceptions is powerful. Planning proactively - saying "because I know this about this student, I will be prepared with this strategy" - is so different than reacting to what a child's gaps in understanding may be and re-stating or re-explaining. Really teaching to mastery is about student understanding and having students prove how they understand a concept or skill in many different ways. Simply put - it is deeper, not wider.

Going deeper to fill gaps in student learning requires a deep understanding of the standards, our students, and the specific competencies and foundational skills that our students must have to achieve mastery. This is very different than re-teaching by providing students with similar questions or problems (or parallel tasks) in order to achieve mastery because it involves a deeper analysis to determine what is missing in the students' understanding of the standard. If we take standard, for example RL 5.3 which states "Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact)," In order to teach to mastery of this standard, we must know what the competencies and skills are that make up this standard. There is no process or short cut that we can give students to master this kind of deep thinking. Students must be able to identify character traits, determine text details that identify the setting, make inferences, identify cause and effect, understand rich vocabulary, identify similarities and differences, and use details to understand the context of dialogue and narration. This takes practice and classroom structures that support this type of thought and analysis.

 In a Reader's Workshop model, teachers model metacognition and text analysis in order to build the capacity for students to think deeply and carry on their own dialogue. In the video clip below, you see how the teacher models both the kind of thinking he expects around the standards and his expectations for students to carry on this kind of dialogue on their own.

 

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Our expectations as teachers and the structures that we implement to support student learning will lead to the type of learners we produce. Our understanding of the standards and the competencies and skills that our students must have in order to achieve mastery will impact the way we plan and the way we use data to teach for mastery. If we understand our students, our data, and the standards, we can produce amazing results in student achievement that will have a lasting impact on our students' lives.

Re-commit to Higher Expectations

It's time to start the countdown. You know how you start to think about "back to school" in terms of the hours remaining? So what will you do with these next few hours? How will you prepare yourself to take charge of that first day back? What expectations will you set for yourself and your students so that you can take charge of the growth you will see in 2015?

Let's start with expectations. If returning to school after a long vacation is like starting fresh in September, how will you start with your students? What do you expect in terms of their work ethic, their behavior, their interactions with their learning community, and their achievement? If we expect students to have certain attributes as a learner - such as applying a certain level of effort to written work or expressing ideas completely to partners - then we must model and practice those attributes with our students until they have mastered them. Returning after a vacation means we must "start from scratch" in terms of modeling, teaching, and reinforcing those skills in order to help our students master them.

The power of our expectations is outlined in much of the book, Teach Like A Champion, by Doug Lemov. Chapter One (linked here http://teachlikeachampion.com/wp-content/uploads/TLAC-Chapter-1.pdf) gives powerful examples of how we as teachers set our expectations for our students in every day interactions in our classrooms. Sometimes we are not aware of the subtle messages we send our kids - apologizing for what they are about to learn because "we have to get through it," answering for them rather than pushing them to persevere and find the solution, and allowing students to answer questions incompletely or not at all - all set our expectations significantly lower than we think they are.

The challenge for 2015 is to re-commit to having higher expectations. Making a resolution to have higher expectations would mean that we didn't have high expectations in the first place. Reflecting on our practice and realizing that we need to have higher expectations - and that our students can achieve those expectations if we stack them for success in our classrooms - that takes re-committing to the work at hand. If each of us re-commits to higher expectations for our classrooms and for our students, we will see great gains in our students' learning and achievement. Let's make 2015 the year for higher expectations. Let's make 2015 the year that our students achieve and we create classrooms where children love learning, thinking, problem-solving, and creating in community with others. We have the power - are you willing to re-commit to that vision?