Learning That Lasts

Challenging, Engaging, and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction

Ron Berger, Libby Woodfin, Anne Vilen

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119253549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Amministrazione nella didattica

A practical guide to deeper instruction—a framework for challenging, engaging, and empowering students of all ages

For schools to meet ambitious new standards and prepare all students for college, careers, and life, research has shown unequivocally that nothing is more important that the quality of daily instruction. Learning That Lasts presents a new vision for classroom instruction that sharpens and deepens the quality of lessons in all subject areas. It is the opposite of a 'teacher-proof' solution. Instead, it is predicated on a model of instruction that honors teachers as creative and expert planners of learning experiences for their students and who wish to continuously grow in their instructional and content knowledge. It is not a theoretical vision. It is a model of instruction refined in some of the nation's most successful public schools—schools that are beating the odds to create remarkable achievement—sited primarily in urban and rural low-income communities.

Using case studies and examples of powerful learning at all grade levels and in all disciplines, Learning That Lasts is a guide to creating classrooms that promote deeper understanding, higher order thinking, and student independence. Through text and companion videos, readers will enter inspiring classrooms where students go beyond basics to become innovators, collaborators, and creators. Learning That Lasts embraces a three-dimensional view of student achievement that includes mastery of knowledge and skills, character, and high-quality work. It is a guide for teachers who wish to make learning more meaningful, memorable, and connected to life, and inspire students to do more than they think possible.

CHAPTER 1
Planning and Delivering Lessons That Challenge, Engage, and Empower

OVERVIEW

A Call to Action

In December 2011, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, visited the Springfield Renaissance School, a 6–12 public district school in Springfield, Massachusetts, the state’s second-largest school district. They were in the midst of a large-scale tour of high schools across the United States looking for evidence of deeper learning.

At Renaissance they observed classes and interviewed students, teachers, and the school’s founding principal, Steve Mahoney. In a follow-up e-mail to Mahoney after their visit, Mehta noted the palpably strong and positive culture at the school and its amazing results. Since opening in 2006, nearly all of Renaissance’s students have graduated on time and 100 percent of those graduates have been accepted to college. For many years the students have beaten the odds in their city with dedication and perseverance, and they have set a new bar for their school district and the city. And as a result, students, families, and faculty feel deeply connected to and proud to be part of the community at their mission-driven school.

Mehta also, however, noted areas that were less strong, particularly in the depth of instructional rigor observed during lessons. He cited a few bright spots but found many examples of low-level tasks and students who could recall information (the lowest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy: See Figure 1.1) but seemed to lack true understanding of concepts. Overall, both researchers found that classroom instruction across the school didn’t move students often enough up the taxonomy of complexity. Despite strong structures for supporting instruction, including frequent observations by administrators, Renaissance as a school had not yet created the rigorous instruction across classrooms to which they aspired.

Figure 1.1 Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

Mahoney likes to joke about Mehta’s comprehensive and candid e-mail: “He tore us apart!” he’ll say with a grin. Instead of feeling defensive about the critical parts of the analysis, Mahoney took the e-mail as a welcome provocation to improve. At Renaissance, Mahoney shared the e-mail with his staff, and it sparked their development of an instructional checklist to be used for data collection and as a catalyst for conversation about instructional practice following administrator observations. The checklist reflected a renewed focus on checking for understanding strategies and what Mahoney refers to as his “obsession” with good debriefs at the conclusion of every lesson. Mahoney also shared the e-mail with EL Education’s national staff and mentor principals, who used it as a common reading during their summer meeting and subsequently began a multiyear effort to increase instructional rigor in their schools.

Though Mahoney takes no comfort in this fact, Mehta and Fine found evidence of deeper learning only very rarely on their national tour of “good” high schools. Almost every school they visited was struggling with rigorous daily instruction. Schools everywhere, even high-achieving and highly regarded schools, struggle in ways similar to Renaissance. It is often easier to consider the ways that curricular choices (e.g., challenging projects or texts) can lead to deeper learning. But daily instruction that compels students to build conceptual understanding is difficult to define and difficult to find in action. This chapter begins our exploration of deeper instruction by lifting up effective instructional strategies that help students learn deeply during daily lessons in any discipline.

Why This Practice Matters

Our focus on the lesson acknowledges repeated studies that show that teacher quality and instructional practices are the greatest predictor of student achievement (Goe & Stickler, 2008). The lesson is the heart of the instructional core (City et al., 2009) where teachers, students, and the content interact every day. Creating classrooms where deeper learning flourishes requires teachers’ and leaders’ persistent effort to create high-quality lessons where the interactions that occur within this core are planned and delivered purposefully. This focus is important for the following key reasons.

Students Need Challenge

A college- and career-ready education must prepare students for jobs that don’t yet exist and global problems that haven’t yet been defined. Preparing students to thrive intellectually and emotionally in the twenty-first century means they have to be facile and resilient problem solvers. As students in one of our schools often say, “The harder the problems, the more our brains grow.” Unless we have lesson structures that compel students to take on complex work and do the thinking themselves, they will leave their K–12 education unprepared for what awaits them.

Students Need Engagement

Students of every demographic are distracted by technology. Cell phones, the Internet, media, music, and the “noise” of the marketplace bombard our daily lives with information, opinions, sales pitches, and data. One goal of any lesson, then, must be to captivate students and motivate them to dig in. This does not mean to entertain them. It means rather to intrigue them, to engage them in discovering connections, making meaning, and grappling with challenge. Lessons that engage students impel them to become self-directed and independent in pursuing knowledge and honing skills.

Students Need Empowerment

Purposeful lesson design and delivery is critical to empowering students with tools for leading their own learning. Creating time and structures for students to understand their learning goals, own their progress, and synthesize and reflect helps them develop responsibility and independence as learners. As teachers, we often admire those students who are self-directed in their learning and wish our other students were just as motivated and confident. We need to embrace the fact that the lessons we plan and deliver can serve to cultivate empowered, self-directed learners or, just the opposite, discourage those dispositions in our students.

Getting started with lessons that engage, challenge, and empower students begins with reflection, planning, and centering lessons within the big picture of teaching and learning. In the Getting Started section that follows we explore the key decision points for teachers by mapping the lesson planning process onto the deeper instruction framework. By unpacking what it means to plan lessons that challenge, engage, and empower students, we move one step closer to answering the call for deeper learning.

GETTING STARTED

Planning Lessons That Challenge, Engage, and Empower Students

Planning the 45, 60, or 90 minutes of each lesson is some of the most challenging and important work a teacher can do. Whether designing a lesson from scratch or customizing a lesson provided with a published curriculum, getting the details right really matters. There are timeless questions that every teacher wrestles with:

• What do I most want my students to learn?
• How will I know if they understand?
• How will I challenge them?
• How will I help make the learning last?
• How will I meet the needs of my diverse learners?

But wrestle we must, because the lesson plans that result from our answers are the best tools we have to promote deeper learning.

A good lesson is the heart of deeper instruction, bringing to life the body of knowledge and skills students need. Indeed, the lesson is how a teacher brings any curriculum to life. Thus, when planning a lesson it is critical to first consider the curriculum for the unit, semester, or year and the knowledge, skills, and concepts required by grade-level standards. Nesting the lesson intentionally within the content, and sequencing lessons in a way that makes the content compelling, challenging, and authentic is work that goes hand in hand with creating and delivering any one individual lesson.

We understand that some teachers build lessons themselves, some regularly customize lessons provided in a curriculum, and still others are expected to follow a lesson plan provided to them almost exactly as it is written. We encourage teachers in all of these circumstances to make use of the deeper instruction structures and strategies we present here as much as is feasible. The structures and strategies can be a foundation for creating an original lesson sequence or can be used to modify and enhance lesson plans that are already created. Because teachers ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Video Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• About EL Education
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Planning and Delivering Lessons That Challenge, Engage, and Empower
• CHAPTER 2 Laying the Foundation for Deeper Learning with Literacy
• CHAPTER 3 Creating Scientists and Historians
• CHAPTER 4 Reimagining Mathematics Instruction
• CHAPTER 5 Teaching in and through the Arts
• CHAPTER 6 Differentiating Instruction
• Conclusion
• Appendix A Sample Protocol-Based Lessons
• Appendix B The What, Why, and How of Protocols
• Appendix C Primary Source Close Reading Guide
• Appendix D Factors to Guide Your Selection of Text
• Appendix E From Assignment to Assessment
• Appendix F Informational Text Resources
• Appendix G Photograph Resources
• Appendix H Great Online Mathematics Resources
• Appendix I Appendix I: Kid Curators Rubric
• Appendix J Initiatives That Build a Positive Classroom Culture of Differentiation
• References
• How to Access the Videos
• Index
• EULA