One of the key reasons these shifts work is that the sheer scale of a new teaching initiative can be massive, and the effort required to launch it exhausting. A teacher who has been comfortable and reasonably successful with delivering content in a teacher-centered environment might be able to see the validity of a new pedagogy in learner outcomes but find it too big a change to consider.
In fact, it was in working with a teacher who was quite overwhelmed with high anxiety and fear of change that I first began to think about these shifts. He told me that using solution fluency was just too much for him to consider and he would leave teaching if he had to make this kind of change. Unfortunately, many teachers are in the same position of fatigue and fear. I wished that there were a few simple things—simple microshifts—that I could use to slowly help teachers to transform.
I asked him if, at the beginning of each lesson, he would be willing to engage in one small change (a microshift) by clearly presenting and discussing his learning intentions (learning goals) with his learners along with providing them with clear success criteria. Very quickly, his learners started to excel and asked what tomorrow’s learning intentions were, then what they were for the entire week. Soon learners were arriving in his class having already met the success criteria. Eventually, he no longer needed his carefully planned lessons because students had already moved beyond them. Upon seeing this success, he asked me what to do next; we started working with essential questions, which became his next shift of practice.
After this experience, I started using these shifts of practice with all my clients and going deeply into solution fluency with the ones who were keen and felt ready to take on this challenge as they had been incrementally successful with other shifts. By offering a range of shifts for everyone to work on, I was in fact personalizing the learning for the teachers. Which is, of course, one of the shifts I present in this book!
Structure and Use of This Book
This book presents ten core shifts of practice you can use with your students immediately, regardless of your core curriculum or instructional pedagogy. Each chapter presents a future-focused shift, explains what it is, and shows how it benefits learning. These ten shifts are as follows.
1. Essential and herding questions: Providing learning without an essential question is like offering food to people who are full—they won’t accept it if they aren’t hungry. Essential questions stimulate students’ appetite for learning. For this shift of practice, challenge yourself to incorporate essential questions in every learning activity.
2. Connection through context and relevance: Ask yourself where your students may come across a certain kind of information or a specific skill in their lives outside of school. If it’s something they’ll come across in their own world, then instantly there is a connection that brings relevance and context to the learner.
3. Personalized learning: Learning is personal, and it becomes more personal when students have a personal connection to the task. By engaging in future-focused learning, endless possibilities appear for personalization. It could be the task, the learning process, the research, the assessment, the evidence of learning created, or the role in collaboration.
4. Challenge of higher-order-thinking skills: Take it up a notch or two using Bloom’s revised taxonomy by shifting your learning tasks to higher-order-thinking tasks (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Challenge your learners to evaluate and create instead of demonstrating remembering and understanding.
5. Information fluency for research skills: We are bombarded with information every second of our lives. We assess the information and, in a split second, determine how it will affect us and our decisions. Information-fluency skills slow down this process so we can dissect every aspect of assessing information and learn how to do it better. It is a fluency built for maximizing the usefulness and credibility of all forms of research.
6. Process-oriented learning: Use other essential fluencies as the learning process to challenge learners to solve real-world problems that matter, dive deep into inquiry, or create something amazing. The microshifts in this chapter feature uses for solution fluency, media fluency, and collaboration fluency.
7. Learning intentions and success criteria: Whether working in one subject or across multiple key learning areas, the impact of being transparent with curricula is amazing. No matter if it’s curriculum lists, learning intentions, standards, or objectives, putting them out front for the benefit of your learners is an essential shift in future-focused learning.
8. Learner-created knowledge: Learner creation means learners are creating new knowledge as part of a learning task, a new product, or a new solution. It’s also about developing the evidence of learning as well as the criteria.
9. Mindful assessment: Mindful assessment is fair, clear, transparent, deliberate, and purposeful. It enhances learning by focusing on formative assessment as well as reflecting on the learning process. We must rethink the bond between teaching and learning by assessing the crucial skills our learners need to thrive in life beyond school, as embodied by the essential fluencies. We do this through the practice of mindfulness with both assessment and feedback for improvement.
10. Self- and peer assessment: Reflection on learning is a skill we can internalize and grow with by practicing it during our school years. That’s why encouraging learner reflection through self- and peer assessment adds such a powerful dimension to learning. Self- and peer assessment stress and reinforce the importance of collaboration, reduce workload, and increase engagement and understanding. In addition, learners’ insights and observations become highly valued since they help them reflect on and understand the processes of their own learning.
Within each chapter, you will find three specific microshifts that detail specific activities you can engage your students in along with reflective questions for you to consider after trying them. I call them microshifts because each is a single activity that can help nudge your practice toward a permanent transformation in relation to the broader shift of practice. Each chapter concludes with a series of guiding questions for further reflection or for a book study with your colleagues or learning community.
Finally, the book’s appendix also presents additional microshift ideas for you to consider, seven small shifts of practice you can implement to further each core shift in this book. All in all, this book contains one hundred microshifts that you can immediately use in your classroom.
As you work through this book, or after you complete it, I recommend starting with the low-hanging fruit by considering only one of these shifts. Reflect on the microshifts and additional microshift ideas and either choose one or develop your own microshift to trial. You might choose whichever shift is easiest to implement or the one you are most excited about. When you do this, consider what you hope to see happen before-hand and afterward, and reflect on whether this occurred or if a different outcome occurred, be it favorable or unfavorable. You may then choose to adjust your approach and attempt it again. Eventually, through a process of application, debriefing, and adjustments, you will find that the shift becomes more entrenched in your practice and improves learning outcomes. When this happens, move to whichever shift you want to explore next.
Although I do focus this text on communicating to you as an individual, it’s important to understand that I developed these shifts of practice as a way to assist entire faculties to transform their learning. As such, these shifts are particularly well suited to teams.