In closing, you’re setting up students for success in learning.
Summary
Setting up your classroom dance floor requires you to understand why you make the choices you make. We hope that this chapter has helped you understand the research behind differentiated instruction and the formative assessment process. More importantly, we hope we have made these concepts easy to remember with our instructional cha-chas. Now that you understand why it’s worthwhile to choreograph your instruction with the steps, it’s time to examine how we begin planning for them, starting with the standards.
CHAPTER 2
Move Smoothly From Broad Ideas to Smaller Ideas
Every excellent lesson plan, like a choreographed dance routine, has non-negotiables. To successfully plan, you must know your district curriculum and standards. (Knowing your dance partners—your students—is equally important, and chapter 3 on page 21 details that effort.) Once you know your standards, you create daily learning targets to support your students in taking little steps toward the broader standard. Determine what students will do, say, make, or write to show their achievement toward the learning target. You can even create a variety of methods to provide choice for the students, which will likely increase their motivation. Create the criteria for success so students know exactly what they must do to show what they know. This evidence, along with other pieces of evidence you have observed—informal, on-the-fly data gleaned during class—drive your instruction.
State standards tend to be very broad and are written from an educator’s perspective; students rarely understand them. For example, one of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers’ (NGA & CCSSO, 2010b) Common Core State Standards for mathematics asks that second-grade students “fluently add and subtract within 100 using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction” (2.NBT.B.5). Most second graders do not know what the word fluently means, and it’s the first word in the standard.
A student-friendly learning target helps students determine the goal and expectations for each lesson. The target helps them determine where they are in relation to the broader standard. Authors Susan M. Brookhart and Connie M. Moss (2012) explain that learning targets:
Describe, in language that students understand, the lesson-sized chunk of information, skills, and reasoning processes that students will come to know deeply. We write learning targets from the students’ point of view and share them throughout today’s lesson so that students can use them to guide their own learning. (p. 3)
Teachers usually plan several checks within a lesson to measure student progress toward the learning target, as well as one bigger formative assessment, often referred to as the class assignment. The latter is often something tangible, like a written response or a presentation and is the hard evidence showing whether the student mastered the day’s learning target. As you plan this, consider the details, the rigor, and the thinking that you want your students to exhibit. It’s the start of a beautifully choreographed lesson.
To plan for instruction, we must answer the following questions.
• How do you identify the standard?
• How do you identify the learning target?
• How do you choose the main formative assessment?
• How do you choose criteria for success?
How Do You Identify the Standard?
Which standard will you be partially or wholly assessing in the lesson? We know that teachers touch on several standards within a lesson, but focus on one to make it easier for student to self-assess and for you to determine what you are assessing. When you have learning targets in place, you are partially assessing a standard. Sometimes the learning target for that lesson is the actual standard because you have taught all the learning targets in that progression toward the standard. Table 2.1 shows several standards broken into learning targets.
How Do You Identify the Learning Target?
It takes several learning targets to get to the big, broad standard. How many learning targets will students need to reach the standard? Ideally, you will accomplish this identification with your teacher team. Together, you separate each standard into skills, content or concepts, and context. Breaking apart the standard will help you determine what prerequisites to teach so students can reach mastery. Each prerequisite is a potential learning target depending on whether you teach them to the whole class, a small group, or to individuals who need it (which is an example of differentiation). The flowchart in figure 2.1 demonstrates this breaking apart. For more details about how to do this process with your team, see chapter 2 in Design in Five by Nicole Dimich Vagle (2015).
It helps to create a learning target progression to get your students to the standard. The Delaware Department of Education (n.d.) has examples of these progressions for Common Core English language arts standards on its “Curriculum Development for English and Language Arts (ELA).” For example, the following is a nine-step adapted progression that the Delaware Department of Education (n.d.) gives for the NGA and CCSSO (2010a) Reading standard “Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details; summarize a text” (RI.5.2).
1. I can determine the main idea of a text.
2. I can explain the difference between main ideas and key details in a text by showing examples from the text.
3. I can graphically represent the relationship between main idea and details.
4. I can explain how the different text features add up to the main idea.
5. I can organize the ideas in a text.
6. I can analyze how a text is organized.
7. I can give examples of how the author supports the main idea with the details in the text.
8. I can write a summary including the main ideas and key details of a text.
9. I can determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how key details support them; I can summarize the text.
Note that the last learning target is the standard. All the previous learning targets lead a student to the big, broad, challenging standard. Each learning target becomes a one- or two-day lesson using the instructional cha-chas cycle.
Notice the following characteristics of a strong learning target. (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download the reproducible version of this list, “Characteristics of a Strong Learning Target.”)
• Each learning target has a verb and specific content: The verb is the do and the content is the know that the students will show within