Excellent teachers have high expectations and share their notion of success criteria with their students. They ensure that there is alignment between the delivery of the lesson, task and assessment of students. When this happens you see results like those that were shared within Abby Oswald's classroom last week. She was teaching a writing lesson. Abby's intention and success criteria were posted. She used the success criteria in her mini lesson and then asked students to repeat over three times. What was the result? 85+% proficient on the assignment. I also asked students as they worked. "How do you know you are successful." They repeated the criteria, in their own words. Fabulous. This is an example of how it can be done. This is teacher clarity! The intentionality and specificity of the language in this lesson when applied consistently throughout all content areas will result in double the growth for students.
It's critical to develop highly effective teaching an increased emphasis on the Common Core or Standards. It's not enough to just write them. You need to understand the content.
Doug Fisher shared with us in the Teacher Clarity Playbook:
"A major aspect of teacher clarity consists of learning intentions and success criteria." "Careful analysis of content standards benefits those who need to teach them. Through the process of discussion and debate, colleagues identify what students should know and be able to do, and thus prevent the inevitable creep that occurs when textbooks and activities, not the standards, begin to drive instruction. Keep in mind that publisher-and teacher-created curricula are not the standards themselves, but rather are materials that (hopefully) facilitate progress toward standards. When discussions at a grade level meeting are focused more on covering a chapter in a textbook rather than the learning outcomes, it is a telltale sign that the standard has been lost."
It's critical that you each contribute to developing learning intentions and success criteria and they are not centered on a story or activity. If you don't have a shared understanding and purpose in the PLC you may get varied results. Remember we are lifting the grade level not just one classroom. We lift all grade levels to see results at a building level.
We are moving in the right direction and IT'S NO SECRET that other buildings and ESC staff are noticing. However, we must stay diligent in our efforts to reach our goal of 70% at the end of the year. You have to be constantly checking on the status quo through your DFAs (daily formative assessments) and CFA (Common Formative assessments). It's NO SECRET that reaching 80% consistently daily on grade level standards will result in correlated result on standardized assessments.
It's no SECRET that this is a tough hill to climb and you need the strength of your team to reach the summit. Make it happen. TAP into the expertise of instructional leaders. Analyze student work and be diagnostic.
Oswald / Danker Fifth Grade
ReplyDeleteWe will start looking at where we want students to be at the end of the unit and how we are going to get there. I am trying to become more familiar with the standards and using them to write a learning intention and success criteria. The common core standards books can help guide us through. Our PLC needs to continue to look at student work to determine how students are progressing toward a standard. We can use that work to revise learning intentions and success criteria as necessary.
1.We will pace the district curriculum map.2. Our students are at many different levels of readiness.3. We will look at our students anecdotal notes to see if there level of understanding is progressing towards meeting the standard .
ReplyDelete1st grade
ReplyDeleteWe pace our instruction based on the data we have collected through MAP, our DFA's, and our CFA's. As we look at student work we determine if students are progressing toward our learning intentions, or if we need to modify our success criteria and instruction. Our biggest challenge in utilizing the standards is turning the standards into learning intentions that first graders can understand and use during their learning. We create or find specific questions in daily work related to the learning intention to use as our DFA's. This allows us to gain a deeper understanding of where students are at in relation to meeting a standard.
4th Grade team:
ReplyDeleteToday we were looking at rewriting LI/SC for CRC and we realized our LI/SC were not decontextualized. This then led to the discussion of creating new LI/SC for ELA based on the standard.
We talked about how the standards build upon one another and become more complicated as curriculum progresses. We then had to focus on decontextualizing and making it student-friendly and achievable. We are working together to establish rigor as we approach the LI/SC with a new lens.
3rd grade
ReplyDeleteAs a team our challenge is needing to spend time looking at the common core book to ensure that our Learning Intentions and Success Criteria are aligned with the standard and not the lessons we are teaching.
Music- Anderson
ReplyDeleteI will be purposeful in speaking,the success criteria to be clear, simple and repeat out loud the "I can" so students are continually hearing and experiencing what they need to learn and understanding.
Kindergarten
ReplyDeleteWe have had to drastically adjust our teaching this year to meet the needs of our students. We are still working with the same standards, just going about it in a different way.
2nd Grade
ReplyDeleteWe are continuing to modify previous LI & SC to more accurately align with the standards vs. activities. We are also modifying DFAs to match improved LI/SC. It is goal of our to make adjustments to word work time to provide more differentiated instruction to give kids what they need to progress their skills at their level.
Mrs. L Anderson
ReplyDeleteWith the end in mind I will share modified continued engaging activities that align with the standards. This will be done to help students take ownership in their learning and meet their individual needs.