The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching

A Checklist for Staying Focused Every Day

Bryan Goodwin, Elizabeth Ross Hubbell

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781416617303
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

Checklists help us work better. They help us manage complex tasks more effectively and ensure we apply what we know correctly and consistently. They've become indispensable for airline pilots and doctors, but can this low-tech approach to planning and problem solving demand a place in the teacher's toolkit? Teaching is complicated, with challenging decisions and important consequences, but it's in the most complex situations that a straightforward checklist can be the most useful.

Goodwin and Hubbell present 12 daily touchstones—simple and specific things any teacher can do every day—to keep classroom practice focused on the hallmarks of effective instruction and in line with three essential imperatives for teaching:

* Be demanding: Align teaching with high expectations for learning.
* Be supportive: Provide a nurturing learning environment.
* Be intentional: Know why you're doing what you're doing.

If there were one thing you could do each day to help one student succeed, you'd do it, wouldn't you? What about three things to help three students? What if there were 12 things you could do every day to help all of your students succeed? There are, and you'll find them here.

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Section 1

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Be Demanding: Articulate and Maintain High Expectations for Learning

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In a now famous experiment conducted in 1965, researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1992) told a group of teachers that some students in their classrooms had been identified on a Harvard test as being on the brink of rapid intellectual development. Unknown to the teachers, however, was that the test didn’t actually exist; the students had been randomly labeled as having special aptitudes. A year later, those same students demonstrated higher IQs than their peers. The general principle that emerged from the study—dubbed the Pygmalion effect—has been confirmed in other studies (e.g., Hattie, 2009), and it has been demonstrated by such famous teachers as Marva Collins, Rafe Esquith, and Jaime Escalante: when teachers expect more, students rise to their expectations.

The Pygmalion effect, however, is not Dumbo’s magic feather. Simply believing in higher student performance doesn’t make it so. For starters, teachers must make their expectations for learning explicit to students. As we’ll see later in this section, there’s a science to doing this. Done well, teachers can increase student motivation and achievement; done poorly, they can inadvertently undermine both.

Similarly, teachers must translate high expectations into unit and lesson plans that give students the opportunity to learn challenging content. If teachers fail to help students understand what “high performance” actually looks like, then students will struggle to visualize success and meet the high bar set for them. If measures of student learning don’t reflect teachers’ high expectations, then students may be receiving the tacit message that they aren’t capable of high achievement.

In the following chapters, we highlight four touchstones that, when addressed together, can help teachers articulate and maintain high expectations for learning in the classroom and, thus, translate a belief that all students can meet high expectations.

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Be Demanding
Item 1

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I use standards to guide every learning opportunity

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Bryan Goodwin: It was my first year of teaching high school. My ethnically diverse 10th grade American Literature class was reading and discussing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I had created what I believed to be thoughtful prompts for classroom dialogue on the delicate subjects of prejudice, feuding gangs, and social conformity—topics I thought my class of sophisticated, articulate students would eagerly discuss. Yet, somehow, the unit had fallen flat. Their gazes were wandering. Their answers seemed pat. Finally, I asked what was going on, a bit worried that perhaps the themes were too sensitive.

“Well, you know we all read this book in 8th grade,” a student offered.

“You did?” I was stunned and embarrassed. I did not know that. As I offered a weak, impromptu rationale about the need to take a second, deeper look at the novel, I worked to tamp down my frustration. I was teaching on a small, K–12 campus where it should've been easy to get everyone on the same page. So why was Huck Finn getting taught in 8th grade when I was the one with the book in my curriculum guide and umpteen copies of the novel in the back of my classroom? And why, for that matter, were some of the things I assumed my students should know—like the purpose of political satire—not being taught in earlier grades?

My annoyance, however, soon turned to anxiety. What wasn't I teaching my students that subsequent teachers might someday wonder how my kids had gotten through a whole year of 10th grade American Literature without learning?

Using Standards to Help Students Expect More of Themselves

It's no wonder that the school-level variable most strongly correlated with higher student achievement is a factor called “opportunity to learn”—the extent to which a school (1) clearly articulates its curriculum, (2) monitors whether the curriculum is actually taught, and (3) aligns its curriculum with assessments of student achievement (Marzano, 2000). Among these variables, the third—aligning curriculum to assessments—has the strongest link to student success.

Basically, the not-so-surprising implication of this research is that students do better on tests when they've been taught what's being tested. Hence, one of the key ways that low-performing schools nationwide have dramatically improved their performance is by getting their curriculum in order—clearly defining what students should be learning at every grade level and ensuring that it gets taught in every classroom (Chenoweth, 2007, 2009). If you find yourself in a school without well-developed or thoughtful curriculum guides, then one of your first tasks may be to work with colleagues and administrators to develop them. If curriculum guides are available, then you owe it to your students and colleagues to follow them.

This doesn't mean teachers should teach to the test, providing students with only the narrow slice of knowledge sampled by a standardized assessment. Rather, in high-performing schools, teachers use standards and curriculum guides as guideposts to ensure they're covering what's most important for students to learn each step of the way. When teachers do this, higher student achievement usually follows without teachers having to resort to the unethical practice of putting an old test in front of students and teaching them what's on it.

In addition to getting on the same page with your colleagues, another function of standards (and the reason using them falls within the Be demanding section of this book) is that when we ask students to expect more from themselves, they usually rise to meet our expectations. Indeed, as great teachers such as Jaime Escalante have demonstrated, sometimes students just need someone to believe in them, challenge them, and unlock their potential.

Escalante, whose story was made famous by Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews (1989) and the 1988 film Stand and Deliver (Musca & Menendez, 1988), helped his students at Garfield High School—a school in a troubled, high-poverty, gang-infested neighborhood in East Los Angeles—not only take advanced placement (AP) calculus but also pass the exam with flying colors. Mathews observed Escalante for several months and concluded that it was Escalante's singular blend of unrelenting high expectations and tough love that transformed his students into true college-bound scholars. It may be no coincidence that the modern standards movement was launched by the nation's governors at a meeting in Charlottesville, Virginia, one year after Stand and Deliver hit movie theaters.

Here are some recommendations for how you can use standards to ensure that what you teach not only aligns with what's expected of students but also challenges them to expect more of themselves.

I unpack standards to clarify what students must learn.

Oftentimes, embedded in a single standard are multiple concepts, ideas, and skills that students must learn in order to master the overall standard. As a teacher, one of the first things you should do when teaching standards is unpack them and determine what declarative knowledge (e.g., concepts, vocabulary, facts, details) and procedural knowledge (e.g., skills, procedures, abilities) students must acquire in order to master the standard. Consider, for example, the following grade 7 standard from the Common Core State Standards:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.7.2 Analyze the main ideas and supporting details presented in diverse media and formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) and explain how the ideas clarify a topic, text, or issue under study.

Even this single, relatively straightforward standard requires students to demonstrate multiple skills, including the following:

• Students need to be able to summarize text in order to highlight main ideas. (procedural knowledge)
• Students may need to use context clues to determine the meaning of new words. (procedural knowledge)
• To follow a speaker's argument, students should understand how arguments are constructed, including main ideas being supported with details. (declarative knowledge)
• To synthesize information across multiple formats, students might need to use graphic organizers to highlight key connections among ideas. (procedural knowledge)
• To analyze the extent to which details actually support main ideas, students likely need some basic knowledge about what makes details relevant and logical. (declarative knowledge)

With these knowledge and skill statements in hand, you can, in turn, identify critical vocabulary terms that students should learn (e.g., fact, opinion, logic, emotional appeal) to be successful in mastering the standard. Only by unpacking the standard will it be clear what students must really learn.

I look for the big ideas embedded in standards.

Although it's important to unpack standards into smaller components—to ensure you don't gloss over important details or procedural steps—it's also, somewhat paradoxically, important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. That is, an overly reductive or fragmented approach to teaching can make learning less engaging and challenging for students. Thus, you should also look for big ideas or essential questions that are embedded in the standards. Framing a lesson around broad essential questions helps students “find personal relevance and can energize them as they seek answers as they begin a unit or lesson” (Ryan & Frazee, 2012a, p. 66).

Returning to the previous example, we might frame a lesson around the standard that requires students to analyze the main ideas and supporting details presented in diverse media with the essential question “How do authors develop their main ideas?” or “How do great speakers persuade audiences or entire countries?” The key idea is to think of essential questions as open-ended and not easily answered—in a word, challenging.

Essential questions should provoke deep thought—perhaps even debate—among students. In order to answer an essential question, students should have to learn and analyze new information, evaluate pros and cons, or make a personal decision based upon evidence.

For example, a teacher starting a unit on the French Revolution could post the following essential questions. Note that these questions do not require, specifically, memorizing dates or names but require students to understand—deeply—the events that led up to the French Revolution and their relevance in today's society.

1. How can popular opinion lead to both positive and negative changes in a society? What are some examples in today's world?
2. If you could go back in time and advise the Bourbon family during late July/early August of 1789, what would your advice be without giving away that you know how future events will transpire? What evidence would you use to support your advice?
3. Natural disasters often act as catalysts that expose political and social shifts happening in a society. What are other examples of this phenomenon? Why do you think this happens?

For further guidance on why and how to write essential questions, consider reading Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding (McTighe & Wiggins, 2013).

I use standards to guide lesson and unit planning.

The whole point of standards, of course, is to guide lesson and unit planning. We suggest using the following five-step process for translating standards or district curriculum guides into lesson plans:

1. Identify your focus for the lesson. Determine what, specifically, students will learn. Frame this information in terms of student-friendly learning objectives (e.g., “I understand and apply the Pythagorean theorem”) and around essential questions (e.g., “How can I determine the length of a triangle's hypotenuse?”).
2. Determine how you will assess learning. Begin with the end in mind. How will you know if students have met their learning objectives? What information will you gather along the way about their progress? At what points will you provide feedback and encourage effort?
3. Determine how to engage students. How will you pique student curiosity in the subject matter? How might you use journal writing, advance organizers, or provocative questions to hook their interest and help them connect learning with their own interests?
4. Determine how you will engage students in learning and mastering content. How will you introduce new learning to students? If you expect them to master content, what opportunities will they have to extend learning, practice new skills, or deepen their knowledge?
5. Identify how to close your lesson. How will you help students summarize and demonstrate their learning? What checks for understanding might you use at the end of your lesson?

Although we'll explore lesson and unit planning in more detail in Section 3, we offer these steps here to demonstrate how standards should be at the heart of every learning opportunity you provide in the classroom, helping you focus learning on what students need to learn. To that end, remember that the shortest point between any two distances is a straight line—that is, lessons need not be complicated or lengthy to be effective; they simply need to provide students with opportunities to learn what they must know and be able to do.

I use standards as both a windshield and rearview mirror for lesson planning.

The new Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts are additive. They have been designed explicitly as building blocks, with the skills and knowledge gained in later grades building upon and expanding those from earlier grades. For example, a grade 6 reading standard states that students should be able to “cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from text.” In grade 7, students are expected to “cite several pieces of textual evidence,” and by grade 8, students should be able to “cite textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says” (Common Core State Standards Initiative [CCSSI], 2010).

This means that if your students miss the critical components they're expected to learn in your classroom, they'll likely struggle in later classes. As you develop your own lessons, you should therefore use standards both as a rearview mirror to look back on the knowledge and skills students should have acquired prior to reaching your classroom and as a windshield to help you anticipate the knowledge and skills teachers in later grades are counting on you to teach your students.

There are two important points to make here. First, do not assume that every student will enter your classroom with all of the prior knowledge and skills needed to be successful for the rigors and challenges of meeting standards in your classroom. Having standards and unpacking them, however, can help you identify the prior knowledge they do need in order to identify and address any gaps they may have in their prior knowledge.

Second, and perhaps more optimistically, it is important to know where your students are going, so you can provide relevant enrichment or accelerated learning experiences for those students who are ready to move on. In fact, accelerated learning is one of the most powerful practices available to educators (Hattie, 2009), and a key purpose of standards-based learning is to challenge all students—not necessarily to normalize or hold back the learning of those who are ready to move on. Indeed, contrary to popular misperception, standards can actually be a powerful tool for personalizing learning and providing students with some degree of learning autonomy in the classroom.

I use standards to provide structure and autonomy for student learning.

Standardized learning does not need to turn learning into a military parade with all students marching dutifully at the same exact pace, their eyes fixed on the supreme commander in front of the room. In the hands of great teachers, common curriculum standards are personalized to student interests, creating intrinsically motivated learners. With that said, the standards should remain as important guideposts for learning. Without them, self-directed learning can miss the mark, creating busywork that fails to prepare students for success. The main thing to remember, according to researchers, is that teachers must provide students with both structure and autonomy. Teachers must communicate clear expectations for learning and explicit directions and guidance, while tapping into students' interests and intrinsic motivation by highlighting meaningful learning goals and giving students opportunities for self-directed learning (Jang, Reeve, & Deci, 2010). The bottom line here is that teachers should use standards to ...