Teaching with Clarity

How to Prioritize and Do Less So Students Understand More

Tony Frontier

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781416630104
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Evaluierung & Bewertung im Bildungswesen

Feeling overwhelmed—constantly, on a daily basis—has unfortunately become the status quo among educators. But it doesn't have to be.

Schools need to stop adding more programs, strategies, activities, resources, projects, assessments, and meetings. Though they are often implemented with the best intentions, these things ultimately end up as clutter—that which inhibits our ability to help students learn.

Instead, teachers need more clarity, which emerges when we prioritize our efforts to do less with greater focus. This isn't simply a matter of teachers doing less. Rather, teachers need to be intentional and prioritize their efforts to develop deeper understanding among students.

In Teaching with Clarity, Tony Frontier focuses on three fundamental questions to help reduce curricular and organizational clutter in the interest of clarity and focus: * What does it mean to understand?
* What is most important to understand?
* How do we prioritize our strategic effort to help students understand what is most important?

By prioritizing clear success criteria, intentional design, meaningful feedback, and a shared purpose, teachers can begin to clear away the curricular clutter that overwhelms the profession—and embrace the clarity that emerges.

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Chapter 1

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Understanding Clutter

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This book is going to be challenging for you. If it were easy, I would simply ask you to do more, but as educators, I know we're already good at that. Indeed, in my years as teacher, administrator, researcher, and consultant, I've never been in a school or district where everyone wasn't already working hard. Everyone is busy; everyone is pursuing the next initiative.

In our pursuit of better meeting the needs of every child, entire systems are busy implementing new math or reading programs, or they're establishing equity and social-emotional learning programs, or they're setting up formative assessment systems or response to intervention programs, aligning curricula to state standards, or implementing new report cards. Or they're doing everything at the same time.

In short, the underlying message is clear: We're not quite there yet because we haven't added the right program.

Teachers today are more adept at accessing and searching through information and resources than at any other time in human history. Somewhere out there on the internet is the next lesson idea, rubric, video clip, article, activity, performance assessment, assessment bank, incentive system, or bulletin board idea that might be better than the one you're currently using (or you might find the magic solution that gets kids to put down their phones). The temptation to find these mythical solutions is real, but the underlying message is clear: We're not quite there yet because we haven't added the right resource or project.

So why will this book be challenging for you? Because I'm going to ask you to do less.

If doing more in our schools and classrooms were the answer to better meeting the needs of every child, then we'd have met every goal and closed every gap by now. We don't need more activities, resources, projects, assessments, or meetings. We need more clarity.

Clarity emerges when we prioritize our efforts to do less with greater focus. With this focus, we give our students time to prioritize their efforts and develop deeper understanding. The enemy of focus is clutter, which is anything that inhibits our ability to help students prioritize their strategic efforts to learn. Clutter is what happens when we do more with less focus. With clutter, there is never enough time or energy to find success; there is always more to cover and more to do. The first step on the path to clarity is eliminating the clutter we put in front of kids during the 16,380 instructional periods they experience in a typical K–12 education system.

Clarity begins to emerge when systems have the discipline to collectively answer three questions:

• What does it mean to understand?
• What is most important to understand?
• How do we prioritize our strategic effort to help students understand what is most important?

If we can't provide clear answers to these questions, then no one in the system can prioritize—or align—their effort to their strategy. And when you try to accomplish something (whether it's in school, at work, or with a hobby), a disconnect between your effort and strategy will almost always result in frustration or failure. What you mistakenly internalize as an ability problem (i.e., I tried hard, but I'm just not good at that), an effort problem (i.e., I guess I'm just not trying hard enough), or a time problem (i.e., I'd like to do that, but I don't have time) is actually a failure to prioritize strategic effort.

Prioritizing and aligning strategy to effort is a challenge for all schools and teachers. However, this challenge requires educators to identify and overcome a set of misguided assumptions about improvement that are outdated and rooted in the Industrial Age.

The Industrial-Age Problem (and Irony) of Organizational Clutter

During the Industrial Age, organizations and laborers worked to turn raw materials into a product of value. A passive set of raw materials would roll down an assembly line and get pieced together along the way. If everyone did his or her job right, a finished product emerged. If the product was of poor quality, the solution was to reorganize—the assembly line was restructured or the organizational chart was modified.

Schools today are still organized according to this somewhat archaic industrial model. Twelve years of formal education, class periods, and the accumulation of credits are an invention of the Industrial Age. According to this model, if we want a better product, then we need to structure things differently: we need to slow down the assembly line, ring the bells at different times, or ask workers to put in overtime. This Industrial-Age metaphor for restructuring schools to improve learning is clearly misguided, yet it persists. In Five Levers to Improve Learning, Jim Rickabaugh and I argue,

Too often the effort put forth, the political chips spent, and the resources allocated to make these structural changes result in few, if any, meaningful differences in educational practices or student learning…. Changes such as moving to a block schedule, adding more computers, or developing a new report card fit neatly into strategic plans, and their implementation processes have clearly defined starting and ending dates. However, we argue that these types of changes often produce the least amount of leverage in terms of improving student learning. (Frontier & Rickabaugh, 2014, p. 10)

These changes rarely prioritize efforts to be more strategic at the point of contact between the student and teacher. Therefore, we conclude,

Efforts focused on large-scale reform haven't been successful because those efforts have failed to change schools. They haven't been successful because, too often, the transactional, structural approaches that can change schools have little or nothing to do with the less visible but far more powerful strategies required to change students' learning experiences in those schools. (Frontier & Rickabaugh, 2014, p. 164)

Ironically, rather than improve students' learning experiences, we've merely added to the system or made it more complex. Unfortunately, administrators often fail to realize they've merely contributed to organizational clutter. They've changed the system, yes, but they haven't built new capacity for students to strategically focus their efforts to learn.

The Information-Age Problem (and Irony) of Curricular Clutter

A curriculum is a sequence of learning experiences designed to help students achieve a goal. In the Industrial Age, schools were expected to produce individuals who had the knowledge and skills to contribute to the economy and be a part of a literate, informed citizenry. Teachers directed students along a path to give them the opportunity to gather and learn the information that would make them educated.

In the early 1900s, schools and universities were of value because they were the organizations that could provide students with access to that information. If students paid attention and learned, the return on their investment would be to contribute to the economy and democracy. However, as newspapers, magazines, radio, and television became more and more easily accessible fixtures of American society, information became accessible everywhere and to everyone.

Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon (1971) explained the gravity of this change:

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. (p. 40)

In the 50 years since Simon made that observation, the internet and cell phones have steadily increased the wealth of information available to each of us at an astronomical rate. Indeed, Simon couldn't have imagined the vast wealth of information, or the corresponding poverty of attention, that exists today. Not only is there more information available, it's more easily accessible, and because there are no barriers to entry for posting something online, large amounts of the information is of lower quality. However, this only addresses a symptom of an even deeper challenge.

As Tim Wu (2016) explains in The Attention Merchants, in an era of unlimited information, the most powerful companies in the world exist to get people to pay attention to their information. The cumulative result, he argues, is that we are all in a state of constant distraction. In 1971, Herbert Simon saw a "wealth of information." Today, there is wealth in information. More than ever before, information is a product, distraction is a marketing strategy, and attention is the economy's most profitable commodity.

As educators, I don't think we've fully acknowledged how this commoditization of information and attention has changed the relationship between students and schools. When information is a profitable product that is accessible everywhere, the battle for kids' attention is everywhere. Schools are no longer the exclusive spaces where students go to access important information and acquire skills so they can one day be hired by Industrial Age companies, such as Shell Oil or Ford.

Today, access to information is occasionally about schools and learning, but more often it is about eyeballs, page views, and clicks. As we prepare students to be successful in the Information Age economy, we compete with companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook to get students to pay attention to our information. Every day, these companies efficiently facilitate the millions of pages of new content and become more effective in their use of strategies to garner attention. Clutter and distraction aren't bugs in the system; they are its central features.

Ironically, in our quest to get students to pay attention, we immerse ourselves in the same sea of clutter that is also the source of our students' constant distraction. Google searches for "rubrics" and "lesson plans" yield nearly 100,000,000 results. It's no wonder we're endlessly searching the internet for the next interesting article, video clip, lesson idea, activity, or easy-to-use rubric. But as we click on those links, do those new resources create clarity for learning, or do they create more clutter?

Choosing Clarity: Shared Purpose and Process

What are the choices we make each day to build a system that makes sense from the students' perspective? When this question becomes a habit of mind among teachers and administrators, kids notice. It helps teachers acknowledge that their individual efforts are less important than how they focus their collective energy to help kids prioritize their efforts to learn. In his book Essentialism, business consultant Greg McKeown (2014) states, "Our highest priority is to protect our ability to prioritize" (p. 101). That's a powerful statement for both personal and organizational growth, but how can it be applied to schools to create clarity amidst the clutter?

I'd like you to envision a system in which principals, teachers, and students all have the same answers to the three questions about alignment of understanding, strategy, and effort that I previously posed. Now imagine those principals, teachers, and students have one—and only one—priority to support that system. Consider the following six statements.

Clarity of Shared Purpose

• We have a shared understanding of what it means to understand.
• We have a shared understanding of what is most important to understand.
• We prioritize our use of time and strategies to support students' strategic efforts to develop important skills and understandings.

Clarity of Process

• Administrators' highest priority is to protect and develop their teachers' ability to prioritize.
• Teachers' highest priority is to protect and develop their students' ability to prioritize.
• Students' highest priority is to prioritize their strategic effort to learn what's most important.

When this level of clarity is pursued as a system, both teachers and students are the beneficiaries. Less clutter translates to greater focus and more time and effort to pursue what is most important. Clarity is a strategic choice, and you must be willing to do less by investing focused effort on what is most important.

As educators, we like to think we've already prioritized what is most important in our schools and classrooms. We haven't. This book will help you understand why. This book is about focusing our collective efforts on the learning that matters most, creating systems that help students understand what those things are, and empowering students with the tools to focus their strategic efforts to improve. Not surprisingly, we'll connect educational research to best practices. Six elements of clarity will be used to guide our efforts. We'll also apply some powerful metaphors for prioritization drawn from fields ranging from medicine to mountain climbing, ideas for decluttering drawn from tips for tidying one's home, and elements of design used to make your phone so easy to use.

The first step on the path to clarity is acknowledging that we have a clutter problem. To better understand this problem and how to address it, we need to consider what clutter looks like through a student's eyes.

Understanding Clutter: Questions for Discussion and Reflection

• As a school, how have we clarified for students what it means to understand?
• As a school, how have we clarified for students what is most important to understand?
• As a school, do our initiatives typically result in doing more or in focusing our efforts to do less more effectively? Explain.
• How well do we prioritize our use of time and strategies to guide students toward the most important understandings? What evidence points to our successes? Challenges?
• How might students benefit if they were clearer about where, and how, to invest in their strategic efforts to learn?

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Chapter 2

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The Clarity Paradox

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Why do students see clutter where we see clarity? If we are going to better understand the clutter problem, then we need to get a better understanding of how students perceive the problem.

As the leaders of one of the world's foremost design firms, David Kelley and his colleagues at IDEO have developed a multiphase, collaborative process to develop products and solve problems called design thinking (Kelley & Kelley, 2013). One of the key elements of the design thinking process is empathy—the ability to see a system, product, or problem through the lens of others. To be empathetic is to understand and value how another perceives and experiences the world. By contrast, a nonempathetic approach assumes others perceive and experience the world exactly as you do. Between empathy and the absence of empathy is sympathy, which is an acknowledgment of another's feelings (often, of sadness or frustration when they cannot control outcomes).

An example of the results of empathetic design can be seen in ...