Improving Student Learning One Teacher at a Time

Jane E. Pollock

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781416605201
• eBook ISBN: 9781416617471
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The most important factor affecting student learning isn't standards, textbooks, or testing--it's teachers. And when it comes to improving learning, research has shown teachers what works. But the real challenge comes when it's time to do what works and do it well. In this book, Jane E. Pollock explains how making the right adjustments in four critical areas of practice—curriculum, instruction, assessment, and feedback—can help any teacher improve student learning significantly. Here, you'll find out how to

-- Create a classroom curriculum document that's truly useful and incorporates robust concepts, generalizations, and procedures.
-- Plan instruction that's focused on helping students become master learners who can apply information and skills, not just do schoolwork.
-- Design varied classroom assessments that yield evidence of mastery and pinpoint where further instruction is required.
-- Use criterion-based feedback to improve individual student achievement and refine instruction.

Along with step-by-step procedures, practical guidelines, and specific models, this book features the voices of individual teachers who share their experience using the author's "Big Four" approach. Like them, you may find it's the missing link you need to transform your pedagogy and achieve unprecedented levels of both student success and professional satisfaction.

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Chapter 1

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Replacing Hope with Certainty

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The Big Four approach provides a way for each individual teacher to improve the learning of every student. Adhering to the Big Four means

• Using precise terminology to describe what students will learn
• Undertaking purposeful instructional planning and delivery
• Employing purposeful assessment
• Applying deliberate assessment and feedback strategies

“Take hope out of schools” seems an incongruous slogan to employ in the quest to improve learning, but if you recall any number of comments you and your colleagues are likely to have made, its relevance becomes clear: “I hope this lab works; I spent a lot of time collecting the specimens and setting it up for my students.” “I hope the students can identify the adverbs and adjectives on the test; we spent so much time reviewing.” “I hope that tonight’s concert goes well; I am so nervous, even though every section has worked hard and we went over every piece again in today’s rehearsal.” “I hope they learned it; I guess next year’s teacher will find out.”

How did we get to the point where teachers hope for good results rather than plan for them?

Teachers throughout the United States and in other countries are determined to do what it takes to improve learning, improve teaching, and improve schooling, but their efforts are frequently frustrated from the start. Typically, teachers attend staff development sessions to learn a new technique or tactic. But no matter how successful the initial session, when the training ends and these teachers return to the classroom, hope once again takes over: “I hope I get to try this new technique, and I hope it brings improved results!” Educator and researcher Bruce Joyce reminds us that learning disconnected topics in staff development programs without systematic follow-up does not positively affect student learning (Sparks, 1998).

To take hope out of school and replace it with certainty, teachers need more robust pedagogical tools that we can use to improve student leaning in every subject area and in any classroom. The Big Four approach is one such tool.

The Big Four

The tenets of the Big Four are as follows:

1. Use a well-articulated curriculum. Know and use clearly articulated learning targets—ones that are robust concepts, generalizations, or procedures rather than only statements of daily classroom objectives.
2. Plan for delivery. Plan and use instructional strategies that will help the learner remember content and apply information and skills rather than just do schoolwork.
3. Vary assessment. Use a range of assessment methods to clarify the learner’s status relative to learning targets, and generate the information necessary to help the learner achieve these targets.
4. Give criterion-based feedback. Give methodical feedback to the learner based on the targets, and refine record keeping and reporting accordingly.

Many teachers are likely to say that they are already implementing the Big Four. Certainly they have a curriculum, create lesson plans, use some authentic assessment techniques, and give feedback in the form of grades. But if we ask these same teachers if all their students perform to their expectations, we might get a very different set of reactions—possibly including some that shift the blame for failure to the students: “I did my best, but the students didn’t do their part.” Such thinking traps us in the cycle of teaching for ourselves; that is, teaching to become “master teachers” rather than teaching to create a classroom of “master learners.” It’s a subtle difference but an important one. Focusing on our improvement as instructors does not necessarily lead to our students’ improvement as learners.

Historically, the dominant public education trends in the United States have encouraged this “master teacher” approach. Understanding the evolution of our current pedagogy provides a starting point for shifting our focus toward teaching and scoring to standards or grade-level benchmarks, thus ensuring that we don’t have to simply hope that our students learn.

Not a New Idea

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom wrote that as educators, we should create a taxonomy of educational objectives to promote the exchange of best ideas and materials and use these objectives in testing to improve student achievement. Guided by “Bloom’s taxonomy,” educators have spent the last 50 years trying different curriculum designs to get “just-right” targets that will improve student knowledge and information application. Knowing and using robust, well-articulated learning targets is the first step in the implementation of the Big Four.

We can compare the evolution of curriculum and learning targets to the evolution of human flight. Numerous failed efforts preceded the famous Kitty Hawk launch, but each of those failures provided vital information that led to the Wright brothers’ eventual success. Similarly, the Big Four learning targets were informed by earlier, unsuccessful designs. What characteristics of these previous designs looked good at the time but proved ineffectual over the long term? And how are we changing benchmarks so that they are more than the same old “objectives” or “outcomes” called by a new name?

Curriculum and Purpose

In Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (1949), Ralph Tyler raised four questions he deemed most significant to curriculum development:

1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
2. What educational experiences can the school provide to attain these purposes?
3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?
4. How can we determine if these purposes are being attained?

The answer to Tyler’s first question depends on what point you’re looking at on the timeline of education’s evolution. Prior to the 19th century, the perceived purpose of education was either religious, meant to inculcate children with the theology of those doing the teaching, or pragmatic, meant to ensure an economically and socially useful populace. In what was to become the United States, most educational bodies followed the European model of social class separation. Children were either educated or they were not, and those who were received the kind of education commensurate with their role in society: classical learning for members of the gentry, apprenticeships for tradesmen, and so on.

The debate surrounding learning targets began in earnest during the Industrial Revolution, when the need for technical education to prepare workers for specialized occupations came up against the “general knowledge” approach thought to provide the foundation for social efficiency. This debate gave birth to the development of the “modern” school. At this point in history, the curriculum question was clear: Do we design curricula or learning targets that are primarily vocational in nature or primarily academic?

Tyler credits the early 1900s’ Committee of Ten (which established a curricular alternative to classical teachings) and later, the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (which offered a more liberal arts approach to education) for struggling to address the question of education’s purpose in the United States. As the first half of the 20th century came to a close, there was a general consensus that education’s purpose was twofold: to create cultural literacy and patriotism and, more importantly, to catapult the U.S. economy into its place as a world leader in trade. In addition, most states’ obligatory education laws at last offered the opportunity for learning to all children regardless of socioeconomic status, thus moving the nation closer to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of one in which all citizens are educated so that they might vote wisely. “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves,” Jefferson wrote in 1820. “[I]f we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”

Objectives for Educational Experiences

The post–World War II baby boom led to significant growth in the school-age population and a shift in educational focus toward answering Tyler’s second and third questions, concerning educational experiences and their organization. The call came for new kinds of curriculum and new ways to design learning targets.

The first of these ways was Bloom’s taxonomy. The actual document, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956), was developed by a committee of 34 college and university examiners and edited by Benjamin Bloom. He and his colleagues argued that a classification system for educational objectives would enable teachers to plan instruction and assessment tasks relative to stated goals and then discuss learning progress in a technical and logical way. They recommended a classification of learning in cognitive, affective, and psychomotor areas, suggesting that the clarity it would bring would parallel the increased accuracy of understanding biologists achieved by organizing the complex details of the natural world into categories like kingdom, phylum, class, order, and so on. When applied to schools, the taxonomy would allow teachers to discuss student learning based on a clear set of targets, which would facilitate student success. The authors clarified their goals thusly: “We are not attempting to classify the instructional methods used by the teachers, the ways in which teachers relate themselves to students or the different kinds of instructional materials they use. We are not attempting to classify the particular subject matter or content. What we are classifying is the intended behavior of students—the ways in which individuals are to act, think, or feel as a result of participating in some unit of instruction” (Bloom, 1956, p. 12).

The learning targets advocated by Bloom and his colleagues, then, were a general structure and not precise knowledge or skills; they did not give the teacher explicit guidance to teach to, and track, student performance. (We would have to wait 40 more years, until the 1990s, for the development of comprehensive “particular subject matter or content.”) Whatever the taxonomy’s initial limitations, it provided a durable structure for communicating about thinking and learning. Its emphasis on knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation established the standard for contemporary instructional programs and assessment tasks (see the second and third tenets of the Big Four). It also introduced the idea of targets (i.e., information and skills) that students can learn to perform at the higher levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, rather than just remembering information for a recall or comprehension test.

Two other methods for designing learning targets also populated the pedagogical landscape in the second half of the 20th century: Robert Mager’s three-part approach and Gronlund’s general-to-specific approach. Mager (1962) produced behavioral objectives that sought to address the performance measurement dilemma. His design took into account cognitive or psychomotor behavior, the condition imposed on the learner, and the proficiency level acceptable for that behavior. Anyone familiar with writing behavioral objectives in curriculum guides probably remembers the lengthy and complicated process required to manage all three of Mager’s components in one statement of performance without feeling overwhelmed by the breadth of content or bothered by the disconnect between the depth of subject knowledge and alleged proficiency. Gronlund (1978) suggested that the breadth of content knowledge lent itself to organizing principles that moved from one general objective to multiple, specific objectives. His approach did not specifically address achievement measurement; it offered instead a flexible schema or scaffold of questions one could ask to create a particular set of objectives, leaving the breadth of the curriculum development work to the teacher or school to complete.

So began today’s method of curriculum development. Discouraged by the lack of time set aside for curriculum development, the breadth of the content knowledge thought necessary to meet the demands of cultural literacy, and uncertainty about “writing curriculum” (Which development method is best? The taxonomy? Mager’s methodology? Gronlund’s?), many teachers complied with the curriculum-writing task by simply using the textbook as their classroom curriculum. They learned to make their own decisions about what to teach and what to leave out, guided chiefly by the amount of content in the textbook and the length of the school year. At times, of course, that approach left subject-area gaps or created topic-area overlaps for the students.

Teachers hoped that by teaching to the textbook as curriculum, their students would “move up” on Bloom’s taxonomy. Conquering the textbook became the goal, and its contents the de facto curriculum; teachers used activities geared toward apprehending the textbook content, gave tests on that content, and assigned grades based on the test results. You see within these developments the skeleton of the Big Four taking shape. However, what we hadn’t yet figured out was that learning targets could, and should, be better than textbook activities.

Reexamining the Purpose of Education

Thirty years after the landmark classification of educational goals, a new sense of urgency forced educators into redesigning learning targets. A Nation at Risk, published in 1983 by the U.S. Department of Education, held schools responsible for the nation’s predicted slide from the zenith of the world’s economy, noting that “while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people” (p. 1). A second report, What Work Requires of Schools, SCANS—Report on Workplace Skills (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991), issued a warning to parents: “Parents must insist that their sons and daughters master this [workplace] know-how and that their local schools teach it. Unless you do, your children are unlikely to earn a decent living” (p. 5).

These two reports sent teachers across the nation back to curriculum committees trying feverishly to couple the former’s “new basics” with the latter’s “workplace know-how.” The result was a briefly used yet highly memorable type of learning target design: outcome-based education.

Australian aboriginal culture tells of a mythical creature call the bunyip, which possesses every physical characteristic of every type of the continent’s extraordinary animal life. If ever a decade produced a curricular bunyip, it was the outcome-driven 1980s. An outcome was defined as bigger than an objective but smaller than a K–12 goal. It included subject content but was not limited to schoolwork tasks, meaning it also described appropriate preparation for the workplace. In other words, outcome statements had tails, scales, flippers, a pouch, and every other imaginable characteristic. They remained as elusive as the legendary monster of the outback and could never be measured.

The eventual demise of the outcome led, in the 1990s, to the promising rise of content-specific standards and benchmarks. Driven by the need to create the cantilevered specificity in the content areas alluded to in Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, various private and public educational organizations published more than 100 standards documents, mobilizing to strengthen academic achievement in math, science, social studies, language arts, the fine and practical arts, and technology. Using and testing those targets became the focus of the No Child Left Behind era.

The New Idea

So, it seems that we have been working on learning targets for a very long time: from Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, introduced in 1779, to President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, signed in 2002. Skimming history, we notice that U.S. educators slowly ceased to debate Tyler’s purpose of schooling. Even as they continued to quibble over the format of curriculum documents, they agreed on the underlying rationale for having a curriculum: to improve teaching, to help teachers communicate among themselves, and to give teachers a clear instructional path to follow or modify for their own purposes, according to their own preferences.

The message of the 1990s standards movement was direct: What was needed were robust cultural literacy statements, called standards and benchmarks, to describe precisely what students should know and be able to do. They were to be written in a spiraled manner, reminiscent of J. F. Herbart’s or Hilda Taba’s suggestions; articulated across the grade levels; and measurable through both classroom tasks and some form of external measure, such as a standardized test.

The advent of standards and benchmarks brought a subtle but crucial change to how educators approached curriculum development—a change fundamental to the Big Four approach. We now create learning targets in our curriculum documents for the express purpose of improving student learning; these targets may only incidentally improve a teacher’s craft or communication. Teachers who use a “just-right set of benchmarks” can track student progress and performance to those benchmarks and adjust instruction accordingly to help students attain mastery. The benchmarks themselves—robust concepts, generalizations, and procedures—when used to plan for instruction and assessment, and coupled with explicit feedback, are hardy enough to improve student learning. That is the essence of the Big Four.

Are We There Yet?

Let’s review Tyler’s questions about curriculum development and the generally accepted answers at our particular point in education’s timeline:

1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? Education’s purpose is to ensure that all children between the approximate ages of 6 and 16 hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Replacing Hope with Certainty
• Teacher Voice: Gary Nunnally
• Chapter 2. Learning Targets
• Teacher Voice: Michelle Crisafulli
• Chapter 3. Instructional Planning and Delivery
• Teacher Voice: Danny Neville
• Chapter 4. Varied Classroom Assessments
• Teacher Voice: Diane Quirk
• Chapter 5. Feedback, Record Keeping, and Reporting
• Teacher Voice: Jodie Jantz
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• References and Resources
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Products
• Study Guide
• Copyright