As promised in a prior post and in response to reader queries: Yes, I am still working on my ideal accountability system (as follow-up to my criticism of most current test-score-based systems). In the meantime, I want to respond to a number of recent e-mails, observations in classrooms, and in-person discussions with educators about the increasingly-common demand that teachers post daily objectives in highly visible form the classroom. [PS: thanks to a great comment, I slightly edited the title to reflect my argument, below.]
In almost every classroom now, one sees such posters; here are a few pictures of some posted Essential Questions in schools using UbD:
But here is a recent e-mail we received, from a teacher working in a district that attempts to honor Understanding by Design on a recent school policy:
My school is currently mandating the posting of K U E D posters in every classroom. I am an elementary school teacher, and I have a hard time understanding the purpose behind making giant posters to switch out for every subject (reading, math, social studies, and science). I feel that time would be better used in actually creating quality lessons rather than making posters. After talking to a colleague, she stated that Understandings shouldn’t be posted, because they should be developed by the students. I see the benefit of the K U E D format as a planning tool, but do not see the purpose of posting these wordy documents for students. Could you give me any advice?
You really don’t know whether to laugh or cry in the face of such mindless policy. (Nor do I know what all the letters stand for; it’s not a UbD abbreviation).
You want to hear something worse? We saw and heard, with our own eyes and hears, a classroom in which the teacher asked: boys and girls, what standard are we working on today? And the kids replied, in dull metronomic unison: ELA Standard B.2.a.i.
Last year I wrote a number of posts on the constant thoughtlessness we see in education. These policies certainly qualify. Yes, of course: it’s important for students to understand the goals for the day and beyond. But does any supervisor honestly believe – if they would just think about it for one minute – that a policy requiring the chanting out of Standards numbers or making and hanging 4 teacher-crafted posters each day is in the best interests of learning and the best use of teacher time? This gets it all backwards.
Effective vs. ineffective goal-setting. The aim is to ensure that students understand goals and how current activities support those goals. Ideally, then, the student has perspective and sees value in the work: they understand the why of the current work in order to find it more meaningful and to facilitate purposeful learning, and they have a touchstone for gauging progress (and thus use of time).
Think about any long meeting. We have an agenda not only to remind us of what we must accomplish but what action items should follow. Why is that useful to provide a written agenda at the start – and, importantly, keep referring to? Because we easily lose track of time or focus unwisely on less important matters than the goals require. In other words, an ongoing reminder of larger purpose (and a double-check on whether current talk is on-task and a good use of our time) is always wise, given human propensity to get lost in the moment. True for teachers as well as learners.
Thus, the bottom line test of the effect of any school policy about goal posting is whether or not students learn better and have greater perspective because of it. For example, when asked, can students say why an activity is being done and why it matters and how it connects to prior work?
Alas, having hundreds of times asked students in class Why are you doing and learning this? I cay say that the results are not pretty. I dunno is the most common. (Older kids sometimes sullenly retort: I dunno; go ask the teacher.) And this is often in schools where there are posters on the wall or objectives on the board.
So, while the intent of the poster policy makes sense, there is little or no benefit to merely requiring the posting. That gets it all backward, as the agenda analogy suggests. The posting is a means; the end is understanding of the meaning of the work and a way to stay on track. So, merely requiring the posting shows that the policy is really not for the learners at all but for the satisfaction of supervisors to make us all think that focused learning is happening (by osmosis?).
But, Grant: even you suggest that teachers post Essential Questions!
That’s just 1 way to keep goals in view. I’m fine with posting it, but posting it isn’t the point. A reason for highlighting Essential Questions is to help students keep the broader goals and value of the immediate learning in view, to connect specifics to bigger ideas and issues which are easily lost in more specific lessons. So, in a unit on the writer’s craft, it makes sense for the teacher – and, eventually on their own, the students – to continually refer back to the Essential Question – whether it be on a poster, in one’s notes, or on a Google Doc: How do good authors hook and hold the attention of the reader? When the EQ is prominent, by whatever means – various Turn and Talk prompts, an exit slip, after each specific reading is considered, etc. – the available document is helpful.
In other words, the formally written and available EQ serves as a reminder to all that each read-aloud, charting of ideas, independent reading, and written reflection is to focus on that question. Like an agenda, the EQ is there to remind all of us to self-assess, make inquiries, and take notes on the priority question as we engage in discrete and easily tunnel-vision-inducing activities.
To put it in UbD terms, the posted goals are meant to be understood, not merely noticed; they are meant to be woven into all the unit design and activities so that they become meaningful as connective tissue for the learning. With active student consideration of what is written somewhere, via teacher prompts and reminders, and by logical links between each specific activity and the coherence provided by the written objective. The student has to be helped to understand the importance of what is written and referred to, in other words, not merely see it as a label for the activities. And that’s just what a good EQ does: it provides a larger perspective and a binding focus to the otherwise unconnected ‘content’.
Check it out. Supervisors, please do a simple test as to whether the current policy is working. Note the objectives for the day, posted as usual. Then, ask students as they leave a room to write on a post-it “What was the goal of today’s lesson? And how did the activities support the lesson?” or, more simply: “Why did the teacher have you do those activities?” The results will likely put to rest the claim that merely posting the goals and citing them once at the start of the day is a good idea.
PS: Readers are highly encouraged to submit both helpful practices for making goals clear to learners as well as more dumb rules about mandatory goal stating for the Mindless Policy Hall of Fame.
PS: Great tweet in response to this piece:
82 Responses
I’m on board. I’d sign this petition if there was one. I am a fellow vocal advocate for Essential Questions and for authentic, meaningful assessment. I am also working to be an advocate for empathy. There is something unkind in calling in it and decisions like this mindless. The administrators who make these decisions, I firmly believe, are making the best decisions they can in the moment with the information they have.Calling it mindless suggest that no thought went into the decision. I suspect that in the school in question, a supervisor saw amazing things happening in a classroom with posted Essential Questions and saw that as a driver for change. (Forgetting for a moment the causation/correlation connection.) Admins are teachers first – they are as harried, as busy, and as overwhelmed as everyone else. Calling their decisions mindless seems unnecessarily divisive. Yes, the rules are dumb but I suspect they’re not mindless but rather hasty and ill-conceived.
I’m would like to humbly propose calling it the Misguided Hall of Fame.
I will happily rename it the Misguided Hall of Fame. But I think you are too kind. I have seen this kind of impatient mandate over and over and it does indeed reflect thoughtlessness because there is no attempt to ponder cause and effect about policy and practice. Why was it the poster that was singled out? Maybe it was the teacher’s reference to the EQ. Thus, it wasn’t the poster but the constant reminder. That’s my point – correlation vs causality thoughtlessness is way too common in education. And to mandate it is an error in the absences of more careful analysis of cause and effect.
This is helpful. Perhaps you can help me sort out a recent struggle I’ve had with learning goals. When I facilitate a lesson based around a single problem, my goal is to ignite students’ curiosity about the answer to a question that I know will lead to a content objective. Sometimes a video or photo will serve as the tinder. (eg. “How long will it take the tank to fill up?”, etc.)
The best way I’ve found to dampen that ignition is to employ mathematical abstraction and disciplinary language as early in the process as possible. It plainly freaks some kids out, starting them off at an altitude that’s too high too soon, an altitude that they might be able to reach given a longer runway.
So I don’t introduce the task with, “Today we’re going to learn how to find the volume of a prism whose bases are regular polygons.” I say, “We’re going to find out how long the tank will take to fill up.” and then assign the disciplinary language at the end of the task.
But you have certain ed consultants insisting that the disciplinary language needs to be assigned explicitly at the start of the lesson. I could take issue with their research design (metanalyses of action research) but mainly it just makes no intuitive sense to me.
Can you elaborate on where you and your UbD work fall on this spectrum? How do you avoid intimidating kids with high-level jargon while still claiming the benefits of a focused agenda?
Dan: This is an important issue. Anyone following me over the years knows my answer: the premature introduction of technical language is psychologically and pedagogically unwise. This lament is as old as Kant, Hegel, Dewey, and Piaget: the educator tendency to introduce language before it is needed or understood. Think about real-world language: we use the language we need when we need it. If the initial problem can be solved used familiar language, and there is no inherent need in the situation to need other clarifying language, why would we introduce such language? (See my rant on this in lead article in the current issue of Ed Leadership on What is Mastery? See also, Piagets’ piece on mathematics instruction o this very issue in The Essential Piaget.)
In UbD, as I noted in a previous reply, what we counsel is keeping the ‘unit’ goals in view, to remind both student and teacher that there is a larger point, meaning, or value top what we are doing at any one minute or day. So, suppose the Unit goal was: transfer your understanding of the relationship between 2 and 3 dimensional shapes to non-routine problems. Suppose the EQ was: “How can we simplify the situation using math to strip the problem to its essence and thus minimize the grunt work and see new possibilities?” (Not pretty, but it’s early in the morning). In the Knowledge and Skill boxes on the template we would put the technical language but not necessarily show it to kids – we might, we might not; they would probably ignore it until later, anyway.
Crucial, I think, is that even if we post the EQ, it wouldn’t become relevant UNTIL we had solved the fill-the-tank problem. Having solved it, we might now remind them of the EQ as well as introduce some of the technical language. Then, we might try a harder problem (like the car talk problem on putting a notch in a dowel to know when a truck tank is 1/4 full, since the gauge no longer works). Now we are really ready to consider both the EQ and formal statements about the relationships we have found.
So, we might now conclude that neither the EQ nor the technical relationship and language statements need to be posted or stated upfront. We might start with: we’re going to explore how to measure and compare challenging shapes and their relationships. And we’re going to look for mathematical ways to lighten the load every time we encounter a different shape (the EQ in statement form).
In short, if the objective only makes sense until we have done a fair bit of work, then why state the objective technically and precisely at the start/ Who is served by that? Not the students.
Tell the Ed Consultants to stuff it. The propensity to think that technical language somehow enhances understanding out of the box is Understanding by Osmosis….
Grant,
A similar idea that I’m curious for your thoughts on is, following on the principle that each lesson should have a specific and concrete objective, that for every class, the teacher should have in mind a specific task or skill that the student cannot do when she comes in, but can do when she leaves.
I think this is likely good advice in general–to chunk curriculum into manageable pieces, and move piece by piece. But I see it applied similarly mindlessly, to the point where every part of a lesson is focused on student being able to complete one, usually convergent task. Rich, fascinating topics like integer operations are broken down into mindless steps for more and more specific tasks– a day on adding a positive number and a negative number, a day on adding two negative numbers, a day on subtracting integers when the second integer is negative, etc. These policies and lessons are well-intentioned–and likely result in a large number of kids coming out of class each day able to complete the objective–but I see them killing conceptual understanding and divergent problem solving skills.
I think this logic leads to the conclusion that for every thirty minutes spent in class, there should be a specific task that a student can do that they couldn’t before, then every ten minutes, and on ad infinitum. A single class shouldn’t necessarily be the fundamental unit for each objective–some need more time, more questioning, and more practice to process and apply effectively. The opposite end of the spectrum is dangerous as well–it risks being endlessly apologist for students who struggle, pushing off accountability. But I see teaching moving in the opposite direction. What are your thoughts?
You anticipate my thoughts. We have advocated from the beginning that the reason UbD focuses on the ‘unit’ as the unit of analysis is that too many educators, both teachers and supervisors, fixate on the day’s lesson instead of building understanding and capacity across many lessons. That’s why, if anything were posted, it would be the unit goals by which – as in my agenda analogy – both teacher and students can remind themselves as to what the point of each activity and discrete skill is.
An obvious example is sports: we don’t want to fixate on each drill. Nor is it even necessary to say what the objective for that drill is in terms of just the drill. It’s obvious: get better at that kind of skill. But the real goal – much harder to achieve – is transfer of that skill into the repertoire of game playing.
This is not unlike my earlier criticism of much of the teaching under the name of the reading ‘strategies’. It’s obvious that today is on ‘author purpose’ – that can be said in 20 seconds. The REAL goal is more effective independent comprehension, and that’s what has to be stressed for both teacher and student sake because it is too easy to just teach each ‘strategy’ or skill in isolation.
Our school just spent the last month and a half of professional learning time on having teachers identify and develop the big ideas, enduring understandings, and essential questions. We were also encouraged to post the essential questions in the classroom. Your posting reminded me that the actual learning is what matters. I posted mine since it was ‘encouraged’, and I could use them as evidence for my professional learning. However, I have not referred to the posters in my teaching and my students have not asked me about them. This in itself should be evident to me that I needed to integrate the essential questions in my teaching for the questions to truly become the bridge between what the students are learning and the bigger purpose of learning English. I’m including the 6 essential questions below for your perusal. I should also state that I teach English Language Learning (ELL).
Grammar: Does grammar affect my communication? How?
Vocabulary: What makes language powerful?
Listening: What should I do in my head when trying to learn a language?
Reading: What do good readers do, especially when they don’t comprehend a text?
Speaking: How can I express myself when I don’t know all the words?
Writing: Why am I writing? For whom? Why does how I write matter?
Hi Allison, Grant Wiggins’s and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design model is what IB uses in its unit planning. I subscribe to Grant Wiggins’s blog. This post reminded me of our discussion about PDSA and its value to students’ learning. Cindy
There is a complete difference between posting the standard numbers and posting essential questions for a unit which help students focus their learning on the important learning in their work. The whole point is relevance. For students improving test scores just isn’t relevant nor should it be. Really, it shouldn’t be a key feature for teachers either. Schools should be about quality learning and good test scores should naturally follow as an outcome of that learning. What is important is that students are learning relevant skills, understandings and information that will serve them during their current study and in the future. When they have a clear focus and purpose they are more likely to understand why what they are doing is important to them. It is also key that they understand how to use what they are learning in a meaningful and purposeful way.
The “false” accountability systems that have been put in place have forced a test prep curricula rather than meaningful learning. I wonder who isn’t getting that — it seems so obvious!
There is so much to chew on here, as usual. In my years of teaching and observing classroom teaching, I’ve found a few things about lesson objectives : 1) writing specific objectives for a class is harder than people realize 2) far too many lesson objectives that I’ve seen are either statements of the day’s content or questions/items that are way too big for a lesson. 3) Being able to write lesson objectives is important for formative assessment purposes and lesson planning.
When I’ve coached objective writing, I’ve pushed it as a three piece process. Teachers and students should know what these are, but we do have to caution ourselves regarding to the language we use and the time we waste creating posters. The EQ I break it into ask: “Why is this specific lesson happening with this specific class on this specific day?” To answer this, the three pieces we work on ask for 1) content being addressed in the lesson 2) things students are learning to do with the content 3) context of the lesson in relationship to the day before and unit / essential question progression.
This post, by the way, reminds me of a another issue, which is having teachers spend endless hours filling out lesson plan forms before ever working on what makes for a great lesson plan.
I perhaps did not make clear an important assumption. Of course teachers should write out objectives – for the unit and for the day. That is the cornerstone of my work in UbD. That said, the issue here was different: what to communicate to kids, when; and what should be mandated (or not) about that communication. And AGREED on the last point! That’s really why UbD exists – I saw so many poor lesson and unit plans, and most people’s conception of ‘goals’ is very weak. A single, discrete attainment – an individual skill or set of facts is NOT a goal, as we often argue. A goal reflects what students will be able to do with that knowledge and skill in some transfer situation, in more complex performance situations. I highly recommend that all readers interested in this issue read Module D in the Understanding by Design Guide to High-Quality Units. IMHO I think we provide as clear and succinct account of what to do and what not to do in thinking about goals as the design process begins.
Thank you, Grant.
I love this part: “A single, discrete attainment – an individual skill or set of facts is NOT a goal, […]. A goal reflects what students will be able to do with that knowledge and skill in some transfer situation, in more complex performance situations.”
If I could get everyone to understand this one idea and act on it, I would consider my life’s work to have made a difference for the better.
Agreed and I agree with Jennifer B. In my school and district (Jeffco in Colorado), we have wandered through several systems of posting consistent and meaningful guidance to students. There was a time we used KUD for “What will I know, understand, do?” Teachers posted, but didn’t necessarily create meaning around the posting.
We are now using posting of the Essential Question, Goal, and Activity. Expectations are that teachers review the posting at the beginning of class, so students understand the meaning and value of the EQ and have a part in building that understanding. We worked a lot in meetings and discussions to create similar expectations and language around the learning goal, in particular. The goal is what learning they expect to gain in the class – possibly in one period or over several days (building toward answering the EQ). It should not be the 40 minute learning, but the 40 day, at least. The activity is what students will actually be doing in the class period toward reaching the goal. We have had several Instructional Rounds observing the posted goals and students’ ability to not only state them, but explain how what they are doing leads to the goal. Whether my students can, in fact, do that consistently will be a part of my evaluation this year.
I really think viewing it in the same way as the agenda for a meeting is valuable. Simple and makes sense.
Thanks for this clear account of what you are doing and why. The 40 day vs 40 minute is, of course, the key.
Yes, I like the analogy, too. Funny, when I started the post, it hadn’t yet occurred to me at all. It was only after I had drafted it that I pondered what I was after by some example or analogy – a great example of why sometimes you have to see what you say in writing before you know what you think, in that wise old phrase by (I think) the poet Auden.
I also like the agenda analogy. Can you imagine a company in which an employee’s performance review included evaluating the number and quality of her meeting agendas?
We are SIOP trained at our school, so we post content and language objectives for every lesson. Sometimes more than one if we are doing more than one activity. The kids have been trained that if the admin, or anyone they don’t know but is wearing a school district badge and has and IPad comes in the room and asks them any questions about what we are doing, they are to point at the objectives and read them to that person. I have no evidence that this is helping the kids learn anything. When I see admin come in, the first thing I do is point the objectives and make sure the kids know what they are because one time I got dinged in an eval for not doing that in the admin’s presence even though I did it right before the admin came in and again after they left.
I’m underwhelmed with this for the reasons that I wrote about. How can this truly be in the kids’ interest?
I appreciate this post. Your words make a lot of sense. As a principal, I have moved away from mandating teachers to post learning targets on the board. As you more or less state, I am more concerned about whether the students know, understand, and are engaged in the learning for the day.
My staff and I are working toward consensus on this practice. We have investigated the definition of LTs from “Learning Targets” by Connie Moss and Susan Brookhart: “Learning targets use words, pictures, actions, or some combination of the three to express to students in terms the students understand, the content and performance they are aiming for” (28). Many still do post learning targets. But they look different in every classroom, based on their kids’ developmental level and what the teachers believe best communicates the learning for the students.
This is the most sensible thing I have heard today. THAT’S thoughtful.
It only took me two years to arrive at this thinking :).
It must be an infuraiting sight to see your work mandated in such a way that, ironically, adds to the compliance culture in the education system when, in-fact, UBD was meant to do just the opposite.
Unfortunately I see this more times than not.
Alas, it is infuriating. But it happens with all the work – Danielson is apoplectic about what has happened to her framework; it ruined Madeline Hunter’s stuff, etc. It’s just the way it is. My advice to up-and-coming reformers: assume your work will be mandated. What will you build in up front to minimize the harm or4 foolish use of it?
Every reformative program introduced takes a hit as soon as it is implemented because the ball is alreay roling. Unless the reformer can isolate or at least buffer themselves from the current system for an amount of time while the reformation takes hold, it is doomed from the start. As you mentioned above, it happens so much now we have come to expect it which only further cultivates and promotes a culture of compliance and mandates. Have you worked with any schools that were willing to stop the ball long enough to implement UBD untill it was, for the lack of a better term, “established”? If so, what does “established” look like? These are two questions that I wonder about often.
I’ve seen schools encourage posting these in student friendly language. “I can” statements. While this can be useful, it borders so closely on prescription that it easily can suck the life and joy out of learning. Seems to me this is a pendulum kind of thing where we want teachers and students to be more cognizant of the why in learning and yet when taken too far it can squeeze out any pleasure the learning might afford.
I would be far more ok with it if the I Can statements referred to complex performance using the skill than just the skill. Posting “I can argue both sides of a complex issue without bias” would be a great heads-up. But posting “I can define ‘crustacean'” is just dumb.
Also, I’d say that if we can use some sort of process descriptor with the student to help them see the numerous steps that lead up to being able to “arguing both sides…,” the students would know, for a number of days, what their work entails and how it all fits together.
Now, THAT’s more like what I would wish to see: like on a map where it says “You are HERE…” or one web sites where there is continuum with steps for each page. That would potentially be of far greater use to kids.
But again, at what point is contrived and lifeless? Even with the “I can argue both sides of a complex argument” it can very easily come across as drone-like. Students asked to recite I can statements. Isn’t is much more meaningful if we just ask students “so what?” or “what have you or are you learning?” I think those are much more natural responses to learning. For learning to matter and take root, the learner has to very quickly make their own meaning using much of their own language.
I suppose I’d just rather teachers be more involved in asking them about their learning than feeding them an objective.
Grant,
I’m really not one of those people who have much of a response to articles/blog posts besides an internal “well-said!” and an occasional facebook share. I certainly never comment. But reading this brings me nearly to tears because I was another teacher who made her students memorize standards (“Juan, please tell me which standard this sentence error reflects.”). I was forced to teach English and reading to the tests, and in addition to official state tests, my school imposed quarterly internal mock standardized tests on students– more to monitor teachers than kids.
Every single Sunday, my co-teachers and I had to fill out huge weekly templates detailing every day’s lessons, with state standards AND objectives, and a mandatory bellringer activity, exit activity, and a few other mandatory categories, plus homework. These templates were literally graded by a “master teacher” whose sole job it was to grade these (we were given scores which went into our evaluations) and then patrol the hallways, making sure the standards on our boards matched those in the templates for each day. I do not exaggerate when I say that A) filling out this template took a minimum of four hours every weekend in addition to the actual planning of units, and sometimes took up to 7 hours, because of its detail, and B) this template– and the associated mentality of the administration that implemented it– made me leave the profession in 2011.
Teaching became all about jumping through hoops that didn’t mean anything to me or my students besides instilling an anger at such dry, disconnected, compulsory tasks, and sometimes even fear– if we actually spent all weekend grading or being with our families instead of completing the template; we’d be written up! Your post made me so emotional because tasks like this seriously deprive teachers and students of the pleasure of learning. No one is saying we shouldn’t have standards, but forcing teachers– who already work way more hours than most professions, let’s be honest– to spend their already scant free time making posters, filling out templates, and memorizing numbers should not happen. I really thought that if I left that particular school, it would be the same somewhere else. Turnover is already too high. I am ashamed that I bailed on my students, and that I contributed to the turnover percentage… but sometimes I felt like I was being paid to fill out a template and not to guide young people.
Thank you for your candor and your reminder that we lose good people to thoughtless policies. I always say to every ex-teacher: do not feel a shred of guilt. We do what we can and we do what we must do to be true to our truest selves. As long as we give of ourselves in some way, we are doing our job for the next generation. Thanks for writing; much appreciated.
Come back, please. Don’t find a new profession, Find a new school with solid administration. Kids everywhere need dedicated, aware teachers.
So…I’m one of the dumb administrators who has recently begun to ask teachers to post their daily objectives and unit EQs. This is a new requirement for our teachers, who are asking, “for whom are we posting these things?” Clearly, we need to do a better job of articulating to teachers exactly WHY having EQs and Objectives is so important, and further, why we need to make these components transparent to our kids. I believe that an underlying issue is that, for years, many teachers did not write daily (let alone unit) plans. It perplexes me that there are many in this profession who fly by the seat of their pants and “wing it” on a daily basis. For me, the reason many teachers are simply posting the EQs and Objectives for compliance is because it’s easier to slap a poster on the wall than it is to become a more reflective practitioner.
Edward: If I can be so bold, can you try using your own lesson as an example for them at your next meeting. It sounds like you have a goal (more meaningful lessons) for your class (the faculty) but instead of playing out ideally, you ended up with frustration over their merely being compliant. Can you go back to your faculty and deconstruct your initiative? Try looking at it again – with the whole faculty – and figuring out where your pd went south, come to an understanding about why it’s an important initiative, and find consensus on how to improve the outcome.
Then, the work can serve as a model for their teaching. How often do they come to class with a lesson that falls flat? Can you help them see that you all needed to get involved in stronger planning and contextualizing if you want the learning environment to improve for everyone in school?
I believe where it breaks down is in the mode of compliance. We go through levels of true understanding and if we NEVER get past “doing because someone else told me to” we never get to true understanding and realizing the greater purpose of something like Essential Questions being accessible to students, teachers, and administrators. Many times the valid reasons behind the policy get left behind or never is fully implemented – just “surface monitored”. It takes tenacity and, yes. time to continue past announcing the edict. Thanks for the common sense talk around this issue many of us face.
Grant,
I am a seventh grade science teacher. Here is something that has worked quite well this year in terms of posting things for authentic purposes. My team and I develop quarter-long essential questions. Our first quarter question was “How do parts shape the whole?” Our current question is “What shapes our stories?” We apply these questions to all our content areas (ELA, math, science, world civilizations). Students often work with these themes in cross-curricular contexts and sometimes produce culminating projects in which they answer the question in the context of all content areas.
I post the essential question on one of my giant wall-mounted whiteboards and refer to it frequently. Students answer the question in the context of the various science content that we cover. Our current essential question – “What shapes our stories?” – is accompanying a focus on narrative writing. From our perspective, narratives are shaped by compelling characters, filter/slant, storyworld, and timeline as described by Fredricksen, Wilhelm, & Smith (2012). I have columns for each of these characteristics on the whiteboard and we frequently cover them with our thinking.
Students are prompted to discuss and share answers during opening moments or closing moments. They write their thoughts on sticky notes (sometimes individually and other times in small groups) and post them for others to read and consider. In the context of science we often think of and describe characters that are not people but molecules or structures like cells. We examine timelines of events that shape processes like photosynthesis and cellular respiration. As a form of front-loading we also think about the characteristics of narrative writing in the context of student’s lives. They post sticky notes about favorite characters from books or movies and important events from their own personal lives before tying these themes to science content.
Thank you for allowing me to share a few thoughts.
Best regards,
Micah Lauer
Micah: This is good stuff, much more to the point! Use the question as a nexus, a hub for connecting experiences and ideas. You also raise a vital issue that I plan to deal with soon. Far too many of the Charting done in elementary classrooms is too static, as if the kids’ initial thoughts are all that matter and where all comments are equally valid. On the contrary: in EQ based classrooms, ewe would expect those charts to get critiqued as well as revised as new information and experience occurs.
Exactly, Grant! I hope more teachers consider doing things like this. It’s quick and easy, yet powerful. The EQ is used organically throughout the week, unit, and quarter. Sticky notes come down. New sticky notes go up. We think about the EQ in lots of different contexts. Students read and respond to each other. What I also like about this practice is that it can be used as a formative assessment (especially when students are asked to sign their names) and it’s a low-stakes form of publishing and writing for an audience. The students really enjoy contributing to our wall of thinking.
I have never understood the concept of posting learning targets for most of the reasons mentioned. Telling students WHAT they are learning by writing out targets can obstruct the spontaneous, unpredictable nature of learning. Withholding objectives— to inspire a sense of surprise when they are revealed– sometimes leads to better learning, as opposed to revealing the objectves at the outset. I start many of my philosophy class days with “the target today is to leave confused but curious as to what happens tomorrow”. What ever happened to confusion being a target? Feeling pressured to post targets I would argue is just another reflection of how we are trying to make everything in education scientifically measurable and demonstrable
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I see so much of the UBD stuff to be a 21st Century spin on the value of Platonic thinking. Plato saw the process of learning as a revealing itself through the questioning process, which in a sense is exactly UBD’s focus with enduring questions. The questions are the fixed stars; all of the daily activities in class strides towards finding answers to these questions, or at least– depending on the class– ways of thinking about the questions. If the questions are articulated and posed properly, and reinforced appropriately throughout the year, then students reveal what they know and don’t know through the attempts to address them. And the questions inspire a certain curiosity which carries enthusiasm. I am bringing forth this connection, not to diminish the importance of UBD– just the opposite. UBD implants Socratic thinking into the context of lesson planning in a way that is profoundly beneficial. Socrates would be proud!
The embedded tension as I see it is that the essential questions approach– shaped as it is by deeply philosophical thinking– isn’t always a comfortable marriage with the more scientifcally rote approach of writing down targets and assessing constantly through standardized tests etc…These kind of activities appeal more towards people who embrace science as the best vehicle for knowledge. Let the modern day war between philosophy and science rage on!
Well, there’s no accident to the Platonic angle: I went to St. John’s College, and taught philosophy in high school for 10 years! Echoes of Meno and the Cave Allegory are everywhere in UbD, ‘by design’!
That’s why rote learning as a GOAL is not at all compatible with UbD. Rote learning of some core skills, like the 4 basic operations and de-coding and French 1 is of course necessary; not sufficient. Nor is it proper, for the reasons you mention, to postpone inquiry until many years of rote learning have gone by. At the heart of UbD is the view that one can become very wise in one’s ignorance through inquiry and dialectic – an idea you recognize.
yep… the famous Rilke quote is irresistible here “Live the Questions Now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
The fight is against people who see the answers as being most valuable, as opposed to the disposition of inquiry which is long-lasting. There has to be a good middle ground to settle into. Your work is very, very important to finding that.
I read Grant’s post and felt relief. I then wrote a post of my own reflecting my recent thinking before Grant’s article and thinking after reading it several times. I never thought to post it here but see now I could have.
I hope you will stop by my blog to see my thinking related to kindergarten.
http://enjoy-embracelearning.blogspot.com/2013/12/twitter-alleluia-grant-wiggins.html
Also, Grant – I am the one who tweeted you about K samples. Thanks.
Thanks, Mandy – will do.
Not only am I required to post a formulaic essential question, our district is under court order to also post a language objective for ELLs that includes all of the supports we will be using for the unit to ensure we are teaching academic language at each student’s WIDA language level. By the time I have all of the required objectives posted in order to earn an effective rating by a district peer observer who doesn’t know me, my students, or my school, I have no more room on my board to write, draw, record, and think about what we are actually learning. Then, on the 16th day of the school year, the peer observer asks that one student who is in the affective needs special ed. program (being mainstreamed) why he is copying a sentence from his book that contains a new vocabulary word onto a Frayer model organizer. He replies, “Because my teacher told me to.” Hence a rating of 2 out of 7 for me because he could not relate his activity to the posted objective and the activity was rote with no rigor. I respond to the PO, “That is a 7 out of 7 rating because he is in his seat, not stabbing other students with a pencil or touching the girls, not stealing their supplies or snacks, and he’s actually following a simple direction which is his objective.” Should I have posted this student’s objective as well?
One more thing. We dismiss students at 1:00 every Friday for PD on Understanding by Design.
Oh, well that is brilliant policy 🙂
Horrible story. And how does that earn you a 2 out of 7??? Keep the faith…
As directed by the RAC, we now have to post three part objectives on our board that include the “condition, behavior, and assessment” for each lesson. For example, I must write “having watched the smart board lesson explaining the theorems to prove triangles congruent, I (meaning the student) will be able to apply these theorems to solve the classroom exercise problems with (fill in the blank) % accuracy.” Would I hope for anything less than 100% accuracy? But that’s not realistic after just an introduction.
Last year they required us to draw targets on the board and list the day’s goals. Hmmm….I wonder what will be required next year? I’m so tired of jumping through artificial hoops when the reason we are a focus school is because of the gap between our highest achievers (whose parents have them tutored in everything) and our Special Ed population which includes students with multiple disabilities and third grade reading levels in 8th grade.
Can’t take too much more.
Very dreary; sorry. “Condition, behavior, assessment” is actually a good template for planning to ensure a focus on outcomes – for the TEACHER. How it would be useful to kids is not clear. (By the way: what is PAC?)
Even my students feel it is not useful. The “suggestion” that we’re following was proposed by the RAC…
“RAC Mission Statement:
New Jersey’s Regional Achievement Centers, struggling schools, and their districts will partner to set clear goals for student growth, put proven turnaround principles into action, and use data to drive decision-making and accountability. Working together, we will meet our shared goal of closing the achievement gap and preparing all of our students for success in college and career.”
Turnaround principles my eye!
Their principles are not proven. They are based on post Katrina Recovery Districts that received no grade higher than a D. I don’t think we are talking about a turnaround. More like a set up.
RAC
http://www.edlawcenter.org/news/archives/other-issues/rac-activities-raise-major-questions.html
Thanks for the heads-up on this. I am going to do some digging to find out more about its rules and regs.
I work in a state run district that has a PE and Health Curriculum that is garbage. I have written numerous people in district, QSAC, RAC, NJ DOE coordinator for PE and Health, Education Specialist for the county I work and the president of the state BOE. However, what matters the most is that I post an objective and DOL for all my classes throughout the building for all my students k-8, along with a do now and an exit ticket. All the while that I am teaching 7 classes a day with no travel time. This again is throughout the building with a garbage curriculum. Do you really think their (the powers that be) concern is if my students know what they are learning? Sorry venting.
Grant,
As usual, I agree completely with your ideas here and appreciate your continued thoughtful pushing of our thinking around lesson and unit design. That said, I fear your headline here is a bit unfortunate. Your piece is a thoughtful reflection on the importance of identifying and communicating high-value learning goals to students. As an administrator who often encourages posting and communicating an objective, I could see the headline being thrown back in my face as an excuse to continue with business as usual. Posting standards and non-student-friendly objective is a wasteful compliance exercise, but different than using a posted objective as a communication tool to help frame student learning. What I have been encouraging is the continued communication to students along the lines of, “Today, as we continue to develop an understanding of (posted essential question), we want to be able to (posted objective).” Similarly, when appropriate I suggest teachers go back to the objective at the end of the lesson as a means of checking for understanding and probing student reflection on their own developing answers to the EQ. Do I expect this uniformly in every classroom? Not necessarily, but I do think there is value in students being oriented similarly throughout the day.
To clarify — before I put words in your mouth — what you are saying here is that what is most important is the communication of purpose. Posting a learning objective for the lesson itself is not inherently bad, but can be a helpful aid if part of the larger goal of making real to students the purpose of the lesson and its relationship to the development of the larger understandings of the course. Yes?
Fair enough! I think I sometimes get carried away in my headline writing, just to raise an eyebrow; not always wise. I will change the title to reflect your good point.
I agree wholeheartedly that we all need to work toward an objective. Posting it may help maintain focus as long as the expectation is to align learning with the objective and NOT to have it regurgitated to an administrative observer by an unsuspecting student. And what happens to student-centered learning and teachable moments, the rich stuff of teaching? Do I respond to a thoughtful question or connection: “I’m sorry, we can’t stop and learn about the contributions to the world made by Nelson Mandela because it isn’t within the realm of our posted objective.” Or do I post a new objective each time a teachable moment occurs?
Making a visible objective should then be the chore of every individual every day in the workplace and outside of public classrooms. If we applied this same rigor to school district offices, businesses, government agencies (other than schools), and Congress, would it make a difference?
I request (not mandate!) that my teachers post a Learning Target using “I can…” language. We have also worked with Webb’s Depth of Knowledge work to promote targets that move beyond “I can define crustacean'” (noted in a previous comment.) I sense that the greatest impact on student learning comes from the teacher being more intentional in planning lessons/units (including assessment during the lesson) and more reflective about lessons. There are a few teachers that feel this is simply a hoop through which they must jump; however, for many, they have appreciated the nudge to be more reflective and reminder that excellent instruction is not a “to do” list.
Agreed: it’s all about intentional and worthy aims informing the design of lessons and activities. But then the point is not the posting but better planning, right? Sure, a nudge is a good thing. But to mandate this daily in HOPES of getting more thoughtful planning seems backward to me. And as many people say here, onerous if it’s mandated daily.
I think the underlying question is: How do we support teachers to become more reflective in their thinking and planning? When all teachers begin to approach instruction using a similar language and approach, the students benefit. Imagine the power of school-wide and district-wide consistency if every teacher were to make their EQs transparent to students. Yes, often this kind of work begins with an administrative nudge. Ultimately, though, it’s about teachers recognizing that they do not teach in isolation; they are just one instructional stop on the student’s educational highway and it is our collaborative efforts and consistencies that will make a huge difference down the road (and I apologize for the travel metaphors!).
DC – This is the essence of the challenge. I often say it, even if the language sounds jarring: many teachers are egocentric by the nature of their job and isolation. They often lose sight of the organizational goals and needs for consistency about core policies. That said, admins. tend to mandate the wrong things. The IDEAS should be mandatory, not the manifestations of the ideas (e.g. posters). The IDEA here is simple and inarguable: students need to know why they are learning what they are being asked to learn, on moral grounds as well as practical learning effectiveness grounds. That’s the ‘mandatory’ idea. But admins. Have a nasty habit of mandating one and only one practice in support of the idea which gets it backward. It’s like the teacher who mandates that students must take notes exactly one way or the coach who demands that a single ‘move’ be used instead of helping players understand the goal and strategy.
I think it needs to be a mix of differentiated approaches to administration and teaching with some “non-negotiable” universalities. Our system is spitting out kids with vastly different skills from one classroom to the next. A first grader in one classroom may learn an entirely different curriculum and walk away with entirely different skills compared to another first grader in the same school who has a different teacher. I’m not suggesting that we turn teachers into robots; however, we need to arrive at universal, collaborative beliefs and implementations.
Also, admin and teachers rarely (if ever) work together effectively. It’s more combative- us vs. them/good vs. evil. Here’s my EQ for the issue: How can we get admin and teachers to work together towards a common goal of improving instruction?
A lot to digest and I really value the opportunity to discuss with like-minded educators on this site.
Hello DC — you wrote a few things that I wanted to comment on
“Our system is spitting out kids with vastly different skills from one classroom to the next. A first grader in one classroom may learn an entirely different curriculum and walk away with entirely different skills compared to another first grader in the same school who has a different teacher.”
Could this be because the human beings entrusted in their care have different skills and capacities? Education reform lauds the value of differentiation for STUDENTS. Why shouldn’t we apply the same approach to TEACHER learning? If we did, then we would spend less time striving for conformity and more time EXPLOITING the unique talents of teachers. Maybe our overarching purpose should be to MAKE SURE students get DIFFERENT experiences from one class to the next.
Grant is absolutely right– teachers are egocentric. But what if we used this egocentrism to the advantage of students, rather than asking teachers to do the same things (Mandating posting objectives, ‘collaboration’ time; common rubrics; common lesson planning; common pacing of units), which in the end breeds robotic behavior and which flies in the face of the value of differentiation. Learning communities are only possible if ALL learners’ unique skills and talents are allowed flourish (teachers AND students).
Just to be clear here– I’m NOT promoting complete autonomy. Those days are long gone. A school can still have general guidelines/mandates. A school can still mandate UBD for example— yet whatever was mandated needs to be differentiated based on the learning needs of the teachers. Imagine the tone that would set in a building… and what it would ultimately mean for students.
Thanks for your post.. you really got me thinking on this one
What you say is very true; however, sometimes “hope” is all I can do for a number of reasons. I’m grateful to those amazing teachers and administrators who love learning themselves, will take the research and apply it in their classrooms and schools, and are continually looking at the ways to be even more effective. Thank you for challenging me to consider yet another perspective!
Well, Joni, you obviously have a sensible and level-headed approach to this. Alas, many of your colleagues do not. And, so, we see needless mandates everywhere – standardization instead of high standards but permissible differences. That is always the challenge, the EQ: Where should we agree to agree? Where should we agree to disagree? As I said in an earlier reply to a comment, we should be mandating a principle, a criterion; not a specific practice. It is mandatory that learning be engaging; engagement can be defined and operationalized in varied ways.
Great Post, Grant. I worked for a long time in a school that was under program improvement for low test scores and the folks there were in such a tizzy to get the scores up that they brought out these ‘Content Objective and Language Objective’ requirements. It was amazingly insipid.
A long time ago there was an essay, perhaps for the “left hand,” perhaps for “the act of discovery.” The essay was in a book called ” The Art of Reading” { Advanced Writing-Concordia-Portland-1990-} Later, there was an assistant sup.He came to our staff and spoke of teaching in a way that students would learn, and then use that knowledge. I mentioned in that meeting that there was a word for that, and I called it HEURISTICS. A teacher quietly asked how to spell it, keeping me honest, and walked over to the giant dictionary. I can still spell it.
Hi Grant,
Here in Colorado (in my district and school anyway) if you do not post your objectives it is counted against you in your Educator Effectiveness rating. Sadly, I feel as though your work has been taken out of context and now many people do not see the depth of it. Some people only see the eye candy and think if an objective, standard or essential question is posted and recited back by the kids then all is well.
After reading your March 9 2015 post about teacher effectiveness I was curious as to your thoughts on how educator effectiveness (that’s what we call it here in Colorado) is tied to misinformed or misunderstood practices to perhaps make it easier for people who are not actually in the classroom teaching to get through the evaluation process. Administrators have always had a big job, but now they have to evaluate every teacher every year in every standard in addition to all of their other duties which is why I feel having a checklist (do I see the objective posted on the wall) is where things start to fall apart an the work gets watered down.
I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
Sigh. I fully agree with you: there is a constant tendency to do the most superficial checklist-y things in supervision in the face of the daunting numbers of people to be evaluated. What I don’t understand, however, is why admins think merely posting objectives does anything of value for kids’ learning (especially when the objectives are low-level and obvious to all once the work is underway).
We plan to address this thoughtlessness in the revision to the UbD book ,just underway, if it’s any consolation.
Thank you for your response. Perhaps one day you will be able to come to my school and have deep conversations with the staff and admin. Have a super day and thank you for all you do 🙂
We do not respect students enough to make them equal partners in education. Students are taught. They are given assignments and told when they are due. Sometimes they have no idea how the assignment is relevant to the goals at hand. I’d go further even- many times they have no idea. They are tested and held accountable. There is little to no choice in courses to take. College bound students must follow a path. They must sit and listen- sometimes to hours on end of the power point ramblings of a lecture.
There are fantastic teachers. And there are fantastic ones who are compelled to do power point from all the difficult mandates that are placed on them. This is NOT a criticism of teachers. Rather, it is a criticism of the system we have.
We must turn it around and have students pursue learning. We must create opportunities and avenues. Power point should be kicked to the curb! And the goals should be discovered. It’s not easy but if we stop “covering the material” and instead explore it- I think we’d see achievement increase.
I haven’t read all of the posts, but I feel like this argument is a bit of a red-herring. Quality instruction can happen in classrooms where a teacher posts the learning objectives or essential question, and it can happen when they don’t.
It’s more of a matter of a teacher’s ability to reflect on how the activities move toward the objectives, and that is a much more difficult assessment to make from an outsider’s perspective. If it’s merely a matter of 15 seconds of writing on the board, I’m not so sure what the big deal is.
Because the mandate misses the point completely. It assumes that this is the only way for students to know goals and for teachers to be accountable. And it encourages cynical thinking and behavior by everyone. More to the point of UbD, it often ends up making people think that the question merely be posted to consider it adequately addressed – which is the opposite of what an EQ is.
My district requires us to post Learning Intentions (LI) and Success Criteria (SC) for EVERY SINGLE THING WE TEACH, even things like handwriting, phonics, and Words Their Way…which are all about 15 minutes each. We do not have to have posters, but they do have to posted somewhere in the room, which means my entire wall of white boards is completely filled with only the LI and SC for each LI. We are required to generate the SC with students at the beginning of the lesson, even though we haven’t taught them anything. Obviously, they should know the steps for dividing fractions before it’s even been taught. We are also supposed to say the learning intentions during the beginning, middle, and end of each lesson. If someone comes in to observe, they have to hear you say this THREE times, no matter what part of the lesson you are on, or how long they are in the room. Which basically means, drop everything and mention the LI and SC.
It’s stupid. It’s a waste of time. My students are not miraculously smarter or more focused by taking time away from their learning every day to talk about what they are learning and how they will master it. This is one educational trend I am ready to see disappear.
The tragic part is that by writing/speaking your targets, you are essentially leaving little room for spontaneous shifts of learning that arise organically from surprising student questions. Ironically, posting learning targets is a very teacher-centered activity.
Actually, Dan, it needn’t be that way at all. The objective could be stated as an EQ, with the objectives being: “Deepened understanding of key issues and ideas, student-generated inquiries and projects, based on the discussion of the EQs” with a little more detail about the content.
As we always say, EQs are not a teacher ‘move’ they are an educational aim: learn to question, to argue, to explore. THAT’s the objective with EQs, not content acquisition.
I think there is a really important lesson here about purpose and context (and the pitfalls of hoop jumping). There is a considerable difference between administrators using objectives as a meaningful tool to help teachers help their students (i.e. “What type of important questions can you develop from the objectives for your students to explore?”) versus a context-less hoop to be jumped through (i.e. “You will post the objectives and recite them during the lesson”). One is productive. The other is definitely not. This all circles back to being thoughtful about your practice – as an administrator or teacher. Are you doing valuable things to help people accomplish their work? Is it good for students? Will it help them learn?
Grant, I see what you are saying. What you suggest…. “Deepened understanding of key issues and ideas, student-generated inquiries and projects, based on the discussion of the EQs”… sounds like a great idea for a YEARLY target, because it allows for plenty of flexibility and student input— and it actually, then, has MEANING for the students because a teacher can continually reference the target throughout the year. Why not yearly targets? Daily is so arbitrary, and makes the assumption that the value of learning must be manifested on a daily basis. This is such a curious assumption to me and I think is a product of our obsessive need to measure learning instead of letting it maturate over time.
Totally in agreement about our fixation on itty bitty objectives…
After writing on the board your sample learning goal–which was nebulous at best–each and every day, the bell would go!
I have been using a format I found on Pinterest- don’t remember the original source.
Today I am-
So I can-
I’ll know I’ve “got it” when-
Seems to be working pretty well. It helps me think about the “Why am I doing this with students?” and how can I help them evaluate their work and learning on a level beyond this is good/bad.
Having said that- I teach visual arts to five grade levels, so essentially I am planning 5 lessons per week- not 30! Using this format takes a fair amount of time and is not easy. Suspect I could not manage it with 30 lessons per week.
Timely article ! For what it’s worth , if your business requires a TX Statutory Durable PoA , my colleague discovered a fillable version here
https://goo.gl/qJRZ3i.