What am I supposed to think about this and where do I begin? This question finds its way into our thinking on many occasions, especially when we are responsible for the success of children. Often the words of others assist us in understanding the imperatives we face. One proven strategy for setting the stage for action is to conduct a task analysis that creates a clear vision of the work to be accomplished. A task analysis is an essential step in presenting effective instruction that causes all children to learn.

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” Abraham Lincoln

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Benjamin Franklin

Lincoln gives us our first thought. In teacher talk, he tells us that when we know what children know at this moment and what future learning they are to achieve, we are more likely to find the strategies for moving their education forward. Franklin gives us the kick in the pants to begin action – in positive terms, by preparing for success, our success is prepared. Hard to argue with Ben!

Task analysis helps us to transcribe complex objectives into an instructional design. The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics present teachers with an extraordinary set of objective outcomes for children to achieve as the result of each grade level of instruction. In their entirety and as individual statements, the CCSS are powerful aspirations for learning, however they are exceptionally rigorous, complex and complicated. In order to understand how a standard causes learning, teachers need to strip a standard/objective down to its parts and rebuild the parts into an instructional design.

The ELA literacy standard for writing for third grade children serves as a case in point.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1 Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1a Introduce the topic or text they are writing about, state an opinion, and create an organizational structure that lists reasons.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1b Provide reasons that support the opinion.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1c Use linking words and phrases (e.g., because, therefore, since, for example) to connect opinion and reasons.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1d Provide a concluding statement or section.

In our task analysis, we must identify the component parts of the learning objectives. What is an “opinion” and an “opinion piece” and what do the children in this third grade class already know about opinions and opinion pieces. Each operative subject and predicate in these objectives must be parsed and a realistic understanding of Lincoln’s “first know(ing) where we are” must be established. If there are 20 children in the class, there could well be 20 different “where we are(s)” to be found. As an example:

Stripping the objective down to its incremental parts is necessary for our diagnosis of what each child needs to learn and how we are to instruct them. This allows us to answer, “Who needs to learn what and in what order do they need to learn it.”

We begin Franklin’s “preparing for success” processes by reassembling our assessment of the parts of the objective into an instructional design that might look like this.

• Verification of and/or instruction of background knowledge and skills.
• Class discussion of “meaty” topics from which they can form an opinion.
• Initial instruction of new knowledge and skills related to paragraph organization, supporting ideas, and writing skills.
• Modeling of new knowledge and skills
• Collaborative work for creating an “organizational structure” or graphic organizer of what the paragraph(s) might look like, including statement of an opinion, supporting sentences aligned with reason that supports the opinion sentence, and a concluding sentence.
• Individual work to write an “opinion piece” using the organizational structure developed collaboratively.
• Teacher monitoring of individual work and support of children with weaker background knowledge or skills (tutorials).
• Presentation of student work.

Task analysis not only addresses the immediate standard(s) to be taught, it also helps a teacher verify background knowledge for the learning of other standards in the future. The analysis entailed in a third grade literacy/writing standard confirms each child’s readiness of any other standard involving opinion, opinion pieces, the organizational structure of an opinion piece, and the process of using collaborative work to establish a framework from which individual work can be completed.

If you are ready and prepared to do something important, the doing is much easier and the result is much more likely to be exactly what you anticipated it would be. Readiness points a person toward success!

We can learn a lot about the importance of preparation by looking at real world examples of readiness. President Kennedy announced in 1960 that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of that decade. It took nine years between JFK’s announcement and Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. Each aspect of every minute task was rehearsed hundreds of times. In the photo below, astronauts wearing full gear in a training center on Earth practiced unloading their equipment, using tongs and scoops to collect samples from a simulated moonscape, bagging and sealing the samples, tagging and labeling the samples, and storing the sample bags in the practice model of the lunar module. NASA pre-thought the incremental steps of every activity the astronauts might need to make related to a landing on the moon and rehearsed each step over and over again.

Many surgeons prepare for surgery by interviewing their patient and studying their records. However, surgeons who warm up for a surgery by going through the hand motions of the procedure prior to beginning surgery had eighty percent fewer errors than surgeons who did not rehearse their hand motions. http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/how-your-surgeon-prepare-operation/

Tiger Woods hits 500 or more golf balls on the range every day in preparation for a round of golf when he wants to make fewer than 72 golf shots.

Olympic athletes can be seen rehearsing the body mechanics of a dive off the high platform or the landing from the balance beam or the configurations of how they will navigate the downhill slalom on the ski hill. Using video, they isolate how they move their arms and their legs, how they tuck into aerial flips, and the timing of each physical movement. From take-off to landing, they have a clear visual in their mind of every aspect of what they need to do.

A child learning to write a poem or do long division or play the flute or weld a leg onto a metal stand needs to be ready for success just like an astronaut and surgeon and world-class athlete.

How do we make children ready to learn?

Preparing a child for learning is our moonwalk. Remarkably, there are hundreds of decisions that pertain to a child’s successful learning. In most instructional designs, however, we are concerned with three very straight-forward readiness targets.

One – Do we understand the critical attributes of what is to be learned so that a sequence of instruction can be accomplished? Having a clear map of what must be learned and the order of instruction is essential if instruction is to cause learning. Effective learning cannot begin halfway through a sequence of ten attributes, but must build successful step upon successful step. When children know that the teacher is following a clear map of instruction, they can confidently give their full effort to learning.

This stage of readiness should be accomplished well in advance of initial instruction. Identifying and staging the critical attributes of a learning task is a complex process and cannot be efficiently performed in a prep period an hour before children are to begin new learning. A graphic organizer is a valuable tool in seeing the map of learning a child must complete in order to successfully learn new content, skills and thinking processes.

Two – Is the child aligned with the first of these critical attributes? This step engages and questions the quality of each child’s prior learning. If the critical attributes require that a child knows, can do and thinks in a prescribed manner, we need to be sure that each child is confident in these three areas. If they are not, we need to pre-teach the background content, skills and thinking process before we begin the new instruction.

Historically, teachers may have generalized their observations that children in their class were confident in the prior knowledge required for new learning. Bell-weather children often were checked; if the middle achievers of the class were ready, then the more competent children were undoubtedly ready and special assistance would meet the needs low achievers. This may have met historic measures of accountability, but it will not meet the needs of our reformed mandates – not by half.

Three – Is the child motivated to begin new learning? We need to pre-think our strategy for engaging each child with a “hook” that personalizes, challenges them with a doable unknown, and engages their curiosity. The same strategy seldom works for each child in a class, so multiple strategies must be exercised so that all children in a class are motivated to learn.

Getting ready for success is only a first step. Readiness alone doesn’t guarantee that everything will be perfect. However, without readiness, successful learning is left to chance and chance is not an adequate predictor of future achievement in the era of educational reform.

Have you ever had that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that a small disaster is imminent?

The dream is real. I woke in a sweat the other night. A consistent dream of incompetence haunts my sleep now and again. I am playing golf on a bright and sunny day. The course is crowded with foursomes and play is clipping along at a good pace. That is until my ball comes to rest in the worst of stony brambles. It’s lodged among rocks and roots and there is no way I can get a club head on the ball. If it was not a dream, I would call an “unplayable lie”, determine the correct direction and distance of two club lengths, drop the ball, and play on. Except this is a dream. I can’t find my bag! Where are my clubs? My playing partners have moved on to the next hole! Now, I can’t find my ball! Everything unravels until I have shrunk from my six feet to about four foot two inches in height with clubs that are too long, a ball that is all but invisible, and stress that would crush a submarine’s hull. Ineptitude, incompetence, lack of confidence, lack of knowledge and skill, and unrelenting surrounding conditions that demand immediate forward progress – these are the makings of my bad dreams. But, it is only a dream about golf!

If I was still a practicing teacher or principal or school superintendent, my nightmare would not be about golf. It would be about the looming mandate that all children in Wisconsin will be instructed in the English/language arts and mathematics Common Core State Standards and a new statewide assessment will be used to not only grade each child’s achievement, but each teacher’s and each principal’s professional effectiveness. Egads!

Crunch time is now. In 2010 the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction adopted the Common Core Standards as part of the Department’s application for a waiver from the mounting tensions of the No Child Left Behind Act. http://standards.dpi.wi.gov/stn_ccss Nationally, most states were floundering in their efforts to meet the escalating performance demands of NCLB. Without relief, many states would have been declared educationally bankrupt. As a result, US Department of Education Secretary Duncan encouraged states to seek a waiver from NCLB. There were many required puzzle pieces that states were required to adopt in order to secure USDE approval of their NCLB waiver. Adoption of rigorous academic standards at each grade level with a more accountable assessment system and reformed measures for assessing teacher effectiveness were just three of the puzzle pieces. Now, meeting these reform mandates has the same feeling as the NCLB requirements that were waived.

2010-11 was a year for teachers to understand the scope of the challenge. 2011-12 was committed to professional development of local curriculum and alignment of curricular resources in units of instruction that would cause students to learn the objectives of the CCSS. 2012-13 and 2013-14 are committed to developing activity (lesson) plans that integrate the instruction/learning of multi-CCSS objectives so that children can accomplish the demands of real world, complex assessment problems. Gone are the old-school multiple choice and true-false exams that teachers used for generations. Here are multi-part problems that require comprehension, analysis and evaluation of several sources of data, collaboration with other students, integration of technology, and reporting of conclusions in an information-style essay.

Wow! Put my golf ball back among the rocks and roots. I would rather play from there.

2014-15 is show time! Children will take their new, problem-rich state tests and conclusions will begin to form regarding the progress of each child’s academic achievement and the effectiveness of each local school and faculty. America loves to keep score and the news media will be waist deep in numbers to report.

Egads! Hear the voices of golfers, now teachers, caught in the brambles of their classrooms questioning their competence, knowledge and skills? A study by the Editorial Projects in Education (Education Week) indicates that almost 50 percent of surveyed teachers feel unprepared to teach the CCSS English/language arts and math standards as of March, 2013. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/02/27/22common_ep.h32.html One of the new wrinkles is that ALL children, advantaged as well as disadvantaged, English speaking as well as non-English speaking, regular education as well as special education, are required to learn the same standards and take the same problem-rich assessment. This is the conundrum that many teachers voiced in the survey; teach all students the same standards and assess all students using the same test. This really is different than it used to be. Egads! no longer is a strong enough exclamation of exasperation.

Interestingly, if education was any other national industry, training the industry’s labor force would be quite different. Boeing trains a required number of workers to understand the design of the new Dreamliner and once they understand, they to begin construction of a Dreamliner. They do not construct 767s while they train. They are relieved of prior work to learn how to do new work. General Motors, Honda and BMW shut down production lines while they retool for a next year’s model. Employees are trained in the new line of autos, not while they are making last year’s model, but while they concentrate on the new line.

Teachers will teach children every school day in 2012-13. They are given professional training on the CCSS after school or on half-days when they must prepare for their substitute teacher and often reteach that half-day’s instruction the next day. The 2012-13 production line of child learning does not stop for teachers to learn the demands of the new production line. And, in Wisconsin, the politics of education continue with new options for parents to choose schools for their children where academic achievement may provide their child an advantage for life. This year’s test scores and school report card scores have ever-increasing meaning for a teacher straddling the 2012-13 curriculum while trying to learn the 2014-15 assessment requirements for instruction in 2013-14. Do well today or lose students tomorrow. This is the way it is. Sounds crazy, but egads! this is a Wisconsin teacher’s reality. And, this is why so many teachers declared that they were not prepared for the CCSS in the Education Week survey.

So, what to do. First, if NCLB was Leave No Child Behind, CCSS should include a corollary of Leave No Teacher Behind and Leave No Teacher Alone. We have too many schools with one, two or three teachers of the same grade level or subject. This is not a large enough work group to get this essential work completed. It is time to cross district lines and combine forces for professional development. Groups of 8 – 10 teachers with a common assignment should be gathered during significant released time to formulate new and innovative instruction of blended CCSS objectives. Combine faculties from different schools. Combine teachers from different school districts. There are no Lone Rangers in preparing for the CCSS.

Second, significant time is at least five days in a block of time several times each year when teachers are released from the demands of their respective classrooms. Education has a measly history of eeking out bits of time at the worst time of the day for teacher training. After school is bad because teachers are weary from a day’s work and this is when they need to be moving from employee to family member. Saturdays are bad because weekends are necessary family time. Time and timing are important and need to be treated as important. That is why released time is necessary.

Third, each group needs a trained trainer to assist them. Trainers can rotate from group to group within a county or CESA. However, every trainee group needs oversight and assistance. BMW does not send its middle management on vacation while workers retool. Everyone is committed to the new product. Superintendents, district office, principals, and all faculty no matter what they teach or do must be involved in retooling for a new instructional design.

Last, each group needs to see validated instructional units they can use as models. These exist. There should be no mystery as to what a quality activity plan looks like. BMW doesn’t tell employees who will make a Z4 roadster, “make it up as you go.” No one is interested in “cookie cutter” instruction, but knowing what cookies taste like helps us to create many variations on that successful taste.

Tempest fugit! Test results will be published in June, 2015. Now is the time to not only put the golf back into play but into a scoring position. Fore!

Do you really know if a child is ready for the next instruction?

Teaching Tool – Conceptualizes and connects appropriate instructional designs to the learning needs of a diverse array of children, including motivation for learning, reinforcement, retention and transfer of learning, extension of learning, and readiness for future learning. (Please see the blog posted on 2/26/2013)

Teacher talk about the abundance of educational testing today can sound a lot like Samuel Coleridge’s lament in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

“…water, water everywhere

Nor any drop to drink.”

The school year calendar includes many dates committed to state, local and classroom tests, but is anyone really drinking of the data that accurately tells them “this child is ready for the next learning activities right now,” if they are to improve that child’s academic achievement? Sadly, the answer is “not enough.” So much of the data meets mandated needs. That river of data contains too much water. We need the water of data in smaller, time-sensitive modules so that we can say with confidence that “this child is ready for what they must learn next.”

A teaching tool that barely gets lip service is the opportunity for a teacher, of any subject, to consistently understand what children know, can do, and if they understand the content, skills and processes they are learning on a frequent basis. More often than not, an individual child’s readiness to learn a next set of content or skills or engage in a next thinking process is bundled in with the class. Or, it is bundled in with other children who demonstrated similar learning readiness “back when.” If a teacher is to cause an individual child to consistently achieve quality learning outcomes, the teacher must know what the child knows – consistently.

Immediately, the “Ya, buts…” form up in a long line of explanations as to why a teacher of 20 – 30 students in a class cannot consistently know the status of an individual child’s learning.

“There is not enough time in a class period to teach what needs to be taught. We would never accomplish all that we are supposed to teach in this class or grade level.”

“If I take the time to assess each child as often as you are implying, what will I do with all of the other children?”

“I am so saddled with trying to incorporate the Common Core Standards into my daily teaching that I don’t have time or energy for one more thing!”

These are two reasonable retorts. However, they fail to answer the real question. That question is, “If you don’t consistently know a child’s readiness for next learning, how can you assume that the child will learn what you propose to teach?”

Why this must be done.

We assume many things when we begin a new unit of learning. First and foremost, we assume that children recall the prior learning that is required for the new learning. And, we assume that they recall it accurately. If they do not, pre-teaching or re-teaching is required. These spot assessments check for accuracy and completeness of prior learning as readiness for next learning.

Children learn at different speeds and with different efficiencies. If this was a walking assignment, once the word “Go” is given, the progress of children begins to spread out over the course they are to walk. The same is true of their learning in a unit of instruction. Once the unit is underway, we cannot assume that all children will progress with the same rate and degree of learning. These spot assessments help us to confirm progress and correct for inaccuracies before the inaccuracies become permanent errors in thinking.

In the aggregate, it is a much more efficient use of time to spot check and correct inaccuracies and/or provide confidence in accurate learning at the time of initial learning than it is to address these errors at the end of the unit or later in the year or through summer school.

When to do.

Prior to beginning a new unit of instruction.

Prior to beginning a new area of content or set of skills or thinking processes within a unit.

Prior to the culminating assessment of the unit’s learning.

What to do.

Using backward design, formulate a task or set of oral questions that you can provide to a child(ren) that will give you an accurate description of the accuracy and completeness of the child’s understanding of what they have been learning.

Create this set of tasks or questions prior to beginning a unit of instruction so that they are aligned with the unit’s objectives (CCSS or other) and provide an incremental preparation for the child’s success on the unit’s culminating assessment activity. (Increasingly, culminating activities will not/cannot be selected response tests. They will need to/must associate with an integration of content, skills and problem solving in a reasonably complex task.)

In your daily instructional design, while children are doing independent practice or collaborative group work, sit with a child or with children in a cooperative group and give them your task or ask your questions.

This task or set of questions needs to be the same set for all children. As you would accommodate the special education learning needs of children or their ELL needs, also do so with parallel accommodations in this spot assessment. Do not simplify or reduce the quality of the task/questions or the scope of the task/questions. Expect all children to reach the same high quality learning outcomes.

In support of this.

Principals must understand and support this need through the provision of teacher aide time or rotating substitute teachers to classrooms so that subject area teachers can do spot assessments and then study and consider what they are learning through spot assessments. Again, the expense of later remediation both in terms of student learning and financial cost is greater if it is delayed.

The teacher’s capacity to consistently check for each child’s accuracy of learning and readiness for next learning should be made part of the “best practices” by which all teachers are evaluated. If this is not made important to and through the principal or teacher evaluator, then the assurance that all children are being efficiently and effectively instructed cannot be realized.

In 1970 the baby boom bulge was in full bloom and there was a national teacher shortage. Recruiters from all over the United States visited the University of Iowa campus with employment contracts in their pockets. By May 1, I held contracts from three school districts in three different states – the choice of where to begin my career as an educator was mine. I would graduate in June with teaching licenses for secondary English/language arts and social studies and was prepared to coach wrestling and baseball. I had the teaching tools that were heavily sought by school districts.

What tools would these have been? The first tool was being licensed, in two subject areas and the capacity to teach a cross-discipline assignment, in a subject(s) that matched employer needs. The fact that the Iowa School of Education was highly respected embellished this tool. Further, I was fortunate in being trained by two outstanding professors, John Haefner, nationally known in the social studies, and Barbara Olmo, one of the first practitioners of inquiry-based pedagogy. Thanks to their preparation, I was confident in my ability to design and deliver instruction.

I owed a second tool to Dr. Olmo. She was insistent in that quality instructional design begins with an assessment of student learning first, very predictive of the backward design espoused by Grant Wiggins’ Understanding by Design. This is a super tool! According to Dr. Olmo, “Thou shall not test before a child is ready to pass the test. If not ready, keep teaching.” And, “Assessment must be in the same mode as the instruction.” It sounded like a Paul Masson wine add, but it was a key to effective and efficient assessments.

There are teacher characteristics that are not teaching tools, yet have historically been placed in a teacher’s professional file as if they are significant. Often times, these characteristics are treated as if they are tools. Many non-teachers like and have empathy for children. Non-educators can manage student behavior and create an orderly classroom conducive for learning, participate in staff meetings and professional development activities, and obtain advanced degrees through graduate studies. I like these characteristics and they add value to a teacher’s professional life, but they are not necessary for causing all children to learn a continuously complex and diverse curriculum of content, skills and thinking processes.

In 2013 two tools are not enough. It is overly simple to say that the requirements for being a teacher have changed. Teacher effectiveness is the topic of national and state-based studies and discussions. Interestingly, effectiveness is no longer a subject for educators and educational organizations; it is a political football being kicked by many players.

The Wisconsin Framework for Educator Effectiveness initially attached Charlotte Danielson’s A Framework for Teaching as a template for teaching practices.

Domain 1: Planning and Preparation

• Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy
• Demonstrating Knowledge of Students
• Setting Instructional Outcomes
• Demonstrating Knowledge of Resources
• Designing Coherent Instruction
• Designing Student Assessments

Domain 2: The Classroom Environment

• Creating an Environment of Respect and Rapport
• Establishing a Culture for Learning
• Managing Classroom Procedures
• Managing Student Behavior
• Organizing Physical Space

Domain 3: Instruction

• Communicating with Students
• Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques
• Engaging Students in Learning
• Using Assessment in Instruction
• Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness

Domain 4: Professional Responsibilities

• Reflecting on Teaching
• Maintaining Accurate Record
• Communicating with Families
• Participating in a Professional Community
• Growing and Developing Professionally
• Showing Professionalism

The WI Department of Instruction now is looking at other models, as well as Danielson. I like and have used the Danielson template. However, one of the faults of conceptualizing a new description of teacher tools is a constant look back at descriptors of the past. Teaching in the next decade cannot be conceived of as being in a classroom or with a class of children. Teaching tools need to be applicable anywhere, with any learners, and with non-traditional parameters. Consequently, the teaching tools I describe will not be “placed.”

I start with the two essential tools of the 70s.

Highly knowledgeable of a subject area content and the thinking processes inherent in that subject area (70s)

Skillful in the cycle of assessment for learning, instructional design, instructional delivery, and assessment of learning (70s)

These two tools can get you started, but teachers need the next three to complete their work of causing all children to learn.

Conceptualizes and connects appropriate instructional designs to the learning needs of a diverse array of children, including motivation for learning, reinforcement, retention and transfer of learning, extension of learning, and readiness for future learning.

Evaluates ineffective as well as effective learning and designs multiple reteaching strategies to extinguish incorrect and inappropriate learning to replace it with correct and appropriate learning.

Communicates learning needs and learning results to parents, significant adults and other professional educators and involves others in enacting the teacher’s instructional design.

My experience as a principal and superintendent working with thousands of teachers tells me that most teachers present one, two or three of these tools when they are hired to their first assignment. Now and again, a four-tool candidate sits with you and you pray that you don’t do anything to cause this person to reject your a job offer that wants to leap from your lips. The work facing educational leadership is assisting teachers with some tools to grow more tools; to help good teachers to become better teachers and better teachers to become elite teachers.

In the next blogs, I will discuss strategies for growing teacher tools.