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Theory into Practice: Blooming the Curriculum with One Word – “So…”

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Tested practices created from research-based theories give teachers the best instructional opportunities to cause all children to learn.

It is easy to think of teaching and learning as linear. We teach and children learn one thing then another and another. Learning is an additive like train cars on a railroad line running through a classroom. Each car arrives with facts and skills to be taught and learned before it leaves the classroom/station, and the next train car of facts and skills arrives. There is more truth in this analogy that teachers want to admit. We change this perception with one word – “so.” All a teacher needs to do to move teaching and learning from a linear to a geometric design is to ask “So, what can/will/should you …” and teaching and learning launch vertically from children waiting for the next lesson to children doing higher orders of cognition with what they have already learned. It is blooming wonderfully!

What do we know?

The names of historic education and psychology theoreticians are fixed in our teacher preparation programs. Their names appear in texts and as footnote references. Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky, Montessori, Skinner, Bruner, et al. Teacher licensing candidates learn to pair a name with a concept the historic person developed, take a test or write a paper acknowledging that person’s name and concept, and then allow the forgetting curve to move the name and theory into their memory fog. Who was that? What theory?

Stop doing this! Teaching and learning theories matter because theories give us road maps for how to transform schooling from linear – learn to test- to geometric – learn to think and do.

Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and pedagogue, gave us a systematic template to describe, assess, and classify educational goals. Bloom published his Taxonomy in 1956 and for decades teacher preparation schools taught Bloom’s cognitive domain, and six levels of cognition often called higher order thinking skills. Seventy years later, Bloom is still the go-to resource for describing and detailing levels of cognitive goals.

“So,” elevates your teaching and student learning.

The baseline of Bloom’s Taxonomy is the teaching and learning of background knowledge and a basic understanding of that knowledge. All children need to learn words that name and describe things in their world. So, we teach them to read and listen and build working vocabularies. Bloom categorizes the first goals of learning as level 1 – remembering and level 2 – understanding. A great deal of PreK-, 4K, and kindergarten involves experientially exposing children to words and facts and remembering and understanding.

In his research for his studies, Bloom saw that most classroom instruction at many grade levels was at level 1 and level 2 goals. Teachers used direct instruction to teach information for children to remember and describe. Teachers tested children, recorded learning scores, and began teaching the next lesson of information to be learned. Teaching and learning bobbled back and forth between remembering and understanding.

Bloom changed the goals of learning by interjecting “so what” into teaching. “So, what can you do with this information?” “So, how is this information like or unlike other information?” “So, which is a better choice in the use of this information?” And “So, what could you create from this information that is new and different?” Each of these questions is indicative of a higher level of cognition requiring children to think differently to answer the question. Bloom labeled these questions and placed them in a roster of unique learning goals.

Bloom’s Taxonomy: Each is a different category of learning goals needing distinct kinds of cognitive thinking. The goal is to –

  • Remember
  • Understand
  • Apply
  • Analyze
  • Evaluate
  • Create.

These goals are not sequential as in a continuum. The first two goals – remembering and understanding are goals for creating background knowledge – necessary for all learning to follow. Later learning builds upon the breadth and depth of a child’s foundational background knowledge. This tells us why children in the primary grades receive extensive direct instruction in reading, ELA, math, science, and social studies. And why direct instruction of required information fills the first chapters and units of middle school and high school instruction. Knowing things is necessary for the later goals of thinking about and working with that knowledge.

To build the goal of remembering, teachers use questions like –

  • Identification – What is the capital of Wisconsin? Of France?
  • Definition – What is the meaning of the word precipitation?
  • Listing – List the three branches of the US federal government?
  • Recall – When did the Civil War take place? When did the first man walk on the moon?
  • Recognition – Which of these formulas is correct for the area of a square?

The work of identifying, defining, listing, recalling, and recognizing words expands a child’s working vocabulary in their seeing, hearing, writing, speaking, and imaging more new words. Each question requires a child to write or speak a word in a different way that builds memory. Five to seven uses of the word reinforce short-term memory, and 15 to 17 different uses reinforce long-term memory.

Parallel to remembering words is understanding – the ways that people talk about and use words. The traditional model for remembering and then understanding is to “Say the word, spell the word, and use the word in a sentence.”

To build the goal of understanding, teachers use questions like –

  • Classify – Tell me the kinds of animals eat meat? … eat plants?
  • Describe – Describe what a Green Bay Packer would see standing in the middle of Lambeau Field just before the start of an NFL game.
  • Discuss – Tell me why World War Two is labeled a world war.
  • Translate – Rewrite this word problem into a mathematical equation.

Understanding requires definition of a word and opens a child to word families of synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. Typical five-year olds have a vocabulary of 10,000 words. Once in school, their vocabulary grows by 3,000 to 5,000 words each year. The rate of vocabulary growth continues until typical high school students know about 50,000 words. The next learning goals give power the words a child knows and understands.

It is important to remember that, although application, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis goals are not sequential, a child’s experience in one will have tangential benefit to the others.

After securing children in meeting the goals of remembering and understanding, a teacher can instruct them in exploring what a person can do with the information learned. This goal is application. True application happens when children use the information or skill or rule to answer a question or solve problem they have not seen before – application requires new contexts.

To build the goal of application, teachers use questions like –

  • Solving – If the hypotenuse is three, what are the lengths of the sides of the triangle.
  • Stimulating – If you were an actor on stage, how would you react to applause after you deliver your lines? Or after the end of the play?
  • Demonstrating – What are examples that show this rule works in the real world?
  • Implementing – If you only had two tools – a scissors and a stapler – and a sheet of cardboard, show us how you would construct a box.

The goal of application is to produce something – a performance, an explanation, a diagram, or a product. A teacher can present children with a “messy” problem or a mystery that includes the words “what if.” These words invite the child to use all they know to solve, react, prove, or implement what they know and to produce something in a new situation. Often the product is an answer on a test requiring a child to consider what they know in an unanticipated word problem. In a real-world context, the ability to apply is the goal of most adult work life problems.

A different goal for learning is analysis. As the goal of application is to produce something in a new context, the goal of analysis is to dissect information looking for patterns, the relationships between parts, and hidden meanings.

To build the goal of analysis, teachers ask questions like –

  • Relationships – What is the connection between global warming and the strength and patterns of hurricanes?
  • Evidence – Which parts of this answer are based upon facts, and which parts are based upon opinion?
  • Categorizing – How would you classify these statements as causes or outcomes from the American Revolution?
  • Deconstructing – Separate this poem into its elements.

Analysis teaches children to be critical thinkers and to question and inquire into the nature of information. Teachers show children how to use charts, diagrams, and tables to show, organize, and rationalize similarities and differences. Children think and reason like historians and scientists. They study an event for its underlying causes and later effects. They guess how the absence of an underlying cause or sparking event may have changed history. Children chart and map chemical reactions to understand how elements relate and react to each other. They chart and map climatic events to understand forecasting. As application creates products, analysis dissects information into its critical attributes.

Educators gave an acronym to Bloom’s categorization of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis goals. They ar labeled as HOTS – higher order thinking skills. Ironically, HOTS should be the dominant goals of secondary education, but the curricular calendar relegates them to specific upper-level courses and a fraction of the school year. Best practice is for children at all grade levels, even 4K-primary, to be given goals in evaluative thinking. Teachers give children a rule or a “yardstick” and ask them to make a evaluation of information. For example, “Our rules say that you will quietly form a single file line when it’s time to come into the building after outdoor recess. What kind of behaviors would not be appropriate for your being “quiet” and in a “single file line?” Young children can do analysis.

Evaluation is making a critical judgment based upon evidence. The key to teaching children to evaluate is giving them a rule or a measurement against which they can make a judgment and provide evidence to support their decision.

To build the goal of evaluation, teachers ask questions like –

  • Judging – Based on First Amendments Rights, should this writer be banned from publishing opinions in the local newspaper?
  • Defending – Do you agree with the historical proposition that a “man’s home is his castle” and justifies the use of deadly force?
  • Prioritizing – Given that your school has limited finances, which of these curricular programs should be exempted from budget reductions?
  • Critiquing – Looking at the past list of Booker Award winners, which of these books has the best likelihood of winning the next award?

Evaluation requires understanding and analysis. Evaluation is not asking for opinions. “Do you like this abstract drawing of a barnyard?” asks for an opinion. Saying “This is an abstract painting of a barnyard. How and how well has the painter used elements of abstraction to tell you the subject of the painting is a barnyard?” asks for judgment with supporting evidence. To make this judgment, children must first understand the vocabulary of art. They must understand the definition of abstract art, and they must understand the critical attributes of abstraction. Then, they must be able to examine and dissect a piece of art by identifying the specific attributes of abstraction exhibited in the art. Finally, they must put their judgment and evidence in a coherent explanation. This is HOTS.

An evaluative assignment takes more time to prepare, more time and consideration for children to complete, and significant time for a teacher to assess and respond to a child’s supported judgment. In addition, every child may make a valid judgment with differing evidence resulting in all children succeeding in an assignment that took a lot of time. And this explains why children have limited lessons pursuing the goal of evaluation. HOTS take time and the curricular calendar has limited time.

The goal of creating also requires assimilation of other learning goals. Creation requires children to examine their knowledge of information, their analysis of critical attributes, and their evaluation of the qualities of what needs to be created to engage in creation. Creating is not just applying in a new situation but the making of something new from what is known to fit a given situation. Creating also is using evaluation to determine the “best” elements for the new creation.

To build the goal of creating, teachers ask questions like –

  • Design – Design a family home for five persons that would survive fire, hurricane, and criminal intrusion. The home will be in California or South Carolina near the ocean and surrounded by woods. You are not limited by cost or material selection.
  • Construct – Given toothpicks and a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, build a bridge that will support a five-pound weight.
  • Reorganize – How would you reorganize the baseball, softball, football, and soccer fields on our campus to require 20% less square feet of area?
  • Develop – Create a story board depicting how five children stranded on an island would create rules for their survival until they could be rescued one week later.

Lessons requiring the goal of creation attach easily to STEM curriculum, technology education, and career development. They also are precursors to real world applications of school-based education.

The Big Duh!

Benjamin Bloom gave us a structure for teaching children to develop different kinds of thinking, of cognition. His taxonomy is a scaffold we can use to ensure that all children learn more than just a recall of information. Using his scaffold of goals, we can cause children to “think and do”. Bloom is worth remembering and his theory of learning goals is a tool for optimizing every child’s education.

I encourage and challenge every teacher to analyze and evaluate their annual curriculum to ensure the teaching of HOTS at all grade levels and in all subjects.

Theory to Practice: Teach for Retention or Forget Teaching It. Your Students Will.

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I said it. Students heard it. Students will remember it. Not really. Educators assume or expect students to remember, but assumptions are not facts. Remembering what a teacher said is a struggle between working memory and brain dumping. If there is not an overt effort to retain what is heard, seen, or perceived, the working brain will dump what was heard, seen, or perceived within 30 seconds. That is a fact. A teacher who wants children to remember what they have been taught must know and practice principles of retention theory. If not, teaching is a wind that blows through children’s minds leaving little that was learned.

What do we know?

Retention is the unspoken assumption in everything we do in school. We want children to remember what we teach them. We test the heck out of students as an assurance that they remember their instruction. We reward children with high test scores and create tiers of intervention and remediation for children with low test scores. Test scores have become our measurement of retained memory. In fact, this pathway almost ensures that instructed learning will not be retained. It is based on false principles and practices.

Let us remember what we know about remembering.

  • The brain is bombarded with thousands of words, images, sounds, and perceptions every hour. The brain is not designed to and will not remember every input it receives.
  • If the brain does not consider/mentally repeat a word, image, sound, or perception it is lost within 30 seconds. The 30-Second Rule is reality.
  • The brain considers to seven to ten bits of information at a time – there is a constant pass through of information in immediate recall. The 30-second rule constantly moves the brain to “next” and “next.”
  • The Forgetting Curve also is a natural function of the brain’s need to be moving on to what is next in life. We forget 50% of received information within one hour and 70% within 24 hours without overt actions to reinforce the retention of that information.

Humans innately forget. If we want to students to remember, we must overtly use practices that cause them to remember. Retention theory must be embedded in every instructional lesson and unit.

Retention Theory

Madeline Hunter named five principles that cause students to remember instruction.

Meaning. One way to combat the 30-Second Rule is to make unfamiliar information meaningful. Brain retention improves when it knows that unfamiliar information connects to what a student already knows or the student’s personal interests. Personal interest is huge in reinforcing memory. She called these connections “anticipatory sets” or ways to overtly move the student toward a positive anticipation about a new lesson. This prepares the brain for memory.

Feeling Tone. Every classroom involves emotional theater, and teachers set the positive, negative, or neutral vibe in which teaching and learning happens. A teacher who has skills of affective and behavioral empathies creates a warm, inviting, and positive atmosphere. The lack empathetic skills and teacher-dominated class time builds hesitant, non-participative student responses in a negative climate. Positive and negative feeling tones are real – teachers know it when they are in one or the other, but do not always know their causations. A neutral feeling tone arises when there is a perceived indifference to whether children learn or not.

Degree and accuracy of Initial Learning. Both correct and incorrect learning lead to memory. Correct learning can be reinforced leading to long-term memory. However, incorrect learning needs to be identified, eliminated, and replaced with correct learning. Although interventions are required, they cloud reinforcement as the brain processes incorrect information out and correct information in. Therefore, when teachers take time to ensure all children achieve high levels of understanding of new instruction before moving to independent practice, teachers are enhancing memory work and retention.

Practice Schedule. Practice does not make perfection, it makes permanence. Theories show that massed practice or “cramming” is effective for fast learning that leads to quick forgetting. In contrast, distributed practice episodes are the key to long-term retention. Practice in retrieving remembered information builds memory muscle and intervals between practice sessions build permanence.

Transfer. The goal of teaching and learning is knowing things that are worth knowing and that can be applied in various new ways, places, and times. Retention of prior learning is reinforced when it is recalled and used in new contexts, and new learning is better understood and remembered when new memories are extensions of older, successful memories. Transfer that connects learning connects memories.

What to do. Each of the following describes a strategy for building and reinforcing retention based upon retention theory.

  • Make information “sticky” and easier to remember. Information is not created equally. Some seems slippery and is hard to remember while other information, like tree sap that clings to fingers, seems sticky and is easier to remember. These strategies make information sticky.

Chunk it. Individual bits of information are hard to remember, but easier when chunked in meaningful groups or sequences or patterns. Chunking means remembering all the individual bits as one – it is easier to remember.

Show it. Research shows that human memory of images is better than memory of independent text or audio. A picture, a video, or a graphic gives the brain another dimension of unfamiliar information. The student sees the word and an image of the word or picks up a representation of the word. Things that can be handled and made tangible, are very memorable.

Add emotional or novelty context. The easiest emotions to embed in new learning are surprise, happiness, and fear. Children love things that go “bang” or have surprise endings. They associate the surprise and the information. All learners appreciate novelty – new things to experience. Just saying “You are the first students to …” makes whatever it is they do “sticky” in their memory.

Do it. Motor skills and experiences are stored in different areas of the brain from information. Teaching about graphing coordinates in math class creates information. Creating a grid on a soccer field and placing/locating things by their coordinates creates a know it/do it combination that is very sticky.

Conversely, there are ways to make information slippery and hard to remember. Avoid or eliminate slippery practices, like giving students lists of random numbers or facts to remember without any context for their memory, allowing passive listening without note taking or required verbal engagement, or giving students information that is highly similar/almost identical to prior information.

  • Use active not passive retrieval of information. Memory requires mental activity and working the information until it avoids the brain dump, becomes short-term memory, then long-term memory, and is transferred to give meaning and context to other information. Passive retrieval relies on a student’s initial interaction with the information and rereading or repeating the same initial interaction. Passive retrieval yields low grade memory retention and leads to very quick forgetting.

What Did You Miss? After first instruction, ask students to write all they know about what they learned. Allow ten minutes. This on-demand retrieval exposes what the student remembers and, when compared with the totality of the first instruction, what is missing.

Discriminating Retrieval. Give students an explanation of the first instruction but one that is missing some information. Ask students to fill in the missing information. This retrieval requires to brain to “work” to clinically retrieve, consider, and identify the parts of the information.

Practice testing and retesting. The strategy of pre-testing and post-testing most often are used to inform and assess instruction. Pre-testing and subsequent testing also work to build and reinforce memory. In any test, students reinforce what they correctly remember. Testing strengthens successful memory retrieval.

Feedback loops. Testing also provides feedback about what students do not know. Focused work on improved reading, listening, seeing, and experiencing of unknown or non-secured information builds new memories. The active work needed to correct misinformation and learn correct information mentally strengthens memorization of what is learned.

Mental refinement/teach back (Feynman Technique). One of the most active is also the strongest retrieval strategy. When students teach what they learned to others, they must consolidate and refine the information they know, construct it in their own words, and deliver the information in ways the others can learn. We often hear that the best way to learn something is to teach it; that also applies to memorization.

  • Spacing. The term “spacing” tells us that productive, active retrieval must is purposefully distributed not massed.       

Intervals. Research suggests these intervals for moving new information into short-term memory and short-term memory into long-term. First review = 24 hours after first instruction. Remember: Without active retrieval, 70% of first instruction is forgotten in 24 hours. Second review = one week later. Third review = one month later. Fourth review = 3-6 months later.

10-30% Rule. Research recommends the optimal gap between retrieval/practice sessions should be 10-30% of the time you want students to remember the information. If the final test is in one month, use practice exercises every 3 to 6 days. If the final test or performance is in one year, practice once each month. For classroom rules that cover a school year, test/practice every month of the school year.

Interleaving. Do not practice the same information/skill at every practice session. Test/practice just a part of the same information at one session and other parts at subsequent sessions. And include different types of information in each session. This requires students to mentally sort through the memory, mine that information, and retrieve specific memories.

Leitner or Box Method. Everyday include a brief retrieval of new information and things students are having difficulty remembering. Every 3 days include a retrieval of things students are shaky on in their memory. Once every week practice information all students can retrieve easily.

  • Layered mastery. Best practice is not the constant use of one active retrieval strategy. Like physical exercise, using one strategy repeatedly only makes that one type of memory stronger. Layered mastery creates a multi-month schedule of intervals for brain dumping, testing, teaching to others that causes students to retrieve information repeatedly, analyze the information, apply the information, evaluate the reliability and validity of information, and synthesize the information into new configurations. When teachers use Bloom’s Taxonomy to guide their use retention theory, they cause students to build their own retrieval systems.

The Big Duh!

The industrial model of teaching and learning in the United States makes curriculum a conveyor belt of information that teachers teach, and students try to learn. The high demands and constancy of our K-12 curriculum delivery do not include time and resources for meaningful information retention. We teach and test then teach and test something new. If we want students to know what they learn for more than one day or until the next quiz, we must understand and use retention theory and its research-based practices. If we do not teach students to build memory building and retrieval, we truly institutionalize forgetting.

Test Less and Converse More

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How do you really know what your students know? Is a student’s learning only the composite score of tests, quizzes, papers, and projects?

Too often students in our classrooms are not children. Students are the grades and points behind their names in our grade books. In the long slog of a school year, each student in your class becomes what their line of grades says they are. A student is – passing or not passing, exceeding expectations or not meeting expectations, or the child who will always give the right answer versus the child who does all he can to avoid being asked a question. The reality of classrooms is that one student is only a single student in the totality of a teaching assignment, one amongst the many, and the speed of curricular coverage blends them all together. This is the web we weave when the only source we use to know how well children are learning are whole group assessments.

As negative as the second paragraph reads, it is the truth in too many classrooms. We prove it’s true when a parent or your principal asks how Alexa is doing in your class, and you immediately need to consult your grade book to answer. School, not just Alexa’s teachers define Alexa’s learning progression by the data in a grade book. How sad for Alexa and how sad for education. We can do better.

What do we know?

First, a child is one among many children. If the average public school teacher’s career is 14 years long and a class assignment averages 25 students, then a grade level elementary teacher teaches approximately 350 children and a secondary subject area teacher teaches 2,100 children in that span of years.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/who-average-us-teacher

It is probable that an elementary teacher who sees the same faces for an entire school day is more familiar with each student than a secondary teacher who sees the same faces for only one class period each day. However, the same portrait of what we know about our students holds for elementary and secondary classrooms – students are characterized by the grades they are assigned by the assessments the are given.

Second, we do not plan for a teacher to know each child in the classroom. In their college preparation courses, teachers learn that a teacher’s knowledge of each student’s prior school learning achievement, their so-called learning styles, their academic strengths and learning challenges, and their cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds help the teacher to better instruct each student. Theory does not always find its way into practice. The short cut answer most teacher take to the idea theory of learning about their students prior to teaching them is “I will find out what I need to need to know as I teach them.” This is not necessarily a teacher’s fault. Contracted in-service time includes several days at the beginning of the school year for a teacher to get ready for the first day of school. But after mandatory district and school staff meetings and required organizing of a classroom, there is little to no time for a teacher to study and know what they should know about their new students. Theory is pushed aside and all they know will know of Alexa is gained through daily in-class interactions in the running stream of school days.

Third, successful teaching is about the success of a statistical majority students not individual students. Instructional school goals want 80% of the students to 80% or better learning success 80% of the time in class. The Rule of 80% is commonly applied is schools using Tier 1, 2 and 3 instruction and Response to Intervention concepts. Sometimes teaching really is an industrial quality control model or at least a cattle drive.

Last, we prioritize efficiency over effectiveness. Each teacher is assigned a grade level or subject area curriculum to teach. In the continuity of PK-12 education, these are building blocks that create an educated school graduate. If the teaching of a single building block is incomplete, there are consequences to the integrity of the education. Completing the total annual curriculum is more important than assuring what is taught is learned well by all students. Emphasizing totality of instruction over quality of learning ensures that the 80% rule becomes 70% or 60% or 50%.

An alternative – talk with Alexa.

An alternative model is Socratic-like: A teacher often sits with Alexa asking Alexa key questions as a verbal quiz AND then asks Alexa to explain her answers. Alexa talks about the background knowledge of her answers, the context for her answering, her problem-solving, and her conclusions about what she knows. When done with proper frequency, this takes 15 minutes. In the aggregate of meetings with Alexa, the teacher’s conversation models what Alexa should know and how she should know it and the conversation coaches Alexa’s personal learning strategies over time. Alexa may have scored only 5 of 10 correct on a written quiz but scored 8 of 10 in an oral discussion of what she knows and how she knows it. Alexa knows more than what a quiz can extract from her.

The conversation is not a complete Socratic model. It stops with a personal assessment of what Alexa knows and how well she knows it. Instead of leading directly into personalized new instruction, the conversation informs the teacher about Alexa’s learning as well as all the Alexas in the class so that the teacher can best confirm what has been learned well by all all students and clarify or correct what has not been learned well. This modified Socratic conversation helps the teacher move the quality of learning above the 80% Rule.

Children respond to this alternative differently. Some will love the opportunity to talk with their teacher and gladly explain what they know and how they know it. On the other hand, some children will be intimidated by the face-to-face time with their teacher and not want to risk talking. These are the same children who do not volunteer in class and of whom the teacher knows the least about their personal learning using traditional assessments. As they are intimidated by all assessments, it is easier to wean them away from fear or their teacher than it is fear of a test. Most children will respond positively to their teacher’s sincerity in wanting to know what they know and how they know it.

Personal conversation models instruction as well as assessment. Children quickly learn that simple yes or no answers or one-word answers only cause the teacher to say, “Tell me more.” Children learn that conversation is like composing an essay. The teacher is looking for the second and third sentences that provide evidence for the answer the child gives to the first question. The child also learns to summarize and give a conclusion.

The conversation also instructs the teacher. She can easily understand from a variety of conversations how well her instruction caused children to learn the curriculum she taught. Some children will need clarification or correction if their learning had errors. The conversation tells her more than which students have errors in learning; she knows the dimensions of their errors. The conversation also affirms that children are ready for the teacher’s next instruction.

This modified Socratic conversation takes time. What do other children do while the teacher converses with Alexa? Individualized and collaborative learning advanced immensely with the pandemic. Classrooms have the technologies for a teacher to readily make individual assignments for students or organize a collaborative activity for groups. Classrooms no longer live in the whole group instruction only era. A contemporary teacher has the resources to provide ongoing instruction for other children while she converses with Alexa.

We get what we settle for.

The traditional model of “teach and test, teach and test” efficiently moves children through the school year’s curriculum. That model drives children from grade level to grade level and course to course. It is a “ready or not, here I come” model.

When we consider that most 4th, 8th, and 10th grade students show “less than proficient” scores on state assessments in reading and math, we should understand that the traditional model is not achieving the 80% Rule but a less than 50% reality.

The traditional model gives us an incomplete understanding of what each child knows and how well she knows it. Based on an incomplete knowledge of what children have learned, we only create an incomplete design for their next instruction.

We can do better when we use better practices.