Lessons Learned

Michael Lambert will be joining us for SOS Episode 9: How To Go Deep In Student Learning? Why? where he will share some of his instructional and assessment practices that take the learning deeper and make it more meaningful for his students. Mike will talk about making connections in the brain and in the learning to other areas of study.

One way to go deeper in student learning in a school is to choose concept-based standards and benchmarks that support well-developed Essential Understandings and Questions. By focusing on concepts and big ideas we then work backwards in our curriculum design to choose instructional strategies and assessments that lead our students to discovery learning. In many cases, this will lead to efforts to keep direct instruction limited to skills development leaving most of the learning to inquiry and other constructivist approaches where students apply their research and other literacy skills to find, analyze, reflect upon and create using information that they are in charge of finding.

If one follows this path, it becomes very difficult to try and do the wide “coverage” that many teachers are forced to do especially when the standards are knowledge or comprehension focused. If you really hold yourself to assessments that measure student learning and the learning is student discovered, then you have no choice but to start deleting standards and benchmarks from your curriculum maps. Fewer learning goals frees up the time to go deeper in how we teach our units.

A good place to start reading more about concept-based standards and benchmarks is the work of H. Lynn Erickson.

Looking at the classroom and brain-based learning, there are lots of resources to support our efforts to connect to our students’ minds to engage, make connections and get those “brain pops” of understanding that we want. The more we tap into the brain for active learning, the deeper the learning goes.

Good teaching is about asking big, “fat”, open-ended questions that help students make connections while giving students the time to think and come up with further questions. Jamie McKenzie is a real leader in this area reminding us that it isn’t about the technology, it is about the learning that comes from asking questions and pursuing the answers to them. Technology can support the effort, of course.

As for the question of why we should go deeper in student learning, is it really learning when our curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep when our students are working to become adept at moving information around? Enough said.