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The genesis of this book stems from something most of us do nearly every day at work: waiting to get on the copy machine to run off a few handouts for class. One day as I (Jim) waited impatiently to get my turn, I began surveying the stacks of handouts that waited to be retrieved and distributed to students. I found myself reflexively drawn to the language of the directions, problems, and prompts.

While the machines whirred out my colleagues’ copies (and I wondered if I would get mine made in time for class!), I became fascinated with the handouts—the words, sentences, and general demands that such language makes on students’ minds. I realized that these simple photocopies were what teachers are really putting in students’ hands and telling them to do. Writing about the challenges and needs of English learners (ELs), Heritage, Silva, and Pierce (2007) insist that the challenge for teachers of ELs is to “plan instruction that meets the language learning needs of students to ensure that their ability to speak, listen, read, and write in academic subjects across the curriculum does not lag behind that of their peers” (p. 171).

The thing is, such “challenges” are by no means limited to ELs, for as these authors subsequently note, borrowing from Vygotsky, “language and thinking develop simultaneously through everyday sociocultural experiences, and [such] thinking occurs through scaffolded interaction . . . that takes place [during] more structured experiences” (p. 182). Nor, for that matter, are these challenges matters of vocabulary alone; rather, these obstacles to entering the academic world are as much about the cognitive or mental “moves” students need to be able to make when thinking and doing the work required by our different disciplines.

As if they had heard my thoughts, the teachers gathered around the copy machine began lamenting their struggles to get students to read, to write, to speak about—in short, to think in—their discipline. By this time, I had discovered and begun flipping through extra copies of textbooks stored in the copy room, finding in their directions and prompts the same words asking for the same mental moves and processes that the teachers around me complained their students could not do. There was, in other words, what Graff and Birkenstein call a “deep, underlying structure, [an] internal DNA” common to the academic and cognitive moves these various disciplines—and teachers—were asking students to make (2014, p. xxi).

At the word level, my colleagues were frustrated by students’ lack of familiarity and fluency with “Tier Two” words, which are those words of “high utility for mature language users . . . found across a variety of domains” (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2013, p. 9). It is facility with these “mortar words” that allows students to connect the “bricks” of the larger ideas we are trying to convey in our classes and teach our students to understand. The hope is that students can do these things—for example, analyze, argue, determine—with some fluency when reading, writing, or thinking about the complex, abstract, and higher-order ideas they encounter as they move from grade to grade (Zwiers, 2008, p. 24). These academic moves, captured in the fifteen words that compose the chapters in this book, are at the center of new SAT changes. As Cyndie Schmeiser, chief of assessments for the College Board, reported: “Gone from the SAT are words like turgid, sagacious, (and probably, umbrage!) and instead, words that gain their meaning from context. . . . Words kids will use in college and the world . . . synthesize, analyze” (2014).

From the start, we asked how we might address the need to teach students these academic and mental moves crucial not only to English but also to all core academic subjects. After much discussion and many e-mails, we arrived at what seemed a concise but useful list of fifteen words that we immediately realized were, as mentioned above, not merely words but essential moves in the classroom as well as on assessments, such as the Common Core and the SAT and ACT. We also took the extra step of checking these words against such standards documents as the Common Core State Standards so as to ensure these were the words most commonly used to describe what students should know how to do. Some years back, in his book To Think, Frank Smith grappled with the same question, eventually arriving at 77 “thinking words” (1990, p. 2). Smith’s list includes all the words discussed here, but many more than any of us have time to use (or teach!) when designing lessons, assessments, or writing prompts.

The fifteen “academic moves” presented here, along with the second list of alternative moves that are not so easily tested but nonetheless vital to more innovative and ambitious thinking, emerged over time through conversations we had with colleagues and each other, typically anchored in our own experiences in the classroom and Barry’s insights as a former teacher and now principal who spends much of his time observing and evaluating teachers’ instructional moves across a variety of subjects. It is this cross curricular integration that we hope you will agree is an especially powerful element of this book, for as Barry himself has written elsewhere, “Students must learn how to use literacy skills unique to science, social studies, English, and math and, at the same time, understand how such skills are related” (Lent & Gilmore, 2013, p. xxv).

Though every discipline comes with its own set of what many call “thinking moves” (see Dombek & Herndon, 2003; Ritchhart, Church, & Morrison, 2011), our aim (and hope) here is to help address what we might think of as a sort of Tower of Babel effect in which students go from class to class, within and across disciplines, hearing different words used to describe the same actions. On occasion, for example, students may hear a teacher say they want the class to “analyze” a text or set of data when, in fact, they meant “evaluate.” This confusion is related to what Graff and Birkenstein have called “the Volleyball Effect,” which they describe thus:

Students are batted from one course and set of expectations to another as the rules mysteriously change without notice. Thus one instructor wants students to develop arguments and interpretations of their own, while another discourages it, wanting only evidence that the students grasp a body of information. . . . Making matters even more confusing, instructors are often not explicit about these expectations and prohibitions, leaving students to guess them, if they can, on their own. No wonder students often approach us with questions like “Do you want my ideas in this paper or just a summary of the reading?” (2009, p. 4)

Thus, another of our goals, one very important to us both and reflected in all our previous work, is that the words and the ideas in this book should be used to bring some consistency and clarity to the language we all use when teaching or designing assignments within and across disciplines. To that end, Jim’s school has made the list of words with definitions into a poster that hangs in classrooms throughout the school and provided copies to teachers to keep handy for reference when planning lessons or meeting to assess or develop curriculum and assessments. Only through such integrated, sustained efforts within and across departments and grade levels can students achieve the sort of depth of knowledge and intellectual agility called for by models such as Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (2002) and Wiggins’s and McTighe’s Understanding by Design (2011, 2013).

Ultimately, what we have done here is conduct a sort of cognitive audit of our own work and others’ to see what we would find. This is exactly the sort of inquiry that Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison call for based on their work at Harvard’s Project Zero and discussed in depth in their book Making Thinking Visible:

To help you identify the possible discrepancy between students’ classroom activity and teaching that is likely to lead to understanding, [b]egin by making a list of all the actions and activities with which your students are engaged in [a given] subject. . . . You might want to brainstorm the list with a couple of colleagues or teammates. Now, working from this list, create three new lists:

1 The actions students in your class spend most of their time doing. What actions account for 75% of what students do in your class on a regular basis?

2 The actions most authentic to the discipline, that is, those things that real scientists, writers, artists, and so on actually do as they go about their work.

3 The actions you remember doing yourself from a time when you were actively engaged in developing some new understanding of something within the discipline or subject area.

They summarize their emphasis on thinking within various subject areas by emphasizing the importance of not just “learning about the subject . . . [but] learning to do the subject, [which] means solving problems, making decisions, and developing new understanding using the methods and tools [and language] of the discipline” (2011, p. 10).

Findings by Ritchhart, Perkins, Tishman, and Palmer (as cited in Ritchhart, Church, et al., 2011) offer a useful complement to our central argument and core ideas discussed in this book. Seeking to identify the essential “thinking moves that are integral to understanding and without which it would be difficult to say we had developed understanding” (p. 11), they identified a total of eight thinking moves, the last two of which align closely with our alternative list of words, which you will find in the appendices:

1 Observing closely and describing what’s there

2 Building explanations and interpretations

3 Reasoning with evidence

4 Making connections

5 Considering different viewpoints and perspectives

6 Capturing the heart and forming conclusions

7 Wondering and asking questions

8 Uncovering complexity and going below the surface of things (Ritchhart, Perkins, et al., as cited in Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison, 2011, p. 11).

Despite the various challenges to and criticisms of the Common Core State Standards, one principle the CCSS framework has rightfully brought back into focus is the role of deep, sustained, analytical thinking across subject areas and grade levels. What we have endeavored to show here, above all, is what students can do when taught these academic moves and the means to use them in any subject area. You will see throughout this book middle and high school students designing and doing work that challenges us all to challenge our students—and ourselves—to do not just more but also better work. The ideas and lessons, assignments, and activities presented through and across all disciplines embody in powerful ways the “13 Habits of a Systems Thinker” recently introduced by Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge (2014).

Archimedes, who as a Greek mathematician, philosopher, scientist, and engineer provides a succinct model of the cross disciplinary mind and systems thinker, famously said that if given a long enough lever, he could move the world. Our hope here is that we have given you a list of words and ideas you and your students can use to move the world if given the chance to show what they know and can do thanks to the time they spent in your school, your department, and your classroom.