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CHAPTER 2

Move Smoothly From Broad Ideas to Smaller Ideas

Every excellent lesson plan, like a choreographed dance routine, has non-negotiables. To successfully plan, you must know your district curriculum and standards. (Knowing your dance partners—your students—is equally important, and chapter 3 on page 21 details that effort.) Once you know your standards, you create daily learning targets to support your students in taking little steps toward the broader standard. Determine what students will do, say, make, or write to show their achievement toward the learning target. You can even create a variety of methods to provide choice for the students, which will likely increase their motivation. Create the criteria for success so students know exactly what they must do to show what they know. This evidence, along with other pieces of evidence you have observed—informal, on-the-fly data gleaned during class—drive your instruction.

State standards tend to be very broad and are written from an educator’s perspective; students rarely understand them. For example, one of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers’ (NGA & CCSSO, 2010b) Common Core State Standards for mathematics asks that second-grade students “fluently add and subtract within 100 using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction” (2.NBT.B.5). Most second graders do not know what the word fluently means, and it’s the first word in the standard.

A student-friendly learning target helps students determine the goal and expectations for each lesson. The target helps them determine where they are in relation to the broader standard. Authors Susan M. Brookhart and Connie M. Moss (2012) explain that learning targets:

Describe, in language that students understand, the lesson-sized chunk of information, skills, and reasoning processes that students will come to know deeply. We write learning targets from the students’ point of view and share them throughout today’s lesson so that students can use them to guide their own learning. (p. 3)

Teachers usually plan several checks within a lesson to measure student progress toward the learning target, as well as one bigger formative assessment, often referred to as the class assignment. The latter is often something tangible, like a written response or a presentation and is the hard evidence showing whether the student mastered the day’s learning target. As you plan this, consider the details, the rigor, and the thinking that you want your students to exhibit. It’s the start of a beautifully choreographed lesson.

To plan for instruction, we must answer the following questions.

• How do you identify the standard?

• How do you identify the learning target?

• How do you choose the main formative assessment?

• How do you choose criteria for success?

How Do You Identify the Standard?

Which standard will you be partially or wholly assessing in the lesson? We know that teachers touch on several standards within a lesson, but focus on one to make it easier for student to self-assess and for you to determine what you are assessing. When you have learning targets in place, you are partially assessing a standard. Sometimes the learning target for that lesson is the actual standard because you have taught all the learning targets in that progression toward the standard. Table 2.1 shows several standards broken into learning targets.

How Do You Identify the Learning Target?

It takes several learning targets to get to the big, broad standard. How many learning targets will students need to reach the standard? Ideally, you will accomplish this identification with your teacher team. Together, you separate each standard into skills, content or concepts, and context. Breaking apart the standard will help you determine what prerequisites to teach so students can reach mastery. Each prerequisite is a potential learning target depending on whether you teach them to the whole class, a small group, or to individuals who need it (which is an example of differentiation). The flowchart in figure 2.1 demonstrates this breaking apart. For more details about how to do this process with your team, see chapter 2 in Design in Five by Nicole Dimich Vagle (2015).

It helps to create a learning target progression to get your students to the standard. The Delaware Department of Education (n.d.) has examples of these progressions for Common Core English language arts standards on its “Curriculum Development for English and Language Arts (ELA).” For example, the following is a nine-step adapted progression that the Delaware Department of Education (n.d.) gives for the NGA and CCSSO (2010a) Reading standard “Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details; summarize a text” (RI.5.2).

1. I can determine the main idea of a text.

2. I can explain the difference between main ideas and key details in a text by showing examples from the text.

3. I can graphically represent the relationship between main idea and details.

4. I can explain how the different text features add up to the main idea.

5. I can organize the ideas in a text.

6. I can analyze how a text is organized.

7. I can give examples of how the author supports the main idea with the details in the text.

8. I can write a summary including the main ideas and key details of a text.

9. I can determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how key details support them; I can summarize the text.

Note that the last learning target is the standard. All the previous learning targets lead a student to the big, broad, challenging standard. Each learning target becomes a one- or two-day lesson using the instructional cha-chas cycle.

Notice the following characteristics of a strong learning target. (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download the reproducible version of this list, “Characteristics of a Strong Learning Target.”)

• Each learning target has a verb and specific content: The verb is the do and the content is the know that the students will show within that lesson’s main formative assessment.

• Learning targets have verbs that you can visualize and measure: Examples of verbs include synthesize, analyze, determine, compare and contrast, and explain. Vague verbs such as understand, learn, know, comprehend, appreciate, and realize are hard to visualize and measure. The verbs focus on the type of thinking students will engage in versus the activities they will do.

• Learning targets have the positive, student-friendly, goal-oriented statement I can: All brains are different, and students will reach the learning target in different ways on different days, but most should be able to accomplish the learning target within a one- or two-day lesson plan. If the majority of students cannot master the learning target within a few days, then you may need to break down your learning target further or provide interventions.

• The phrase at the end of this lesson appears in the learning target: For example, At the end of this lesson, I can distinguish between main idea and details. This helps students understand the precise expectation for that lesson.

Table 2.1: Breaking a Standard Into a Learning Target

Standard	Learning Target
With prompting and support, identify major events in the story (RL.K. 3).	I can identify major events in this story.
Ask and answer questions about key details in a text (RL.1.1).	I can ask and answer questions about key details in the text orally and in writing.
Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g. character’s thoughts, words, or actions; RL.4.3).	I can describe a character based on specific details in the text.

Source for standard: NGA & CCSSO, 2010a.

Source: Adapted with permission from Anne Arundel County Schools, 2018.

Source for standard: NGA & CCSSO, 2010a.

Figure 2.1: Unwrapping a standard with a flowchart.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.

• Students can self-assess where they are with that learning target: Hattie (2009) finds that the act of self-assessment has a 1.44 effect size on student achievement. We will share in chapter 3 (page 21) many ways to help students own this learning target.

Choosing the main formative assessment is the next step in lesson planning.

How Do You Choose the Main Formative Assessment?

You will informally check for student learning throughout the lesson, but deciding what formative assessment will be the biggest—but not summative—evidence of proficiency. It should be substantial and produce higher-level thinking. One- or two-page writings, short essays, graphic organizers, and role-playing are some of our favorite substantial formative assessments for those reasons.

Just giving students a chew does not mean they will engage in higher-level thinking. For example, if you ask them simply to write about what they learned without giving them the criteria for success for that writing, you are unlikely to get quality, higher-level thinking within that writing product. Brainstorm what qualities you expect in this writing. Determine this assessment’s characteristics. We take you through the steps to creating the criteria for success in the next section.

We encourage you to explore Norman L. Webb’s (1997, 1999) Depth of Knowledge (DOK) to design more level two, three, or four products or chews to truly challenge your students. Author Eileen Depka (2017) offers question help for English language arts (figure 2.2) and science (figure 2.3).

You may also consider other taxonomies, including Bloom’s (1956; Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) revised taxonomy and universal design for learning (Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014).

Figure 2.2: Using DOK in an English language arts lesson.

Figure 2.3: Using DOK in a science lesson.

How Do You Choose Criteria for Success?

The criteria for success is proof, or evidence, of mastering the learning target. It’s a student-friendly tool that makes them aware of exactly what the formative assessment asks of them, so they can assess their current performance in light of the learning target. The criteria are linked to the task or performance—the main formative assessment. It’s a list of attributes that you want to see in their assessment. Choose criteria that align with the learning target. You can request a checklist, rubric, self-assessment, exemplar, or nonexemplar.

We highly recommend having students watch you complete an exemplar and nonexemplar while they work toward the main formative assessment. We like to ask our students to explain what we expect to confirm their understanding. Every now and then, we develop them with our students, getting their buy-in and ideas. For example, some students might request to use a different website to gather information rather than the one you provide on the checklist. This criteria for success helps you differentiate and give better feedback.

Figure 2.4 is an example of how the learning target, formative assessment, and criteria for success come together to form an engaging, higher-level-thinking lesson (as shown in the student example on the bottom left). It’s just the beginning of the process. Alignment of all three is critical. It works as one more support for the students who are working to master the learning target. Notice that the fourth-grade teachers provided two different criteria for success checklists so they could meet the needs of a few students who needed sentence starters.

Source: D. Hafner, E. Kirby, & J. McKinlay, Maryvale Primary School, New York, 2018.

Source for standard: NGA & CCSSO, 2010a.

Figure 2.4: Alignment example—the learning target, formative assessment, student example, and criteria for success.

Figure 2.5 shows the first part of the lesson-plan template. The highlighted, added portions of the lesson-plan template in subsequent chapters show the elements each chapter discusses. You will see the progression of this template’s completion throughout the chapters, with the completed lesson plan in figure 8.2 (page 188). Find “The Main Idea and Detail Tabletop Graphic Organizer” reproducible on page 104, and visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download a free reproducible form for recording what your students have mastered, their preferred learning modality, notes for teaching the lesson or unit, and so on.

Effective teachers know their standards and their students and plan accordingly. With the decisions in place from this chapter, you have completed step one in the planning phase. Now you’re set up to powerfully implement the remaining steps. It’s time to incorporate student data into the plan.

Source for standard: NGA & CCSSO, 2010a.

Figure 2.5: Reviewing the sample lesson plan for alignment.

Summary

You always create a song list before beginning to dance, just as you create a learning list for your students before beginning instruction. We hope that this chapter guided you through the process of providing a seamless learning sequence by showing you how to break a broad standard into smaller learning targets that students can master within a few days, and how to design formative assessments that accurately evidence learning target mastery.