Planning for Student Learning

Teachers sometime invite me to meet with them to discuss various issues that we face. Today I was invited to have coffee with two teachers. One of the teachers is changing grade levels and is at a loss as to where to start planning for her ELA block. On the kitchen table there is the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) Guidebook, Learnzillion (LDOE Guidebook 2.0) on the laptop, standards, teacher-pay-teacher products, and coffee.

We spent time talking about what lay in front of us, but the question remained how do we start planning? Honestly, there are more resources than teachers have time to use or sometimes even view. After lots of discussion we came up with this process:

Examine the assessments, determine what learning MUST take place. Label each item with a standards.

Write the target standards on a sticky note.

Put the sticky note in a place that remains visible throughout the unit or module. It is critical that the teacher and students know what learning (target standards) must take place.

Use the following questions to plan.

1. What do you want your students to learn?

Examine the Learnzillion lesson to determine if the target standard is being addressed. If it is not addressed, check the LDOE Guidebook. This is the place to look for explicit instruction (the one thing you want your students to learn).

This is a starting point for your instructional sequence for teaching the target standards.

2. How will you know they learned it?

Within the lesson plans underline opportunities for students to show their learning of the target standards. Look at activities that follow the explicit instruction, writing prompts, and discussion questions. This is called informal assessments and should guide instruction.

3. What will you do if they already know it?

There are teaching opportunities and activities for small groups and independent learning in the LDOE Guidebook. Select opportunities for students that already know the skill or task to extend their academic reach. Data from #2 will let you know who has or has not mastered a standard.  If there are no opportunities within the Guidebook, consult a list of Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs or a Depth of Knowledge chart and create an opportunity to use the skill or task at a more advanced level. Remember- hard and more does not equal rigor. Also, assigning the student(s) as a peer tutor is a cop out.

4. What are you going to do for the students who don’t get it?

By the fourth week of school you know the students that will need additional support. Look carefully at the standard, task, or skill and ask yourself what is it that a student must be able to do to master what is asked. Think about prerequisites. Provide the student with the learning that is needed to be successful. This is the perfect time for small group, teacher-led instruction.

Once instruction is completed, reflect on the lesson and student work to determine if learning took place. This process should focus on learning rather than covering the material.

Grab this FREE poster to remind yourself of the questions that you should be asking during the planning process:

Planning Question FREEBIE Poster

Vocabulary for comprehension and composition

For years I have recommend the book Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan to teachers of all grade levels. It is a great resource for learning how to teach vocabulary as well as how to choose which words to teach. Over the summer, I decided to reread it. As an educator who loves learn new things and share, I loaned my book out and it was never returned. So, I had no choice but to order a new one. This time I ordered the second edition.

The second edition is a page turner. (I am a nerd!) It may be because I am in a different place in my professional career or that I had tunnel vision when I read the original book, but I missed a big idea. There is more to choosing words to teach than I initially thought.

What remains the same is that we should not choose words just because we think students do not know them. As is outlined on page 28, words should be chosen based on importance and utility, conceptual understanding, and instructional potential.  Put simply, we choose words that we can use over and over again, words that are important to understand the big idea of the text, and words that can be used in other academic areas. I have preached this more times than can be imagined, but I missed a piece.

The critical piece that I missed was that we must consider “the utility of words for use in both comprehension and composition as the priority” (p.25). Students need words that serve them well in building their comprehension of a text as well as creating relevant compositions. Word knowledge is needed for both reading and writing. I have been missing the writing component!

The average student has a lot of words they are able to use and understand in their oral language. Students are much more limited in the words they can use to express themselves in writing. It is specific, content rich words that create an exact meaning. Word knowledge extends beyond processing word meaning to producing and expressing a thought. Attention to choosing and teaching words that will both increase reading comprehension and develop student writers must be given equal attention.

Sonya Louviere, Ed.D.