All right, so now it's my pleasure to introduce our presenters today. Doug Fisher, PhD, is Professor and Chair of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University and a leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College. Previously, Doug was an early intervention teacher and elementary school educator.
He is the recipient of an International Reading Association William S. Gray Citation of Merit and an Exemplary Leader Award from the Conference on English Leadership of NCTE. In 2022, he was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame. He has published numerous articles on teaching and learning, as well as books such as the Teacher Clarity Playbook, PLC Plus, Teaching Reading, and Teaching Students to Drive Their Learning.
Doug loves being an educator and hopes to share that passion with others. Nancy Fry, Ph.D., is a professor of educational leadership at San Diego State and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College. She is a member of the International Literacy Association's Literacy Research Panel.
Her published titles include Visible Learning and Literacy. This is Balanced Literacy. Removing Labels. PLC Plus. Playbook for Instructional Leaders, How Scaffolding Works, and Onboarding Teachers.
Nancy is a credentialed special educator, reading specialist, and administrator in California and learns from teachers and students every day. And John Almirote, PhD, is a best-selling author and an associate professor of education at James Madison University. He was awarded the inaugural Sarah Miller Luck Endowed Professorship in 2015. and received an outstanding faculty award from the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia in 2021. Before his academic career, John started as a mathematic and science teacher in Augusta County, Virginia. As an author, John's written multiple education books focusing on science and mathematics, and he has co-created the framework for developing, implementing, and sustaining professional learning communities called PLC+. Dr. Elmerow's work has been presented to the U.S.
Congress, the Virginia Senate, and the U.S. Department of Education. One of his recent projects includes developing the distance learning playbook for college and university induction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Continuing his collaborative work with his colleagues on what works best in teaching and learning, how tutoring works, visible learning, in early childhood and how learning works were released in 2021. All right.
And with that, I'm going to hand it over to you, Doug, to take it away. Awesome. Thank you. And thanks for all being here.
John, great to see you. Nancy is finishing her presentation at the Teacher Clarity Institute. So you couldn't be here in San Diego.
That's why you're online. But we have about 330, 340 people. engaged in teacher clarity work here in San Diego.
So this is how we're going to spend our time about thinking about what do we mean? How do we analyze standards? How do we discuss learning intentions?
How do we create the alignment, which is teacher clarity? So that's how we're going to hang out today. We're learning about clarity. We're refining our learning on clarity and its impact on student learning.
So in the first edition and in the work we've done, we identified, we suggested there are nine components of teacher clarity. In the second edition, the same nine exist, but people who really notice things notice number five. We made a decision to move the language expectations out of the learning intentions and into the success criteria.
Most people, when they think about language and the language expectations, the linguistic demands of the task, they mostly put it in success criteria, which is fine. In reality, it doesn't matter where you put it, as long as you know that everything we learn, we learn through language, and we should be clear on the language we expect from learners. What's the academic language they need to use and produce?
So the nine have remained the same, although we've done a lot of updating in our thinking and revising in the years since the first edition has come out. And by the way, thank you for the reactions. I love the reaction buttons. Have at the reaction buttons.
Make me happy. when the hearts go by and the claps go by, I love it. So when you look at the original meta-analysis on this, we started thinking about this.
And oh, look at all, I love it. So... It's like a continuous flow of hearts.
Makes me so powerful. So Fendick had the first meta-analysis and talked about what it means to have teacher clarity. Clarity of organization, clarity of explanations, clarity of the examples and practice we give students, and then clarity of the assessment. This is logical.
Now I put this in to remind me to say this. It's not just learning intentions and success criteria. Yes, those are important. but it's about the clarity. So now we talk a bit differently now.
We talk about alignment. We think of clarity as alignment. Yes, we want learning intentions and success criteria.
That's important. But the tasks and activities, the lessons have to line up to those learning intentions and success criteria. The questions we ask learners line up to what they're supposed to be learning. The discussion prompts we give them, the feedback we offer, the assessment tools we use all have to line up to what we want students to learn.
We all recognize that feedback can be overwhelming, especially when it's a laundry list of feedback of here's all the things you didn't do well or all the things you did do well. What was I supposed to be learning? Because that's the feedback I need right now.
Again, it's about alignment. So we think about clarity as an alignment. process that takes what I want students to learn, identified in the standards, through to the assessment and feedback.
Now here's a newer idea. This is a modification of something Tom Guskey had been working on. Thank you, Barbara.
This is something Tom Guskey had been working on, a table of specifications. And Guskey's, and we've been doing some work on this and some revisions on this, and Tom Gussie says, when you take a block of standards, probably not a single standard, take a block of standards and you analyze that block of standards, a unit, maybe let's say a three-week unit, and you analyze it and you say, what's the terminology the vocabulary students need to know? What are the facts that students need to be familiar with? What are the rules? What are the processes?
Now, those knowledge of are generally represented in the nouns and noun phrases. The next three, translation, we might say transfer, application, analysis, and synthesis, those are generally represented in the verbs and verb phrases of the standards. And a table of specifications is kind of a bonus idea on clarity.
You want to assure alignment, you take a unit, you do your table of specifications. Here's an example of one around character analysis. I'm just going to give you a moment to take a look. at this unit of instruction around character.
And as you think about this, and as you look at these columns, this is at the unit level. Now we have a table of specifications. This is the detail from the standard.
So yes, I know we'll talk about nouns and verbs and things like that. This is another level. Then you say, how am I going to use my instructional minutes? What percent of time do I want on terminology and facts? What percent of time do I want in transfer translation or application?
The next logical process is, do my assessments line up to the table of specifications? If 25% of your assessment items are vocabulary related, Did you spend 25% of the minutes on vocabulary? Or are you really not assessing things like application or synthesis? Because you focused more on the knowledge of and not the other parts. So this is a newer area of work that we've been thinking about.
Tom Guskey originally proposed this way back in 2005. Kind of fell out of favor, and now it is very much back. Curriculum writers and test generators. Use the table of specifications to say, did we cover everything that was in this block of standards in this unit?
So I've had some experience lately of working with teacher teams like curriculum teams and saying, OK, here's a unit of instruction that you designed. Let's look at it. So I had a meeting outside of Chicago a few weeks ago with curriculum directors.
Let's take a unit of instruction. Let's analyze it. What are all of the specifications in this unit, whether it's language arts or history or whatever, science, art? PE, etc.
And then let's look at the assessments that you recommend that teachers use. Do the assessments line up to your table of specifications and do your lessons line up to your table of specifications? This is taking teacher clarity to another level around alignment. How do we line this up? The alignment again, yes.
So then we've created, and some of you know these, these are our clarity questions, our clarity questions that we think about. What am I learning today? And that's an important indicator.
Today, lesson-sized. Why am I learning this? This is our relevance. And then number three, how will I know that I learned it? Our three clarity questions.
And when we do this, when we say, here's what we're learning, here's the relevance, here's what success looks like. Then you take that daily and you line it up to the lessons, the delivery, and then the assessments. Alignment, alignment, alignment.
So let me show you a video from a teacher in Texas. Please feel free to live chat a culture of appreciation. What are you noticing as this teacher introduces the learning to her students? Oka.
Oka. Merida. Merida. Today, I am learning to create a 3D origami sculpture. All right, Mia, where's that?
Okay, and then how do we know that we learn our objective? How do we do that? Let's see here.
Let's get up in it. How do we know that? We look at our, yeah, can you say that a little bit louder?
Success criteria. Yeah, and who can read some of our success criteria? Let's see. Let's do Joseph, let's do Layla, and Serenity. I can identify two D shapes.
Okay, next one. And? All right.
So there's some. keywords here that I want you guys to focus. Identify, compare, and fold.
These are the things that we're going to do today so that we know that we have learned how to create a 3D sculpture, right? Now, let's see if we know really what that means. So, I want you to grab your board, grab your white board marker, and I want you to write our lesson objective in your own words.
What does this mean to you that we're going to learn to create a 3D origami sculpture? Let's do a minute, Joseph. All right. I like that. Allison is writing her sentence with a capital letter.
Thank you, friend. All right, how much time we got, Joseph? All right, good job, friend. Oh, I like how Daniel even has a picture to go with his sentence. If you got a checkmark, can you please stand up?
All right. Can you share, Daniel, what you wrote and can you show your class what you wrote and what you drew? Yeah, I need to make origami.
All right. Can you tell them about your picture? Yeah, bring it in. Yeah, we made a 2D shape into 3D. All right, can you show your class?
All right, thank you, sir. And then, Amirani? Can you show your class? All right, forms.
Good job. And then, Serenity? Okay, great. Thank you. I saw the comment, what do you say when teachers say there's not time for this?
What else are you doing with your time? If they don't know what they're learning, they're probably not going to learn it. We know that when teachers are clear on the learning intentions, learning targets, learning success, learning objective, learning goal, whatever you call it, students are three times more likely to actually learn it. By the way, I loved all your live chat. I love watching.
One of my favorite things about online learning this way is I can see thinking while you're watching a video. If I'm in present with you all, I can't see this because we all have to be quiet and listen to the video. I just love watching your thinking. Oh, sorry on your end. Sorry about that.
So let's think about this further. So one of the things, Doug, that is, yeah, there's benefits to online learning. I caught that too.
One of the things that often comes up, Doug, is how do we get to this? How does a classroom like that come to fruition? And the answer is not by chance, but by design to pull a bumper sticker comment that has been quite commonly used in our webinars. But it has to do with the beginning with that end in mind.
And so knowing what it is that I want my finished experience to look like. So one of the things to do for this and one of the things that I often tell my students at JMU is pause for a minute and start to think about what it is. a student would say or do or how they would act or what they would know and what they would understand when finished. So think of your ideal student, although there's no such thing really, but what is it that you want to end with?
And that's how this all gets started. And so how do we do this? We analyze the standards. There's no way to avoid this.
And there's probably some groaning that just occurred when I said analyze the standards, but we have to pick apart those standards. How did Tom Guskey come up with that table? How does any teacher come up with that table and fill it with information that is valuable? And it starts with those nouns. So grabbing our standards and opening them up and taking a peek at those nouns.
Now, some of you on this in the Zoom webinar, and I know who you are because we've interacted before, are purists. You're purists. Right. So and by the way, I am loving Carlson. I mean, I.
Maybe we just hand the microphone over. But some of you peers are thinking, well, what about not all of those are nouns? OK, hang tight. Nouns, noun phrases, concepts, big ideas. They represent the what of the learning.
Those vocab terms, those ideas, those things that are written out in the standard that students must know and understand. And so what we want to do is grab those items. So let's look at an example. Just take a moment and see if you can match the standard and the concepts and see how we came up with that list.
I'm going to give you just a moment to read the standard, take a look at that list of concepts and see if you can see where that list came from. So here's the best part. I'm going to pull from some of the comments in the chat box.
The standards tell us what to teach, not how to teach it. And so in this particular standard, we're going to focus on patterns and causes and consequences, specifically adaptations of into the environment, migrations, immigration, migration and emigration, human migration. There's the what. That's the what of that standard. But it doesn't tell us to use a packet.
guided notes, or film strips for some of you wiser saints in the room that are familiar with what that even is. And so it doesn't tell us how to teach. And so to pull from some of the comments, we are supposed to teach the standards, but the standards don't tell us how to do it.
They don't tell us how to do it. But that's only part of it. So in addition to knowing what it is we're supposed to teach and what our students are supposed to learn, no one understand, we also have to understand how well they have to know it.
Barbara, one of the things I say to my students is if the nouns and the noun phrases tell us the what, this next part, the verbs, are going to tell us how well they have to know it. Now, I want you to pause for a second, and in the chat box, just type in verbs tell us how well. So I'm going to let you fill in that chat box, verbs tell us how well.
So what do we mean by that? Well, if they have to know about migration, how well do they have to know about migration? Do they have to know it well enough to describe it, explain it, compare and contrast, critically analyze?
To what level are they expected to know it? And in many ways, that means the verbs represent those skills. Those verbs represent those skills. So take a look at the example that we looked at earlier.
Now we're going to put the verbs in place. So how well do students have to know about patterns, causes, consequences, and different migrations, the answer is well enough to do what? Explain it.
Well enough to explain it. Now, I want to try something out. Now, I have to tell you, Doug, I actually snatched this from you. I was in the audience many years ago and watching Doug give a presentation at a conference, and I'd always been skeptical of certain taxonomies. Always been skeptical of certain taxonomy, but it wasn't until Doug had us do this exercise that I became clearly, clearly averse to picking one taxonomy of another.
He had us write down two verbs, identify and evaluate. And then he said, all right, where would you put these on? Do you remember this, Doug? And so he had us write down, where would you put these on blooms?
And of course, I was, oh, I mean, Ben Bloom. Yes, I live in Virginia. And so.
We do nothing without blooms. And I said, well, identify would be low and evaluate would be high level blooms. And he said, all right, I want you to evaluate the comfort of your chair. It required no thinking at all.
And then he said, now identify the forces that keep your chair upright. And that's when I knew I was in trouble. So I want to park, if you don't mind for just a second, Doug, on the idea of verbs.
They can be deceiving. So when we talk about things like explain or illustrate or describe or identify, there's more to it than that. This is really important. So if you're taking notes, you could jot this down.
If you aren't taking notes, this might be a time to take a picture. It's not just the verb by itself because we can have learners explain. It's what comes after the verb that really tells us how well they have to know it or what's often called the cognitive complexity.
Now, Doug, you're going to talk us through a better way to think about this. Is that right? Right. And there are many ways to think about this.
And I appreciate you talking about that identify versus evaluate because we get so caught up that there's higher and lower. It's what the verb is requiring from us. So I look at that.
That's Kirsten transition. That's fancy. Eric Francis was doing some work around with Bloom.
Sorry, with Norm Webb and the depth of knowledge. And he talked about there's other ways to think about it between level one, level two, level three, level four. And people start to interpret level four is amazing.
Level four is not so good. And he argues that there's different kinds of knowledge. There's knowledge acquisition. There's nothing wrong with that.
If the standard requires acquisition, then that's what we do is we focus on acquisition. But some standards require. application, others require analysis, and some require augmentation. And so he mapped these words onto Bloom's, or sorry, onto Webb's depth of knowledge and said, it requires different kinds of knowledge.
Four is not better than one. What does the standard require? There's nothing wrong with acquiring knowledge. We all have acquired knowledge. It's just not the only kind of knowledge.
So I appreciated Eric really framing it that way, that there are different ways to think about what was needed by students. So let's practice this, right? So we've got knowledge acquisition, we've got knowledge application, knowledge analysis, knowledge augmentation.
Let's take a single verb and let's walk it through here and see if we can match these suckers up. So let's look at the verb identify. Now we're going to have three different scenarios for identify.
Take a quick look. I'll give you a chance to read through these. So let's match them up.
Which of these is knowledge acquisition? Which of these is application? Which of these is analysis? And maybe which of these is augmentation? In the chat box, where would you put these items?
How would you make sense of these ideas around the verb identify? Or in other words, what comes after the verb identify? Yeah. So Paula, thank you for getting us started.
Identify key factors. So we're talking about probably acquisition at that. point.
So I'm acquiring the key factors contributing to climate change. So that's identification. But there's more.
What about identifying interconnections between different effects? Yeah, I would say analysis on that one as well. Interconnections requires us to analyze the different effects of climate change to find those interconnections.
And of course, identifying sustainable solutions might be. I see some folks who put it as augmentation. Absolutely.
The point being is for so long, we focused so much on just the verb, just the verb, instead of focusing on what happens after the verb. Now I'm going to speak from a science teacher perspective. Doug and I both have experiences teaching science. Doug, the verb illustrate always throws my students for a loop because you could illustrate a flower by simply drawing it from a textbook picture.
Or you could illustrate a flower of your choice using different ways to create. So you're actually creating a model, but it's labeled as illustrate. So that's one of the verbs that get us and gets us in trouble, particularly in science.
Solving mathematics. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
I was just thinking about this. We haven't really talked much about it, but there's about 20 verbs that are commonly used across grade level and content areas. And there's about 30 more that are more rare verbs.
Students should know these verbs. They should know when you say illustrate, here's what's expected of you. And it doesn't mean simply like my low level illustration is to draw a sketch, like a little stick people.
That's not what we're looking for when it says illustrate. There are lists of cognitive behaviors that are there. And we need to be clearer on those. And it certainly helps build.
self-regulated learners when they can grab the verb themselves and start to monitor their own processes. Let's take a quick peek at a video. Now, there's some questions we want to throw out there that are going to prime it. So we want to keep this conversation going.
As you listen to this next video, keep these things in mind. Take a look. So use those questions to frame this next video.
And one of the stars of this video might be on this webinar right now. When I'm designing learning progressions, the first thing I do is think about what my students will need to be successful in the lesson, starting all the way back to the prior knowledge or the back. knowledge that they might need. What I start with in my success criteria are the most foundational skills, which could be something like identifying or breaking apart.
And then from there, they get more difficult or rigorous. And as the week goes on, as we progress through the lesson, the beginning success criterias might be removed from our lessons because those were the foundational skills that they've mastered over time. And now we're focused on the end of our learning.
progression, which is going to be like synthesizing, summarizing, comparing and contrasting things that require a little bit more of a cognitive demand. When I'm building a unit, I think of learning progressions as the building blocks of knowledge that I want students to understand as we go on throughout that unit. I'm then able to use my learning progressions to develop my learning intentions because I'm going to bundle those learning progressions together.
and transform them into student-friendly, lesson-sized learning intentions. So let's take a moment and use the chat box to answer some of these questions. How do learning progressions tie into what you know about teacher clarity?
How does mapping out learning progressions support teacher clarity? And how does mapping out learning progression support student learning? Use the chat box.
Share some thoughts on this. We'll be looking for your thinking on this. Thoughts on progressions.
That was Emily who just put it out there. That was Emily who's here in the meeting who just talked to us on video. I love it.
The scaffolds. Thank you, Jason. Alignment, Rachel.
Next destination. I love that idea. We talk about unit goals now.
We've been talking instead of unit success criteria and daily success criteria, we've been talking about unit goals. Oh, look at all these. Progression, knowledge.
Now, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole, but... One of the comments here made reference to scaffolding. And Doug, you and I have had this conversation so many times. If we don't have...
clear learning progressions, then scaffolding becomes very different because the learning progressions help us decide when to put in the scaffold and better yet, when to start to fade the scaffold or remove that scaffold. Without a learning progression, it becomes enabling. Yeah.
I love all the thinking, you know, unit or module two on learning progressions has really challenged people. So I'm hoping we got it better with unit goals and this kinds of talking about progressions. And the chat in here is really good about learning progressions, the value of progressing a series of experiences across time with our students. As you all continue chatting, I'm going to give you some examples. So we're starting to see teachers who who build clusters of ideas, not just here's this one thing.
So you can see this is a progression of learning and it's building out. Here's what we've done in the past. Here's where we're going.
You can see the I can statements. You can identify. You can locate. You can order. So it's not just one day, but each of these were a day.
And this is what success criteria looks like as they build it out into these big clusters. I really think this is a cool way of doing this. That's thinking about, oh, we did this, we did this, I can still do this. Now some people, you know, they talk about the I don't have the wall space to put the learning intentions and success criteria up.
To which I respond, what's more important on your walls than what you want students to learn? Because certainly that Pinterest poster is really important. But what you want kids to learn.
But look what this teacher did. It's not just a one day. Take down the gap posters. Yes. Or the tribute wall.
But look at this. But this is. A commitment here is as we keep learning things.
Here's another example. This is from Fresno. Teams of teachers coming together and saying, what's it going to look like?
And look at all these things that they're my learning targets. Rate yourself. And they built this share for each other in their middle school to say, here's what it's looking like for our students.
Same school. Here's their clarity, their techniques. And this was from a PLC Plus time that they were working on. How do they know students are learning?
And this is across the whole middle school. Yeah. And Paula, they see the relationship between the standards in that bubble map of what they're learning, the success criteria.
Look at what the work that teachers are doing to say, Ha! Jason. Because it's also qualified as a wall.
We used to have a rule in our school district years ago, with the long-ago superintendent, that the standard had to be posted on the wall, which is too big. I wouldn't do that. It's way too big.
And so what I did is what Jason did. I stuck the standards on the ceiling so when the principal came in, I could say, behold the standards. They're all here.
You have to check me out. There's another example from seventh grade social studies. These people are working really hard to figure out what is it?
that we want students to learn and be able to do as teams of teachers working together. All right. So let's tackle the hard ones.
So every now and then, and by the way, this is not uncommon. And so, and I know I'm not talking about anybody on this webinar, but somebody, there's often a confusion between learning intentions, agendas, and the actual learning experience or directions associated with that. And oftentimes there'll be questions. Well, wait a second. Are you saying it's not important for my students to have an agenda?
Well, of course not, because one of my children and the reason I'm not naming the child is because Doug keeps score. And I don't know that I'll have time for another story. So I'm going to leave nameless.
So I'm going to text him and say, your daddy only said your name. So a child of mine needed a visual schedule through their. early childhood years.
And so that's, I absolutely advocate for an agenda, but there's a difference in what it is we want our students to learn, why they're learning it and how they know they're successful and the order or the flow of the day. And better yet, that's even different from the instructions needed to complete the task. So learning intentions describe the learning, agendas describe the flow. And the learning experiences have to have clarity of directions.
How is it that they're expected to move through the individual task, whereas the agenda is move through the day? So I want you to take a moment in the chat box. What are some of the other challenges you've encountered when it comes to learning intentions and success criteria?
One of those has to be the difference between agendas and the learning experience. But there might be some others we haven't thought of. And so we need some information from you.
What are some? other challenges you've run into when it comes to learning intentions or success criteria and quite possibly other things in our classroom. Oh, success criteria versus criteria for success.
Absolutely. So Nancy, in that case, I would say that's a battle that is a semantic argument. And I might not go down that path.
But one of the questions I would have is, how do they see the difference? Not specific enough. One of the success criteria that I have as an example says the student will complete the worksheet with 75% accuracy. I don't know about that. Different levels of experience in the basics.
Absolutely. Three weeks. Ah, so what do we do when the unit is three weeks long?
And so what's the difference between unit wide goals and daily goals? And if I can't reconcile that, maybe I need to use another way to display that. Maybe using a rubric or a single point rubric or some other way to share those.
Absolutely. Right. And unit goals, John, as you were just saying, I'll clarify again. Unit goals are different than the daily bite-sized, here's what we're learning today and here's what success looks like today. So if it was a three-week long unit, you have unit goals, you would have at least 15 learning intentions for three weeks of learning.
Absolutely. Even in something like language arts where they're writing a narrative piece, yes, they're all working on their narrative essays or their narrative writing pieces, but each day they're working towards some smaller chunk of that that builds to the end. These are excellent concerns.
So let's spend a little time talking about learning intentions in particular, because I think a webinar like this, let's go ahead and dive in. In the chat box, before we reveal it, if you had to describe characteristics of a high quality learning intention, what would be on your list? What would be on your list?
vocabulary that they understand good student friendly clear age specific what they're learning today yep describe what is to be learned rigorous yep yep yep yep genuinely new learning yep goal specific excellent well let's see what we can come up with If you were to pull together the research on learning intentions, and there are meta analyses on clear goal intentions, and if you pull those metas up and you start to look at what counts as a high quality learning intention that gives you that potential for a 0.44 effect size, you would see these things on the list. Number one, accessible to students. If they're five years old, do we have gestures and images linked to the words?
We don't remove the words. We still keep a very text. language-rich environment, but we provide other ways for them to access it visually or through gestures. Same thing goes for multilingual learners.
Do we help them see the one-to-one correspondence in those words? Do we help support the language development at the same time? We're helping them know what it is they're going to learn. The second one is big.
It's the learning, not the task. Today, we are reading chapter six of the book. That's not a learning intention. Today, we are learning about symbolism. and how it helps communicate the purpose of the author.
That's what we're learning. It just so happens we're reading Gatsby, or it just so happens we're reading As I Lay Dying, or it just so happens that we're reading Mockingbird. The learning is the key there, not the task. So it does answer that question, what am I learning?
We want to make sure we use first-person language. It's not very appropriate to talk to students in third person. If Doug and I had joined in the webinar tonight, or this afternoon, and for some of you at other parts of the world this morning, if we had started talking to you in third person, you'd have probably thought something was wrong with us. And if you didn't think something was wrong with us, you'd have been unnerved by it. But yet we talk to students in third person.
Probably ought to be careful with that. And then it does need to be lesson size. It needs to be today's chunk of learning, not three weeks of learning in one day.
You mean we can erase swab at from our boards? We don't have to write that anymore? Swab at. And if you're one of those like me that wrote it in permanent marker so you wouldn't have to write it again, just put up what am I learning over top of it with construction paper and move on.
Excellent. So let's look at how we interact with learning intentions. This is one of my favorite teachers. And well, you'll see why.
Why don't you take a look at the board here? learning intentions for today. So our content is, Catherine, would you be able to read it for us? We are learning to solve a system of equations using elimination. Probably what words do you think are important?
Solve, system of equations, and elimination. I want you to turn to the person next to you and say which one of these words is new. Elimination.
So I'm going to assume that this is the third way. Yes. What word is new in this content intention? Elimination.
Elimination. Okay. So we've been learning about solving equations. The new word is elimination. So what do you think elimination is?
Like the third way to solving system of equations. Yeah, what do you guys think? A new way to solve systems of equations?
So with your partner, I want you to look at your paper. It says to solve a system of equations, there are three ways. See if you can come up with three ways to solve a system of equations based on what we already learned and thinking about what we're going to learn today. Scrapping, substitution, and elimination.
This relates to our earlier content because we know we can solve with two other ways, and now elimination is our third way. What do you think elimination means? To like remove or eliminate.
Perfect. To remove or eliminate. So we're going to remove or eliminate something. Okay.
All right. And as you know, John, because you spend a lot of time with Maggie, this is a daily phenomenon for her. This is how she interacts with students.
Yeah, I love it. And what is really neat there, Doug, is she weaves in clarity of assessment. She...
She works that in by asking them to go back and retrieve prior learning so that they can start to see those connections. And so in many ways, it's that depth of knowledge that she is diving into. That's a great example of how to share learning intentions and success criteria with learners beyond just posting them on the board.
What we don't want is for learning intentions to become the speed limit sign on the five. We know it's there. You can find it if you need it, but nobody pays attention to it until they see the police.
Our learning intentions can't be on the board. We know where they are, but we only pay attention to them during walkthroughs or when a Corwin consultant is in our building. So that's the idea there. The five. You sound like a Californian.
We love to say the in front of a freeway number. So now we're talking about success criteria. How do we construct them?
How do we create them and share them? So I was thinking about the purpose of success criteria, and I want to clarify something. We do learn from failure.
The human brain can learn from failure. We learn from errors and mistakes. Absolutely, we do.
However, our brain really likes to learn from success. So if you read some of the neurosciences research, the reward pathway floods when we experience success. And so, yes, it is true we learn from failures, but our brain actually really likes to learn from success.
And if we give students clear success criteria that are actionable and attainable, and they say, and someone wrote earlier, I have too many success criteria. Probably not. If you have four or five success criteria, and as soon as I got that one, I got that one, I got one, you're feeding their brain the reward pathway over and over and over. And they want that feeling again, because success is motivational. Success serves to motivate us.
Bribery, punishment really doesn't. We are motivated when we experience success. And what we're doing now, which we did it 20 years ago, we didn't have success criteria. Now we say, this is how you know you're successful.
And like, oh my gosh, I'm successful. I feel great. My brain got flooded with dopamine and all these neurotransmitters and I feel awesome. The other thing is it scaffolds learning.
And this was newer for me to think about. We've had success criteria for the last few years. It's really interesting to think about.
the success criterion are a scaffold in and of themselves. There was an article out not too long ago, maybe six months ago or something, around teacher clarity reducing cognitive load for learners. And what this article talked about, this is a research study, they did all this stuff around like these students got it, these didn't get it, etc. And what they showed was when students knew what success looked like, it was a scaffold. That's where I need to get to.
to experience success today. And we think about all kinds of different scaffolds. So this is one of them. And so when we think about how do we scaffold for learners, they have to know what successful learning really looks like.
Teachers are doing all kinds of creative and interesting ways to share success criterion and learning intentions with students. Here's a handout planned in a week in advance. Here's what I'm gonna have you learning.
Here's what success looks like. And students literally check them off and then they write at the bottom. What do I need help with still?
Where am I at in this learning of this learning journey? That's what we want to try to create. Now, one point I want to make. AI can help us with this teacher clarity journey. There's a lot of tools out there that we can use to create learning intentions.
Now, in the past, we had to create our own learning intentions and success criteria. So this is ChatGPT. You can see that.
And it's the 3.5, the free version. This is a screencast. This is my laptop. And I am going to type in here, probably not very well, how do I teach about the hugen? I mean, human.
heart in 10 days. Develop lesson plans. Instantly chat GPT gives me lesson plans.
Now, the thing about AI is about 80% of the time, it's not very good. Sorry, 80% of the time, it's reasonably good. 20%, it's not very good.
Biased information, inaccurate information, but 20% is not a bad error rate when it's free and you didn't have to think of it yourself. And so then you have to go through and say, what is it that I like and don't like? Like, I don't really like this idea of a guest speaker. I don't really love this.
On 10 days of lessons, I'm probably not going to bring in a guest speaker. So I could say to chat DPT, replace day nine. I don't want a guest speaker.
And it would do that. Now, the objectives, we don't call them that because they don't technically meet the criterion for an objective. These are, we would call them learning intentions. I don't think a learning intention is to review key concepts. That's not what we're learning today.
So it's going to have to be revised a bit. They're not perfect, but it gave you some things to think about. And then I said to ChatGPT, here I go.
I'm going to type any second now. What did I say next? What would...
success critters, I mean criteria, for each day look like. And here are 10, or sorry, 10 days of success criteria, three per day. This instantly generated 30 success criteria.
Again, not all of them are good. A whole bunch of them are task related. That's not how I think of success criteria.
But I didn't have to think of these. So even if 50% of them were good, I didn't have to think of them. So we've been putting this in.
We can put them in there. And yes, Michelle, it's a great starting point. And honestly, it created some that I had not thought about. And I was sitting with this group of teachers thinking, if we generated this and we downloaded it, and we could then criticize ChatGPT instead of criticizing each other. Because sometimes we generate learning intentions and success criteria and we say, oh, you know, that's not very good.
You know, I wouldn't do it that way. Blame ChatGPT and say it's in the 20% of not useful stuff. But what if your teams could do this and then say, we have no excuse saying we don't have time to generate learning intentions and success criteria.
We can do this. And then we just use our human brain to decide. which of these are more useful and which of these are not useful.
And I put Jack TPT in because it's the free version. There are teacher-facing tools, Diff It, Magic School, those kinds of things that are even more specialized that you require a fee to be paid to it. But this is free.
It's available today to type in. Show me learning intentions. Show me the success criteria. How can we use this with our teams? No, Carolyn, it doesn't.
And so it doesn't know the difference between objectives and learning intentions. But if you type it in, it generates about the same thing. It's not, it doesn't have that much of distinguishing, you know, less than designer can. And then like magic school, if you use magic school or some of those other ones, it'll be more specific. But I try to show you the free versions and saying, Hey.
This is good stuff. They didn't cost me any money. So that's our thoughts on the next generation of teacher clarity.
Thank you. Welcome back, Kaylee. John, great to see you. Absolutely good to see you.
And I have to, before Kaylee takes over, the chat box was blowing up. So I have to emphasize this, Doug, just in case. Remember, whatever chat GPT gives you, we have to then adapt it with.
The pronouns, the student-friendly language, the vocabulary, all of that is our expertise. Don't let it deprofessionalize you. Instead, use it as a tool that helps us be more efficient and effective at using our professional knowledge, professional expertise.
Right. Thank you. Yeah.
Sorry, John. I have to emphasize there's going to be bias because it's scrubbing the Internet. It's going to use certain kinds of pronouns because it's scrubbing the Internet and the Internet is inherently biased.
And so we have to use our human brains to say, no, I need I need to rethink this and recast it. Excellent. So we do have just a couple of minutes.
for Q&A. So if you do have any additional questions, please feel free to type them in the chat. And if we don't have time to get those questions answered today, we can get those to, you can email us at info at Corwin.com. I see some questions in the chat about adding contacts for you.
professional learning services, I'm assuming. So I'll make sure to, I'm going to put that link in the chat, but please feel free to add those questions if you have them. Alyssa, you asked about the best text that aligns to this work. The second edition of the Teacher Clarity Playbook would be the go-to source.
Absolutely. There was a question about relevancy and the learning intention. Doug, do you mind if I grab that one? Yeah, go ahead.
So the what, the why, and the how, the three clarity questions. The learning intention traditionally answers the what and the why. Today I'm learning about elimination to go to Maggie's classroom.
So I have a third way to solve systems of equations. It can be that basic in its relevancy. But there's another secret here. Sometimes the task...
handles the relevancy itself. So if the task is engaging and authentic, then what will often happen is the learner will focus on the task. Well, what are you learning about? We're learning about circuits. Well, why are you learning about circuits?
So we know how to make the light bulb light up. The task actually did the relevancy for us. And so there are different ways to show relevancy, utility. In other words, I'm going to use this in a couple of minutes.
affiliation. I'm doing this because I'm part of this group. I'm part of this team. I'm part of this community. And then there's identity.
I'm going to learn this because it's part of what makes me a learner or makes me a human. And so there's a continuum of relevancy, but typically it's captured in that learning intention or it's captured in the task itself. And Amy, thank you for being our public relations representative. Amy, the familiar faces.
Thank you all. Thank you. There was a question about the differences.
I don't know if that was addressed or not, if you wanted to touch that quickly. Yeah, it's 75% new content. All of the examples, all of the practice, all the modeling have been replaced.
And then we changed the You know, we had to update all the research, like the relevance section is completely different because, as John just said, the relevance has changed pretty dramatically based on the newer research on relevance. We've updated things on assessment for looking at cycle, you know, short cycle, medium cycle, long cycle assessment. Learning progressions are different.
We have more unit goal focus on the learning progressions. So when we had someone review it, it's 75 percent new content. All right.
Kaylee questions. Yep, those are Kaylee questions. Yeah, so I will, so in the follow-up email, I will be sure to add the information of how you can get more information on the Teacher Clarity Professional Learning. So, and how you can reach out to your professional learning advisor to make that contact.
Great. Well, thank you again, Doug and John. It's been great. And thanks for everybody for attending. This concludes our webinar today.
Have a great week.