For many professional learning teams, being prepared “with additional time and support for every student who demonstrates the need” (Buffum et al., 20102, p.129) means “doing all that we can to help struggling students master our essential outcomes.”
And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that thinking.
If we truly believe that the outcomes we have identified for each unit of study are essential for success both in and beyond our classrooms, then we have nothing short of a moral obligation to make sure that all students – including those who struggle – master them.
This moral obligation creates a sense of urgency around the work that we do for question 3 students. Schools use universal screening tests multiple times a year to identify specific skill gaps – and then target those gaps during “all hands on deck” intervention periods, where struggling students receive intensive support in their areas of greatest need; intervention experts meet with classroom teachers during regularly scheduled “kid-talk” meetings designed to monitor the ongoing progress that struggling students are making towards mastering grade level essentials; and teachers on learning teams set aside planning minutes to design intervention lessons and instructional minutes to work in small groups with struggling students.
The highest performing learning teams, however, recognize that our moral obligation isn’t to simply help all students master our essential outcomes. Instead, our moral obligation is to help all students learn at the highest levels.
Even in the face of external pressures to decrease the number of students identified as nonproficient from year-to-year, high-performing teams work with the same urgency to extend the learning of students who have already demonstrated mastery of grade-level essentials as they do to intervene on behalf of students who are struggling (Roberts, 2019). Tier 2 interventions on high-performing teams, then – traditionally thought of as teacher-led efforts to provide supplemental help with grade level essentials (DuFour et al., 2016) – also include extensions that are carefully designed to “take the learning beyond what the core instruction has provided” (Roberts, 2019, p. 20).
The highest performing learning teams also recognize that their students are unique individuals with differing skill sets. That means every student – regardless of perceived ability – is likely to need both intervention and extension at different points during a school year.
Instead of thinking of question 4 students as “all of the academically gifted students in our classrooms”, high-performing teams see question 4 students as “all of the students in our classrooms who have demonstrated proficiency with the grade-level essentials that we are working on right now.”
That simple shift in thinking allows high-performing teams to look for the “superior potential” in every kid and to break the dangerous cycle of targeting only the weaknesses that we see in our students – particularly those from poor communities or underachieving subgroups (Jackson, 2011, p. 42). “When we believe in the vast intellectual capacity of all students to achieve at high levels,” writes Yvette Jackson in The Pedagogy of Confidence (2011), “we are relentless in searching for ways to unleash that capacity” (p. 53).
Relentlessly searching for ways to unleash the intellectual capacity of question 4 students starts when learning teams prioritize planning for extensions, recognizing that meeting the needs of students who are already proficient depends on something more than “fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-teaching” (Roberts, 2019, p. 38).
In fact, the highest performing teams often “teach up,” a practice that involves “planning first for advanced learners, then scaffolding instruction to enable less advanced students to access those rich learning experiences” (Tomlinson, 2015). Doing so leads to more meaningful instruction and higher levels of achievement for all students (Tomlinson, 2015).
While there are many ways to plan extensions for advanced learners, three primary strategies are recommended in Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work® (2016) – the seminal text written by the original architects of the Professional Learning Community at Work® movement:
- Students can be asked to demonstrate mastery of essential standards at a level beyond what is deemed grade-level proficient.
- Students can have access to more of the grade-level curriculum that is deemed important, but not essential
- Students can be taught above grade-level curriculum.
(DuFour et al., 2016, Kindle Location 3746)
Michael Roberts – author of Enriching the Learning: Meaningful Extensions for Proficient Students in a PLC at Work® (2019) – offers two additional strategies worth considering:
- Students can be asked to connect concepts related to an essential standard’s learning to new information they learn while working on an extension standard.
- Students can be asked to apply their learning on an extension standard to a real-life situation not addressed in class.
(Roberts, 2019, p. 14)
Like good intervention efforts, high-performing teams make extending learning doable by remembering that extensions don’t have to be complicated in order to be meaningful.
The kindergarten team asking already proficient students to compare the basic shapes found in nature to the basic shapes found in the architecture of playground structures, the eighth-grade science teachers asking already proficient students to rank order pathogens in order from “most dangerous” to “least dangerous”, and the high school statistics teacher asking already proficient students to identify the inaccuracies in the data being shared by biased news sources are all providing extensions.
The key rests in remembering, however, that providing extensions for already proficient students means developing tasks that require students to work “thoughtfully at a deep cognitive level over an extended period of time” (Roberts, 2019, p. 2).
Common practices like assigning more problems to already proficient students, allowing already proficient students to read quietly or work independently on other high-interest tasks, or asking already proficient students to serve as tutors to their struggling peers can have a negative social and academic impact on learners (Roberts, 2019).
Students asked to engage in these practices on a regular basis quickly stagnate, realizing that their continued learning isn’t a priority in the classroom – and teachers who lean heavily on these practices fail to meet the moral obligation to help all students learn at higher levels.
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