Let’s start with a simple albeit uncomfortable truth: The goal of educators in a professional learning community isn’t to ensure that all students reach proficiency. Instead, the goal is to ensure that all students learn at the highest levels.
That might seem like a small semantic difference, but it has huge implications for the students in our schools.
Here’s why: When we prioritize “ensuring that students reach proficiency” in the work that we do with our collaborative teams, we also prioritize students who are in need of intervention over students who can demonstrate proficiency from the moment they walk through our classroom doors.
The result: Question 4 students — our highest level learners who are in need of extension beyond grade level expectations — become forgotten children, watching others learn while rarely being challenged themselves.
Michael Roberts — author of Enriching the Learning: Meaningful Extensions for Proficient Students in a PLC at Work — goes as far as to argue that our highest performing students are also often the most “at risk” in our building because of our tendency to push their needs aside as we work to bring struggling students up to grade level.
Roberts is right, isn’t he?
We DO drop conversations about question 4 in the PLC at Work process — How will we extend learning for students who are already proficient with the knowledge, skills and dispositions we identified as essential? — when our meetings run long. After all, those kids are going to demonstrate mastery already. We don’t need to worry about developing interventions for students who are already successful in schools, do we?
The answer is, YEP.
Planning for interventions should INCLUDE the steps that we are going to take to ensure that even our highest flyers are moving forward.
So, how do we do that? How do we get better at planning for extensions?
The first step is to have a clear sense of the specific actions that you can take to extend learning for students. According to DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many and Mattos (2016) and Roberts (2021), extensions can include:
Asking students to demonstrate mastery at levels beyond grade-level proficiency:
In most cases, curricula for different content areas has been carefully spiraled, exposing students to similar concepts at increasing levels of complexity from year-to-year. High-performing teams use these curricular spirals to create proficiency scales and rubrics that define multiple levels of mastery for each essential outcome. Then, they use these scales and rubrics to extend learning by asking question 4 students to demonstrate mastery at levels that go beyond grade level proficiency.
Giving students opportunities to study nonessential curriculum:
When working together to answer the first key question of learning in a PLC — “What do we want our students to learn?” — high-performing teams divide the outcomes in their required curriculum into two simple categories: Need to Knows and Nice to Knows. Need to Knows become the grade-level essentials that teams work together to ensure that every student learns. Nice to Knows are nonessential outcomes that question 4 students can be exposed to as a part of extension tasks.
Teaching students above grade-level curriculum:
Learning in most content areas is progressional. The concepts and skills that students are introduced to this year are designed to prepare them for success in the same content area next year. As a result, effective teachers spend time studying what it is that students have already learned and what it is that students are going to learn next. High-performing learning teams use this knowledge of learning progressions in their curriculum to create extension tasks, giving question 4 students chances to wrestle with above-grade level concepts and skills.
Introducing students to real-life examples of essential outcomes in action:
Students of all ages have an inherent need to see value in the content and skills that they are being asked to master. Engagement, then, is dependent on ensuring that students have a clear sense of why their learning matters. High-performing teams use this need for relevance to create extensions by introducing question 4 students to real-life examples of essential outcomes in action or by asking question 4 students to use the knowledge that they have learned to solve real-life problems.
The next step for collaborative teams is to deliberately plan for extensions at the beginning of a unit.
In When They Already Know It: How to Extend and Personalize Student Learning in a PLC at Work, Weichel, McCann and Williams argue that planning for extensions in advance helps all students to achieve at higher levels because teachers are developing a shared sense of what “working beyond mastery” looks like in action. What’s more, planning for extensions in advance also increases the likelihood that teachers can respond in the moment — addressing the needs of Question 4 students throughout a unit of study rather than putting extension off until the end of a unit.
I have three go-to strategies when planning for extensions.
They are:
Building Tiered Task Cards: My collaborative team has been tinkering with an idea that we call “tiered task cards” for a while now. Here’s a sample from our pathogens unit. We take one of our essential outcomes and build four tasks that increase in cognitive complexity using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge. Then, when students are in need of extension during a lesson — when they are already working beyond grade level expectations — we ask them to pull out their tiered task card for the unit and begin working on completing the tasks that are included on the card.
This is an example of asking students to demonstrate mastery beyond grade level proficiency and it has worked great in our room.
We call tiered task cards “turn to tasks” because they are tasks that students “turn to” when they have demonstrated mastery of our grade level standards. It has become a routine in our room —- students know what to do and often get started on their own without needing any extensive support and guidance from us.
What I love about tiered task cards is that they are easy to create AND they aren’t just busy-work. Students completing our tiered task cards are engaged in rigorous learning and not just killing time waiting for everyone else to “get caught up.”
If you need a key describing DoK levels, check out this resource from my newest book — The Big Book of Tools for Collaborative Teams in a PLC at Work.
Using Student Wonder Questions as Extension Tasks: One of the strategies that has worked well in my room over the years has been to ask students to keep track of the things that they are wondering about as we are working through a unit of study. In fact, my classroom mantra for years has been “the smartest people are always wondering.” Using this simple handout, students create a “running record” of ideas that they want to explore.
These wonder questions make for another perfect “turn to” task for students ready to work beyond grade level mastery. Whenever they place out of direct instruction or remediation being offered to others, my question 4 students can pull out their list of wonder questions and begin doing independent research to find answers to their own questions.
This accomplishes two goals. First, it reminds students that THEIR questions are just as important as the questions that TEACHERS ask them to answer. I think that is a message lost in lots of classrooms as we sprint our way through the required curriculum in time for our kids to take the end of grade exam.
This also gives students the chance to study nonessential curriculum and/or above grade level curriculum — two additional extension practices recommended by “the experts.”
Asking Students to Create Review Tutorials: A final strategy that I like to use with students who are ready for extension is to ask them to create review tutorials that can be used by other students who are still working to learn our grade level essentials. Using this handout, my students identify and evaluate potential review videos found on popular websites like YouTube or TedEd. They think carefully about whether the video teaches our content accurately and in a way that would engage grade level learners.
Once they have identified a video with potential, they develop 3-5 questions that viewers would have to answer to demonstrate mastery of the content shared in the video. Finally, they use sites like Edpuzzle or Google Forms to create their review tutorial — which is then shared on our classroom website as a tool for students as they are studying the content covered in class.
What my kids like the best about this task is that they get to watch YouTube videos during class.
What I like the best about this task is that they are working at the highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy as they evaluate and critique the videos that they are considering for their review tutorial. This gives them a second chance to think about our curriculum in a deep and meaningful way.
Can you see what all three of these strategies have in common?
All of them are planned well in advance — and can be completed by students without extensive direction from the classroom teacher. That’s essential if extensions are going to become a routine part of the work that we do in our classrooms.
If extension is “an event,” interrupting the seamless flow of our instructional plan, we aren’t going to do it very often. On the other hand, if extension is as simple as turning to a task that is already prepared, shared with, and familiar to our students, it has the chance to move even our most advanced students forward.
Does this make sense?
