Teachers can set up opportunities to learn, but it’s up to the students to follow through, since culture emerges from the sum of their collective experiences. When students do not follow through, an instructionally agile teacher makes another move to influence them. Teachers must set up these opportunities to learn and continually try new instructional maneuvers to impact learning and confidence.
Every learning theory includes some form of regulation by the student (Brookhart, 2013a). The true test of a positive classroom culture is students’ ability to become instructionally agile and regulate their own learning. When students believe they can control the outcome of the learning process, they are more likely to learn. This might seem obvious, but students can—and do—often attribute their success to that which is external, unstable, and uncontrollable (Weiner, 1979).
For example, students who believe an assessment was easy are attributing their success to something beyond their control both in the moment and going forward. They think they are only successful if and when the teacher randomly adjusts the assessment experience. When students realize that they owe their success to internal, stable, and controlled factors (that they had everything to do with succeeding), teachers create an environment in which students expect to succeed. When they expect to succeed—when they expect to learn—a culture of learning begins to override other perspectives (for example, they got lucky or the teacher is easy) that too often dominate the classroom experience.
A culture of learning focuses on the process of learning, not just the final summative assessment score. A culture of learning, therefore, is also a culture of thinking. Teachers have the power to implement various forces to shape that kind of culture.
Forces That Shape a Culture of Thinking
In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart (2015) outlines the eight cultural forces that impact how teachers create environments of thinking. According to Ritchhart (2015), each of these forces can, if teachers intentionally implement them, shape a classroom culture that encourages thinking and deeper levels of engagement. Eliciting evidence of thinking is assessment at its best. A culture of thinking is an environment in which assessment maximizes the process of learning by allowing teachers to be agile in developing the opportunities for students to think more deeply.
Table 1.1 outlines Ritchhart’s eight cultural forces that imbue every classroom with a culture of thinking (Ritchhart, 2015).
Table 1.1: Eight Cultural Forces
| Force | Brief Explanation |
| Time | Allocate time for thinking by providing chances to explore topics in more depth as well as to formulate thoughtful responses. |
| Opportunities | Provide purposeful activities that require students to engage in thinking and developing understanding as part of their ongoing classroom experience. |
| Routines and Structures | Scaffold students’ thinking in the moment as well as provide tools and teach patterns of thinking students can use independently. |
| Language | Use a language of thinking that provides students with the vocabulary for describing and reflecting on thinking. |
| Modeling | Model who you are as thinkers and students so you discuss, share, and make visible the process of thinking. |
| Interactions and Relationships | Show respect for and value one another’s contributions of ideas and thinking in a spirit of ongoing collaborative inquiry. |
| Physical Environment | Make thinking visible by displaying the process of thinking and development of ideas. Arrange the space to facilitate thoughtful interactions. |
| Expectations | Set an agenda of understanding and convey clear expectations. Focus on the value of thinking and learning as outcomes as opposed to mere completion of work. |
Each of these forces has very real assessment implications that can impact how instructionally agile teachers can be as they respond to the emerging evidence of students’ thinking. Creating a culture of learning by examining assessment through the lens of these eight forces fosters an environment in which students can potentially come to see themselves as partners in the learning process. Table 1.2 outlines the same eight cultural forces in the classroom with their implications for assessment.
Table 1.2: Assessment Implications of the Eight Cultural Forces
| Force | Assessment Implications |
| Time | Assessment is more about quality than quantity, so while speed and ease are always desirable, effectiveness must be the primary goal. Students need ample time to think, process, and rethink throughout instruction. |
| Opportunities | Teachers must have student thinking in mind when designing quality assessments that consistently provide opportunities for students to display—and even track—their thinking. This means assessment design moves beyond just a single test to more organic, engaging, and authentic performance tasks. |
| Routines and Structures | Assessment routines and structures anchored on clear learning intentions, success criteria, and learning progressions create predictable instructional decisions that allow for scaffolding toward proficiency. |
| Language | The language of assessment can lead students toward a deeper level of thinking. Assessing why (and the interconnectedness of standards) instead of simply what allows for an integrated assessment approach. |
| Modeling | Through instruction and assessment, teachers can make their thinking visible by modeling the potential approaches students can take to grow in their learning and the struggle that often comes with thinking deeply. Modeling this struggle helps students better understand the experience they may have as they think deeply. |
| Interactions and Relationships | Assessment is relationship building. How teachers create assessments and respond to their results reveals the true nature of the student-teacher relationship. Teachers do not accept students’ failure to do the work and persistently provide feedback and scaffolded support to promote student achievement. |
| Physical Environment | Using exemplars gives students potential opportunities to demonstrate their thinking. Teachers guide them to examine the qualities of thinking within the exemplars and advise them to avoid mimicking what they’re seeing, hearing, or touching. |
| Expectations |
Setting learning intentions, success criteria, and the progression to
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