for success. When teachers put in place these clear expectations for performance at a greater depth of knowledge, they make it clear to students that memorization and recall fall short of the ultimate goal.
These forces are integral to every teachers’ efforts to be precise yet flexible in all assessment efforts. The eight cultural forces must be considered as teachers implement any instructionally agile maneuver described in the following chapters. Any maneuver may work or not work to create a culture of learning, and it is often these forces that may prevent the maneuver from working well. Chapter 2 discusses how to engineer dialogue and engage in conversations to gather and respond to evidence of learning. Chapter 3 focuses on eliciting evidence through questioning. Observation is key to instructional agility, so chapter 4 explores this means of gathering evidence. Chapter 5 discusses mobilizing students to be instructionally agile on their own. Practicing is central to instructional agility, so chapter 6 illustrates various ways that practice provides opportunities for teachers to be instructionally agile. This includes shaping the role homework plays in instructional agility. Educators often debate the value of homework in supporting learning, so it’s necessary to tackle this important dilemma. Finally, chapter 7 discusses the broader context and how jurisdictions, districts, schools, and teams can be instructionally agile. The elements of these forces are front and center as teachers maximize the opportunity to be agile in response to every student, developing a rich culture of learning.
A Culture of Learning in Action
Instructional agility doesn’t just happen. Teachers must intentionally strive to be agile in response to the evidence of learning that they uncover during the assessment process. Planning for flexibility creates an assessment dichotomy with which teachers must become comfortable; the notion of planning for flexible responses seems odd and yet, it is the essence of instructional agility.
While it may seem like a paradox, instructional agility is anchored in the process of planning with precision, which leads to a response with maximum flexibility. Certainly, teachers cannot know how each student is going to respond to assessment opportunities, but they can anticipate the most typical understandings and misunderstandings students will demonstrate. Most teachers have a clear picture of the most likely results. The greater the precision in planning, the greater the opportunity in responding to meet each student’s needs. It is a front-back relationship—if teachers invest in front-end planning there is a back-end payoff of more effective and intentional instructional responses with higher achievement.
To create an instructionally agile learning environment, teachers can do a lot with design, interpretation, and response. While the remaining chapters in this book examine specific strategies teachers can use to intentionally elicit evidence and allow for maximum response agility, we explore the prerequisites in design, interpretation, and response in the following sections. We do not intend to explore each of the strategies in depth; rather, we explore strategies and prerequisites within the context of creating a culture of learning. It is one thing to have a friendly, engaging environment, but it’s quite another to go a step further to create a real culture that puts learning at the center of the student experience. From an assessment perspective, the following strategies and constructs make the words learning-centered culture a reality in the classroom: assessment design, accurate interpretation, and assessment response.
Assessment Design
Developing a culture of learning is an intentional process that begins with planning assessment outcomes. A true culture of learning makes learning the centerpiece of what students experience every day. This is the basis of the assessment architecture tenet. The following four criteria are crucial to developing a culture of learning.
1. Clear learning intentions
2. Clear success criteria
3. Learning progressions
4. Quality, learning-centered tasks
Clear Learning Intentions
A culture of learning begins by clarifying what students are supposed to learn through instruction. This is different than simply advising students on what they are going to do, since the activities they participate in are more the means than the end. Whether teachers post, communicate orally, or demonstrate learning intentions, it is vital that students are clear on the intended learning so they understand why the teacher is asking them to do particular activities or tasks.
Students often ask their teachers why they have to do, know, or show things, which can be a sign that the learning intentions are not explicit. The question is not whether teachers teach with clear learning intentions in mind; they do. But they often do not clearly articulate those learning intentions to students. Once students are clear on the intended results of the learning experience—skills, concepts, or even dispositions—they will see that there is a learning purpose behind the activities and assignments.
Clear Success Criteria
Success criteria describe the qualities of what exemplary work, performances, or tangible demonstrations look like. Here is where teachers describe—in sufficient detail—what students will do to meet the intended learning outcomes; the two go hand in hand. Learning intentions describe what they will learn, while success criteria describe how they will show what they’ve learned. Teachers can communicate success criteria orally or through examples, demonstrations, simulations, rubrics, and checklists. The advantages to each method depend on the learning goals. Performance assessments lend themselves nicely to rubrics and demonstrations, while a written composition might use a rubric along with a handful of exemplars.
The critical aspect of establishing and communicating success criteria is that they be substantive rather than trivial (Brookhart, 2007). Establishing success criteria with students must be part of a larger process with the goal of student engagement throughout the assessment experience (Andrade, 2013). Co-constructing success criteria, goal setting for individual demonstrations of learning, self-assessment, and peer assessment are all examples of how to engage students directly through assessment. (We will explore this concept in depth in chapter 5, page 99.) To establish a culture of learning, teachers must provide a clear description of what that learning will look like by articulating clear, specific success criteria. Nothing screams learning like directly communicating this is what your learning will look like.
Learning Progressions
A learning progression is an intentional sequence of learning goals and success criteria that teachers form into a model to lead students from the simplest to the most sophisticated understandings. The truth is that most teachers teach with some kind of learning progression in mind, but it’s less common to articulate that progression to the students. It is equally rare for a teacher to use the students’ assessment evidence, which illustrates where each student is in understanding the planned instructional responses. Transparency at all stages leads to understanding and engagement. Also known as learning trajectories or construct maps, progressions of learning provide the necessary model of cognition that so many assessment systems and processes seem to lack by outlining typical development over time (Brown & Wilson, 2011). Whether teachers develop the progressions through a top-down or bottom-up process (Heritage, 2013), they are essential for showing students that there is a path to reach advanced or exemplary
