Not everything we teach is essential. I have no doubt that everything we teach is important or we wouldn’t choose to teach it, right? There is, however, an elephant sized difference between what is important and what is essential when it comes to what we teach and who we are teaching. While it might seem small, determining what is essential in a blended learning classroom, or any classroom for that matter, will have a profound impact on how students learn and grow. If a skill is essential, then assess it. If it’s not, don’t. I started my teaching career at a school that had just jumped on the PLC and GVC train. We focused on building common formative and summative assessments among “like” content teachers across three different high schools. We worked to horizontally align our curriculums and, eventually, worked to vertically align our K-12 curriculums. Grade level teams were initially asked to assign standards to each learning unit. My teams had between 4-6 units a semester and we were asked to assign 5-6 different learning standards to each unit. Now, I’m in no way shape or form a math guy, but even I could see the difficulty of teaching and assessing 30-40 standards and guaranteeing that all of my students would master them all. Eventually, after tough conversations with PLC gurus (Mike Mattos, Anthony Muhammad, and Nicole Vagle), the district eased up and allowed our PLC teams to start small and build a curriculum focused on a small number of essential learnings. Narrowing our focus made learning more meaningful. Students were more engaged with a few essentials and appreciated the lack of perceived busy work they were assigned. Eventually, our district K-12 English team created a model of a graduate of our district. We decided that a student who left our district should be able to demonstrate the following five skills (these skills are still the foundation of my classroom): 1. Read and write critically. 2. Argue persuasively. 3. Collaborate effectively with peers. 4. Speak confidently. 5. Solve complex problems with no obvious answers. We connect every essential standard to one of these skills. Applied value to standards and learning targets based on their connection to them. How Do You Decide What is Essential? The protective teacher in me wants to tell you that every learning activity I have is essential. It’s not. Important? I believe so, but not essential. Essential means that you will die on a hill to teach it. It means that a student absolutely, without questions, undoubtedly, must leave your classroom having mastered this skill. It means that it is carefully selected, taught, assessed, remediated and enriched. For me, essential skills are also inter-disciplinary and cross-cutting. They have a benefit to students beyond my class. Each teacher or team of teachers must decide what is essential for their students. Take the standard below. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.2 Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text. When determining the essential learnings within this standard, it’s important to break the standard down to its bones which become learning targets.
Foundationally, students must be able to 1) determine a theme. It’s important and an essential skill in prior courses. It serves as a nice refresher for most students, but it is not something that I assess. Instead, I focus on 2) determine two or more themes. It’s what the standard calls for and is the next logical step in understanding themes. I consider this essential and all students will leave my classroom with this skill. The next target 3) analyze how two or more themes develop [...] is essential. Texts are complex and in order to solve complex problems with no obvious answer, understanding how themes and ideas develop over the course of text is an essential critical learning skill. By divorcing this skill from finding themes, I am able to provide students with targeted interventions of theme development instead of spending time covering determining themes. The final target 4) provide an objective summary is another important skill, but, again, is not essential and certainly not a skill that I am going to drive through the assessment process. However, this is a skill that I teach and spiral into my curriculums. I don’t consider it essential, but it is worth teaching. Additionally, this skill is one that previous grade levels cover extensively, so a refresher rather than a reteaching is more beneficial to my students’ learning. I cannot stress the benefit of separating the important skills from the essential skills in any learning model. It has focused my teaching and instruction as well as the scope and pacing of my curriculum.
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