# data[].attributes.body
How to use questioning to increase rigor in your lessons

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Rigor. Text Complexity. Difficulty. What do these words all mean in the world of thinking? Teaching? Learning? In my last post, I wrote about a "take away" that I had from our ILA narrative scoring session. In that reflection, I realized that our students have the mechanics (mostly) and drive (mostly) to write well; however, we need to extend student thinking to develop more complex, meaningful pieces. One way to do that is to become familiar with (and use) Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DoK) to develop and expand rigor and complexity in student thinking.

I learned about Webb's Depth of Knowledge just last year when I was at a Larry Ainsworth Professional Development workshop about unwrapping Common Core State Standards and aligning our instructional sequences to those standards. Except for unwrapping standards, I humbly admit that I never really used it. I put it on a mental shelf with things that I learned about in PD sessions but would probably never use again. Then, this past summer, Chris Lehman Extraordinare (follow him on Twitter to learn every day: @iChrisLehman) refreshed my thinking by showing and modeling the importance of using Webb's Depth of Knowledge to plan daily lessons and assessments. Chris, as always, broke it down in user-friendly terms that helped me to understand and apply the information. And then again today, we focused on DoK at an assessment consortium meeting about the item development of Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) with an emphasis on the performance task assessments. Ok, three times in one year: I think it's something I should research, I realized.

So, what is Webb's Depth of Knowledge and what's the big deal? Well, like Bloom's Taxonomy, Webb's theories are based on research about student thinking to extend student learning. Bloom's Taxonomy focuses on the tasks that students complete to deepen student understanding. However, Webb's DoK centers on the thinking process, not just the product. Webb's Depth of Knowledge is about the cognitive demands (thinking process) of instruction, tasks, and/or assessments. While Bloom's Taxonomy relies on the verb, Webb's DoK extends beyond the verb to what follows--- beyond the 'what' to the 'how'. As we know, a verb alone can vary in terms of difficulty and complexity. "Create", for example, is a high level on Bloom's taxonomy. However, if you are asking students to "create a model of the human eye based on a textbook model," little independent thinking has actually occurred from copying the model. Students may not need additional background knowledge to complete the task. There is little transfer of knowledge. How many "creates" have you inserted into an objective and thought that you were tapping into higher-level, and perhaps even- critical- thinking? We all have. But W ebb's Depth of Knowledge challenges us to dig deeper beyond the verb and into the thinking process to expand student learning.

Branching off of a "flipped classroom approach" and because I don't pretend to be an expert on Webb's Depth of Knowledge, click here to review (or learn about) the four levels of Webb's Depth of Knowledge continuum:

I believe that each unit needs a mixture, or a balance, of all of the levels above. There is a place for recall and reproduction. I would even argue that the CCSS leans to recall and reproduction (DoK1) in the reading standards when "close reading" is high-lighted. Daily lessons, even, can be a combination of these levels. However, to help students grow and manage the multi-dimensional world ahead of them, we can't stop at DoK Levels 1 or 2. Just because we ask students to create or analyze doesn't necessarily mean that we are providing a deep level of thinking (nor does it mean that we haven't provided it either). We must consciously ask students to extend their thinking in order to teach them toimprove their thinking.

How do we apply Webb's Depth of Knowledge into our classrooms? Strategically. Click here for a video that walks through a social studies example addressing the content of the Gettysburg Address through the four levels of Webb's Depth of Knowledge.

If we are asking students to research, for example, here are some ways that we might be able to integrate DoK into a research unit sequentially:

DoK1. Students identify and list topics that may interest them to research. They search for books that may relate to the enduring understandings or essential questions for the unit.

DoK2. Students choose a topic and expand on it by utilizing multiple sources. Students collect and display notes based on structures that have been provided for them.

DoK3 .Students choose the note-taking strategy or structure that works for them based on many samples and practice activities provided. Students draw conclusions about different ways to assimilate the information to the reader based on the structures that we have provided and reflect on those processes in writing. Students have used differentiated reasoning to make their informed decisions.

DoK4. Students analyze and interpret the information provided to them and relay the research in any way that they choose that best exemplifies the learning process. Students make strategic choices about the information presented based on task, audience, and type of product based on their level of knowledge and analysis from multiple sources.

How does that look in Writing Workshop ? I'll give it a tentative shot in the revision process (and open for feedback or better examples, please!):

DoK1. Teacher shows students how to revise writing in a mini-lesson by adding details. Students go into their writing and identify and locate places to revise using the same strategy. (I do- you do).

DoK2. Teacher provides students strategies to revise their writing. Students go back into their writing to use some of the strategies throughout their writing and identify patterns of their own writing. The teacher may guide the student.

DoK3 . Using mentor texts, teacher mini-lessons and revision strategies, students compare and critique writing strategies and structures to revise their writing by choosing appropriate and strategic parts to enhance their meaning.

DoK4. Students develop generalizations about the types of revisions used in different parts of texts to apply multiple revision strategies to their writing. Writers are synthesizing information across many texts to think critically about the choices they are making in their writing process.

Levels 1 and 2 usually have finite, or correct, answers. Moving into levels 3 and 4, students are reasoning and exploring without the answer being exact, or "right"-- this is where the real thinking happens! Levels 3 and 4 involve a more time intense activity that requires real world investigation and application. Independently, students are accessing their resources to apply their knowledge. If we don't set students up for exciting experiences that can extend their thinking to level 4, our level 1 experiences are doomed!

Click here to view Karin Hess's Cognitive Rigor Matrix, or a professional development video with Karin Hess, which parallels Webb's Depth of Knowledge with Bloom's Taxonomy. It's a complicated chart to read, but this chart will help you recognize the difference between Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge. Sound a lot like differentiation and gradual release of responsibility?
Yup. Sounds like that to me, too. Here are additional tools that we can use to use to set students up for success based on the scaffolding and structure that all students need.

As we continue our journey of curriculum review into curriculum alignment, we must remain conscious of our questioning, our modeling, and our guidance to teach students how to extend their thinking. Students will be asked to extend their thinking on the new assessments, be it PARCC or SBAC; we must prepare them for these expectations. And is that so bad? Even if we shoot high and slightly miss the mark, haven't we developed our students to be better, independent thinkers? Sounds like a win-win to me. Rigor. Text complexity. Difficulty. Thinking. Teaching. Learning.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rigor. Text Complexity. Difficulty. What do these words all mean in the world of thinking? Teaching? Learning? In my last post, I wrote about a "take away" that I had from our ILA narrative scoring session.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
9 Ways to Make Learning Visible in the Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You have to see the change to make sure it’s happening.

# data[].attributes.body
Learn more about meeting the needs of individuals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
PreK-12: Instructor-Led Course

In this introductory online course for preK-12 educators, participants learn the research basis for UDL, practical applications of UDL to lesson design, and helpful technology tools that support flexible, inclusive instruction.

Monday, September 11 - Monday, December 11, 2023

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Find out more about CAST. We're busting barriers to learning, until learning has no limits®.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
September 1995 | Volume 53 | Number 1
Strengthening Student Engagement Pages 8-12

(and what really motivates them)?

Richard Strong, Harvey F. Silver and Amy Robinson

How, then, would we define engagement? Perhaps the best definition comes from the work of Phil Schlecty (1994), who says students who are engaged exhibit three characteristics: (1) they are attracted to their work, (2) they persist in their work despite challenges and obstacles, and (3) they take visible delight in accomplishing their work.

Most teachers have seen these signs of engagement during a project, presentation, or lively class discussion. They have caught glimpses of the inspired inner world of a child, and hoped to sustain this wonder, enthusiasm, and perseverance every day. At the same time, they may have felt stymied by traditions of reward and punishment. Our challenge is to transcend these very real difficulties and provide a practical model for understanding what our students want and need.

Goals and Needs: The SCORE

As the responses to our questions showed, people who are engaged in their work are driven by four essential goals, each of which satisfies a particular human need:

Success (the need for mastery),

Curiosity (the need for understanding),

Originality (the need for self-expression),

Relationships (the need for involvement with others).

These four goals form the acronym for our model of student engagement- SCORE. Under the right classroom conditions and at the right level for each student, they can build the motivation and Energy (to complete our acronym) that is essential for a complete and productive life. These goals can provide students with the energy to deal constructively with the complexity, confusion, repetition, and ambiguities of life (the drive toward completion).

Rethinking Motivation

The concept of "score" is a metaphor about performance, but one that also suggests a work or art, as in a musical score. By aiming to combine achievement and artistry, the SCORE model can reach beyond strict dichotomies of right/wrong and pass/fail, and even bypass the controversy about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, on which theories of educational motivation have long been based.

Extrinsic motivation-a motivator that is external to the student or the task at hand-has long been perceived as the bad boy of motivational theory. In Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn (1995) lays out the prevailing arguments against extrinsic rewards, such as grades and gold stars. He maintains that reliance on factors external to the task and to the individual consistently fails to produce any deep and long-lasting commitment to learning.

Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, comes from within, and is generally considered more durable and self-enhancing (Kohn 1993). Still, although intrinsic motivation gets much better press, it, too, has its weaknesses. As Kohn argues, because intrinsic motivation "is a concept that exists only in the context of the individual," the prescriptions its proponents offer teachers, are often too radically individualized, or too bland and abstract, to be applied in classroom settings (See "Punished by Rewards? A Conversation with Alfie Kohn," p. 13).

Perhaps it is the tradition of separating extrinsic and intrinsic motivation that is flawed. Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart recently addressed this possibility in Defying the Crowd (1995). They assert that any in-depth examination of the work of highly creative people reveals a blend of both types of motivation.

Knowing the SCORE

After taking into consideration the needs and drives we've mentioned, our model poses four important questions that teachers must ask themselves in order to score the level of engagement in their classrooms.

1. Under what conditions are students most likely to feel that they can be successful?

2. When are students most likely to become curious?

3. How can we help students satisfy their natural drive toward self-expression?

4. How can we motivate students to learn by using their natural desire to create and foster good peer relationships?

Much of what we will discuss is already taking place in classrooms across the country. The point of our SCORE model of engagement is first to help teachers discover what they are already doing right and then to encourage the cultivation of everyday classroom conditions that foster student motivation and success.

Convincing Kids They Can Succeed

Students want and need work that enables them to demonstrate and improve their sense of themselves as competent and successful human beings. This is the drive toward mastery. But success, while highly valued in our society, can be more or less motivational. People who are highly creative, for example, actually experience failure far more often than success.

Before we can use success to motivate our students to produce high-quality work, we must meet three conditions:

1. We must clearly articulate the criteria for success and provide clear, immediate, and constructive feedback.

2. We must show students that the skills they need to be successful are within their grasp by clearly and systematically modeling these skills.

3. We must help them see success as a valuable aspect of their personalities.

All this seems obvious enough, but it is remarkable how often we fail to meet these conditions for our students. Take skills. Can you remember any crucial skills that you felt you did not successfully master because they were not clearly taught? Was it finding themes in literature? Reading and interpreting primary texts? Thinking through nonroutine math problems? Typically, skills like these are routinely assigned or assumed, rather than systematically modeled or practiced by teachers.

So how can we help students master such skills? When teaching your students to find themes, for example, deliberately model interpretation. Ask your students to give you a poem you have never seen, and then interpret it both for and with them. If they are reading primary texts, use what we call the "main idea" strategy. Teach them how to find the topic (usually a noun or noun phrase), the main idea (a sentence that states the text's position on the topic), and reasons or evidence to support the main idea. If students are concerned about writer's block, remember that perhaps the most difficult task of a teacher is to teach how to think creatively. Model the process of brainstorming, demonstrating that no idea is unworthy of consideration.

These are not revolutionary ideas. They simply illustrate how easily classroom practices can be improved, thus increasing the chance that your students will succeed.

But what of the criteria for success? Teachers define success in many ways. We must not only broaden our definition, but also make sure the definition is clear to everyone. In this way, students will know when they have done a good job, and they will know how to improve their work.

To achieve this clarity, we can present examples of work that illustrate high, average, and low levels of achievement. Such exemplars can significantly motivate students, as well as increase their understanding of their own ability to achieve.

Arousing Curiosity

Students want and need work that stimulates their curiosity and awakens their desire for deep understanding. People are naturally curious about a variety of things. Einstein wondered his whole life about the relationships among gravity, space, and electromagnetic radiation. Deborah Tannen, the prominent linguistic psychologist, has spent years pondering the obstacles that prevent men and women from conversing meaningfully.

How can we ensure that our curriculum arouses intense curiosity? By making sure it features two defining characteristics: the information about a topic is fragmentary or contradictory, and the topic relates to students' personal lives.

It is precisely the lack of organization of a body of information that compels us to understand it further. This may explain why textbooks, which are highly organized, rarely arouse student interest. We have stimulated students' curiosity by using a strategy called "mystery." We confront the class with a problem-for example, "What killed off the dinosaurs?"-and with the actual clues that scientists or historians have used to try to answer that question and others. Clues might include:

Mammals survived the changes that killed the dinosaurs.

Chickens under stress lay eggs with thinner shells than do chickens not under stress.

While flowering plants evolved, dinosaurs increased in population and in number of species.

Some flowering plants contain alkaloids.

Students then work together in groups, retracing the steps scientists took in weighing the available evidence to arrive at an explanation. We have seen students work diligently for several days dealing with false hypotheses and red herrings, taking great delight when the solutions begin to emerge.

As for topics that relate to students' lives, the connection here cannot be superficial; it must involve an issue or idea that is both manageable and unresolved. We must ask, With what issues are adolescents wrestling? How can we connect them to our curriculum? Figure 1 illustrates some possibilities for adolescents.

Encouraging Originality

Students want and need work that permits them to express their autonomy and originality, enabling them to discover who they are and who they want to be. Unfortunately, the ways schools traditionally focus on creativity actually thwart the drive toward self-expression. There are several reasons for this.

First, schools frequently design whole programs (art, for example) around projects that teach technique rather than self-expression. Second, very often only students who display the most talent have access to audiences, thus cutting off all other students from feedback and a sense of purpose. Finally, and perhaps most destructive, schools frequently view creativity as a form of play, and thus fail to maintain the high standards and sense of seriousness that make creative work meaningful.

How, then, should self-expression be encouraged? There are several ways.

Connect creative projects to students' personal ideas and concerns. One of our favorite teachers begins her study of ceramics by having students examine objects found in the homes of a variety of ancient civilizations. She then asks the class to design a ceramic object that expresses their feeling about their home.

Expand what counts as an audience. One of the most successful creative projects we have seen involved an audience of one. Each student in a middle school class was linked to an older member of the community and asked to write that person's "autobiography."

Consider giving students more choice. The medium of expression, for example, is often as important to an artist as the expression itself. What would have happened to the great tradition of American blues if the early musicians were forced to adhere to traditions of European music? This is one more argument for instructional methods that emphasize learning styles, multiple intelligences, and cultural diversity.

Use the "abstracting" strategy to help students fully understand a genre and to maintain high standards (Marzano et al. 1992). Too often, students prefer video art to a book because they perceive it as less demanding or requiring less commitment. Teaching students to abstract the essence of a genre will change their perceptions.

Begin by studying examples of high-quality work within a genre (the science-fiction story, poster art, sonnets, frontier diaries, television news programs, and so on). Examine the structure of the works and the standards by which they are judged. Then, ask students to produce their own work in that genre that expresses their own concerns, attempting to meet the high standards embodied in the original work. Finally, have the students ask themselves four questions about their work: How good is my technique? Does my work truly express my own concerns? Does it demonstrate my understanding of the genre in which I am working? Does it successfully relate to its audience?

Some people worry that the stringency of this model might actually block self-expression, but our experience is precisely the opposite. Students' drive toward self-expression is ultimately a drive to produce work that is of value to others. Lower standards work to repress, not to enhance, the creation of high-quality work.

Fostering Peer Relations

Students want and need work that will enhance their relationships with people they care about. This drive toward interpersonal involvement is pervasive in all our lives. Further, most of us work hardest on those relationships that are reciprocal-what you have to offer is of value to me, and what I have to offer is of some value to you. In general, unbalanced, nonreciprocal relationships prove transient and fail to generate much energy or interest.

How does this insight apply to life in the classroom? Consider a student's perception of homework. The only relationship that can be advanced through the typical homework assignment is the one between student and teacher. And this relationship is essentially unbalanced. Students do not feel that the teacher needs their knowledge, and the teacher, with possibly 145 students a day, probably isn't seeking a deep relationship either.

But suppose student work is complementary: one student's job is to learn about tortoises, another's is to learn about snakes, and a third student is boning up on lizards. After they do their research, they jointly develop a poster comparing and contrasting these three reptile types. The students actually need one another's knowledge.

Annemarie Palincsar Brown has applied this "jigsaw" strategy to inner-city students using in-classroom computer networks (Brown et al. 1993). She found that it significantly improved their motivation, reading, and writing. Elizabeth Cohen (1994) builds reciprocal groups by asking students with different talents and abilities to work on one project that requires all of their gifts.

Orchestrating Classroom Performance

As teachers, the first thing we should try to "score" is our own performance. Different people value the four goals we have discussed to different degrees in different situations. Which ones are particularly important to you? How does this preference affect the way you run your classroom? By observing and understanding how classroom conditions can create or repress student engagement, we can gradually move toward a more successful, curious, creative, and reciprocal school system.

All students, to some extent, seek mastery, understanding, self-expression, and positive interpersonal relationships. But they are all different as well. Imagine what could happen if we engaged our students in a discussion of these four types of motivation. What might they tell us about themselves and their classrooms? Could we actually teach them to design their own work in ways that match their own unique potential for engagement?

Last, we can score the change process itself. What professional conditions block teachers' motivation? We can redesign staff development to promote understanding and respect among school staff members.

By seeking to break down boundaries between teacher and teacher, teacher and student, student and the learning process, we will learn what students want and need. As a result, more and more teachers may go to bed at night remembering the images of wonder, enthusiasm, and perseverance on the faces of their students.

References

Brown, A., D. Ash, M. Rutherford, K. Nakagawa, A. Gordon, and J. Campione. (1993). "Distributed Expertise in the Classroom." In Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, edited by G. Salomon. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cohen, E. G. (1994). Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom. 2nd Edition. New York: Teachers College Press.

Kohn, A. (1993). Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Marzano, R., D. Pickering, D. Arredondo, G. Blackburn, R. Brandt, and C. Moffett. (1992). Dimensions of Learning. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Schlecty, P. (January 1994). "Increasing Student Engagement." Missouri Leadership Academy.

Sternberg, R. J., and T. I. Lubart. (1995). Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity. New York: The Free Press.

Richard Strong is Vice President and Director of Curriculum Development, Harvey F. Silver is Vice President and Director of Program Development, and Amy Robinson is Director of Research and Publishing, Hanson Silver Strong and Associates Inc., 34 Washington Rd., Princeton Junction, NJ 08550.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Strengthening Student Engagement: What Do Students Want

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
September 1995 | Volume 53 | Number 1 Strengthening Student Engagement Pages 8-12 (and what really motivates them)? Richard Strong, Harvey F. Silver and Amy Robinson How, then, would we define engagement?