I begin each year with the best of intentions. I make my little pacing guide. I map out the year: what I will “cover” each quarter. Every student will master x in quarter 1, y in quarter 2, and so forth. Easy-peasy, right?
Ummm…no. This is just not how learning works.
There is nothing wrong with having a pacing guide–you need a plan.
However, if all you’re doing is checking standards off without really focusing on authentic learning or accounting for individual student needs, you need to make some changes.
Some years ago, I came to this very realization. Stop “covering” the standards, and start teaching the kids.
So, here, then are the questions:
- How can I determine what my students need?
- How can I create a series of learning experiences that will take them from where they are to where they need to be?
- How do I personalize these learning experiences, differentiating for ability, learning modalities and preferences, personal interests, cultural considerations, etc.?
- How can I do all this for ninety-some students and not lose my mind?
The fact is that our goal for all of our students is largely the same: we want them to grow up to be competent, literate participants in our democracy. We want them to enjoy literature and glean some wisdom from it. We want them to be savvy readers of informational and so-called “news” texts, identifying bias and flaws in logic. We want them to question: Where did this information come from?
Most importantly: We want to give our students the power to express themselves. We want to give them their voice.
However, every student is different. Some of them mastered the skill of finding the main idea in the third grade and yet we keep teaching it to every student every year. Other students didn’t grasp this concept back in the third grade, and every year we reteach it in largely the same way and they still don’t get it.
Maybe they don’t have the prerequisite skills of basic comprehension.
So, how do we back up and find and then teach from the place of actual need for every student?
The following is my version of a planning method called backward design.
Step 1. Determine the end goal. What is the standard you’re addressing? How will you know when students have mastered this standard?
Step 2: Pre-assess. You have to know where students are before you can begin. (I wrote about how and why to use pre-assessments here.)
Step 3: You will evaluate the results of the pre-assessments, then reate a pathway–a series of assignments, instruction, and other learning activities–to help them get from where they are now to where they need to be, as determined in Step 1.
Here is a pathway I created for the following objective:
Students will analyze how writers use figurative language to create tone, which in turn helps create mood.
I might begin by using the introductory slides as mini-lessons, then allow students to work independently or in small groups through the rest of them, with me checking in on students’ progress, always thinking about what other supports students might need along the way.
Part 1: Figurative Language to Tone
Part 3: Tone to Mood to Theme in a Literary Text
Step 4: Flexible Grouping
Put students in groups. The group with the most need will begin with the first step on the pathway you’ve created. Position all of the other groups to places along the same pathway where they need to begin. So, this means some students will skip the first few steps of the pathway. Some will skip all of them. If this is the case, you will need to find or create learning experiences that lead students into deeper analysis of the study at hand, or you might lead them on to a new skill.
Here are some more thoughts on how and when to use flexible grouping.
Step 5: Feedback
Provide frequent opportunities to evaluate and provide personal feedback–here is where the truly personalized part comes in.
Here is a fabulous Edutopia blog post about the power of feedback–especially individualized feedback–and how it can empower students.
Inspire! Middle Grades ELA and Social Studies 