AMBITIOUS INSTRUCTION
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students. That means, among other things, the following (Cobb, Jackson, Henrick, Smith, & the MIST Team, 2018; Lampert & Graziani, 2009; McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013; Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2011). ¢
Tasks focus on key disciplinary ideas, problems, and processes of a given subject area.
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Tasks prioritize reasoning, argumentation, synthesis, and reflection as the essential processes and products of academic work.
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Teachers engage all students through structured opportunities to address the demands of these kinds of tasks.
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Teachers are responsive to individual students’ learning during learning.
In this sense, ambitious instruction is defined both by its attention to the design of certain kinds of instructional activities—that is, ones that best elicit students’ understanding and application of rich content—and by a kind of delivery of these activities that is tailored to and interactive with students in moment-to-moment engagement with the work (Lampert & Graziani, 2009; Lee, 2007). This means rigorous tasks that deeply engage students. This means strong instructional support, including structured use of inquiry and feedback, deliberately designed to sustain both students’ persistence and resilience when faced with complexity, while also maintaining high expectations for all learners. You can imagine the rest: consistent and deep interactions with texts, meaningful collaboration with and among peers, leveraging both to synthesize and construct arguments, and so on. This kind of instruction, alas, is exceedingly rare in grades 6–12 classrooms (Goldman, Snow, & Vaughn, 2016; Greenleaf & Valencia, 2017). The results when we do apply it, though? A powerful rebuttal to those who doubt students’ ability to do high-level work: research has repeatedly shown that students, especially those with persistent learning challenges, learn more and achieve greater outcomes when what we ask them to do is consistently rigorous and grade-level appropriate (Abedi & Herman, 2010; Boston & Wilhelm, 2017; TNTP, 2018). In short, rigorous instruction can be done. It must be done.
Ambitious Instruction: The Blueprint And it will. But naming it and doing it, as you know, are not the same when it comes to complex instruction. That’s why this is a book of next steps: not just a bunch of tantalizing, frustratingly abstract nouns (ambitious instruction, rigor) but a step-by-step breakdown of the will and work necessary to make them come alive in the classroom—a blueprint. To build the foundation, we need to dig deeper and get inside the actual practice involved in teaching ambitiously.
