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AMBITIOUS INSTRUCTION
Chapter 3 gets granular. You’ll learn how to build the tasks necessary to power ambitious instruction on the daily. Here you’ll find out ways to structure and sequence daily instruction that enables inquiry and supports students’ ability to problem solve and argue. Chapter 4 dives into facilitating rigorous learning, with a focus on launching and sustaining inquiry. Here you’ll learn how to engage students during investigations of texts and interactive argumentation—that is, how to push student thinking toward the higher levels of intellectual development we’ll discuss in this chapter. Chapter 5 provides a comprehensive agenda for both personal and schoolwide professional development that you can use to learn to take up the work in planning and daily instruction. To help you determine your entry point for changing insight into action, each chapter grounds you in the fundamentals and foundations of knowing, doing, and leading ambitious instruction, including what to look for and expect in students’ intellectual work, how to plan and facilitate instruction to support this intellectual work, and how to design professional development to improve both. I also identify opportunities throughout to jump in and get started on the work with additional direction and inspiration. Each chapter concludes with a section titled The Big Idea, which summarizes its key takeaways that you can use as talking points for your review and means of introducing ambitious instruction to others.
One Last Word Before We Begin If you’re like me, you’ve become accustomed—perhaps even desensitized—to how books on curriculum and instruction work: a catchy acronym here, a step-by-step process there, a bunch of graphic organizer templates in the back. In the decades since the concept of backward design became popular, the approach has been tried countless times: the promise of the perfect process or the perfect planning template to solve our curriculum challenges. Spoiler alert: they don’t exist. That’s because a book can’t solve teachers’ planning challenges. What it can do is position teachers to develop solutions. Process, in other words, doesn’t create rigor; it just supports you to create rigor. Process lives best in professional learning environments where you can learn through inquiry, analysis and enactment of your curriculum products, careful study of the texts and tasks, and collaborative planning around standards. Process lives or dies based on you—your thinking, your collaboration, your interests and orientations—and not templates.
