14
AMBITIOUS INSTRUCTION
Beyond being a cute anecdote, what this story exemplifies for me is the underlying spirit of ambitious instruction—blatant curiosity. People who are experts at what they do are passionate and knowledgeable about their subject matter, sure, but they are so because they are pursuing with purpose answers or solutions to that knowledge area; they work at that passion and knowing. Blatant curiosity. Blatant because it is designed, structured, educative, and intentional, and curiosity because interest and investment motivate and sustain learners, ensuring they become doers. Necessary in secondary classrooms is an intentional mix of thorough tasks that drive student engagement (curiosity) and well-thought-out capital-T teaching—modeling, an intentional sequence of activities, and feedback in the moment—to ensure students can engage in increasingly rigorous and independent ways (blatant). Blatant curiosity is our driver in this chapter and the next as we focus on planning. The focus of this chapter is on the two tenets, (1) problem-based learning and (2) synthesis, that underlie the design of ambitious instruction, from the biggest semester-level project or paper to the smallest daily activity; you’ll also learn how to start crafting problems for these big and small activities. Chapter 2 continues this focus by explaining how to put those principles in motion at the performance assessment, unit, and task levels of specificity. The purpose is simple: once you see what underlies rigor in and across content, you can more readily plan for it at the summative, unit, and daily levels.
Delving Into the Two Tenets Inquiry-based instruction is hard. I say that at the outset of a section devoted to unpacking how to do it so that it’s clear that the entry points I discuss in this chapter are just that; they’re not meant to be exhaustive when it comes to planning and enacting this kind of work. But get to truly know and live these two tenets, and the 150 other things we do and say in rich classroom instruction will begin to reveal themselves. Ambitious instruction is problem based. At the core of ambitious instruction is a rigorous and relevant problem—the kind that engages students in repeated opportunities to learn, apply, and expand content knowledge and skills. Problems are often
© 2020 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.
I never met the man, but I’m not surprised he was viewed as almost never wrong on matters of food. And that’s not because of good taste. It’s because he had such a surefire process to build expertise—or, at least, know more than other people. There’s no magic in his methods: he consciously and consistently built background knowledge, pursued questions through inquiry-based practices, sought the input and collaboration of others, and assessed his findings and ideas based on a set of criteria. It was, in a word, a rigorous way of figuring out what and where to eat.
