One Last Word Before We Begin

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.

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.

This book, if you haven’t already noticed, has a slant. It is not an exhaustive attempt at covering the whole of instruction. It does not purport to be the answer to every day of instruction in your classroom. What it does is leverage the results of key research to conceptualize and codify a kind of instruction that, if implemented regularly, can significantly impact students’ ability to read, write, and think within and across disciplines.

Again, keep in mind that what follows is not a definitive vision of teaching; it may and should lead to more questions as you plan and implement—that’s inquiry, after all. Inquiry is what to aim for and around. Approach these chapters as opportunities to experiment and learn from your work, to test and uncover. Aim for integration, too. Look for ways the principles and practices in this book can refine and enhance existing instruction, rather than erase it.

Opportunities and constraints surrounding rigor are the same as they have always been. Many schools—including, perhaps, your own—have focused or are focusing on rigor; many schools fail, often because they fail to build buy-in for doing the work in the first place. In the end, and especially at the start, it’s less about what teachers know and can do instructionally and much more about belief and mindset—that this approach is worth teachers’ time and effort, and that students can do this level of work. Building consensus regarding the effort and developing a common language and approach for doing so is critical to meaningfully changing your school’s instructional core. Because while the challenges of supporting struggling learners are very real, teachers don’t have a choice: the Common Core and other next generation college- and career-ready frameworks make it clear that all students are expected to learn and be proficient in, say, developing evidence-based arguments from the reading and analysis of multiple sources. This cannot be argued. Rather than seeing such competency as some level to reach, or beyond the current capacity of our students, we need to see the learning of it as the means to help students achieve proficiency and be college ready. We need to believe it is the core of our work. And that is why it is the core of this book.