Ambitious Instruction: The Blueprint

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.

Tasks prioritize reasoning, argumentation, synthesis, and reflection as the essential processes and products of academic work.

Teachers engage all students through structured opportunities to address the demands of these kinds of tasks.

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.

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.

The good news: there’s actually nothing here you don’t already know. And everything you are going to do for planning and enacting ambitious instruction can be boiled down to a simple mantra: assign students to solve, in and through multiple modalities, a relevant but grade-appropriate problem of the discipline or content area; structure and sequence your instruction to help them solve it. You know this already. Really. But a little more detail can’t hurt. Let me introduce you to the two central tenets of ambitious instruction. 1. Problem-based learning: The best pedagogy to help students realize this kind of critical thinking is inquiry based, with clear structures and supports provided by the teacher in order to ensure students’ ideas are valued, enabled, and extended. In the pages that follow, you’ll find a vision of inquiry built around intellectual problems, collaborative meaning making and discussion, and argumentation—disciplinary literacy with a disciplined focus. 2. Synthesis: The kind of learning students should primarily be doing is critical-analytical in nature—that is, individual learners and the class engage in examined, systematic understanding of the arguments and perspectives of both texts and peers. Such a curricular focus, which I will refer to as intellectual work throughout the book, centers on interrogating and evaluating relevant problems of a given subject area, positioning students as meaning makers and subject matter as complex and worthy of meaningful exploration. So far so good, right? The four main components of such instruction, which we’ll unpack in subsequent chapters, follow suit. 1. A high-quality problem that develops students’ content knowledge and discipline-specific problem-solving skills (surprise, surprise). 2. A performance assessment designed to answer this problem through synthesis. 3. A text set, which is a group of thematically linked texts that functions as the content-area learning in support of the problem. 4. A module, which is the road map that guides learners from the launch to the completion of the end assessment—the sequence of content and instruction designed to support preparation for answering the problem. Figure I.2 (page 8) provides a visual representation of these four segments.

Highquality problem

Module

Ambitious instruction

Performance assessment

Text set

Figure I.2: Core curricular products of ambitious instruction.

Underlying what I’ve laid out so far, but as yet unstated, is your most precious commodity: time. This kind of teaching and learning is problem driven, exploratory, and requires multiple tasks and activities; it takes time. And it’s more than just a matter of the amount of time. We also must think about how we use the available time in service of intellectual learning. Class can’t just be lessons as usual. Realizing rigor, in other words, is more than simply asking students to do hard(er) things; it’s designing instructional time to help them do so. This means we cannot default to ingrained, preconceived ideas about planning. We have to let go of the notion that the school year comprises a series of units of certain and confined length (for example, four to six weeks), or that each day of instruction is a discrete lesson, to be completed by the end of the instructional time provided that day (that is, the period). There is no evidence that these structures aid either planning or student learning (Willingham, 2018). Instead, think of ambitious instruction as more than just a matter of defining essential understandings and assessments but also a matter of essential use of time—that is, how instruction is to be organized in order to enable students to solve meaningful problems in meaningful ways. Ambitious instruction is also ambitious use of instructional time.