The Big Idea

lever to both set classroom expectations and preview the kinds of literacy practices students will experience over the course of the year.

In concept and in language, what we want and ask students to know and do matters. That adage “task predicts performance” (City, Elmore, Fiarman, & Teitel, 2009, p. 30) rings true here. And now that we’ve talked about creating those problems, it’s time to turn, in chapter 2, to solving them. The extent to which solving problems is at the center of classroom work, and the quality of said problems, is likely to predict the quality, rigor, and clarity of student engagement, performance, and achievement.

Use the following key takeaways to review, reflect, and help introduce these concepts to others.

The essence of ambitious instruction is solving meaningful, rigorous, discipline-specific problems by analyzing, evaluating, and developing new arguments from multiple texts—synthesis, in other words. Effective problems are topical and attentive to the core knowledge and ways of knowing of the content under study. They are relevant, argumentative, and sophisticated. To create good problems, teachers should look to both what is essential to know and do in their course and content area and what is meaningfully arguable within the content; in tandem with developing the problem, teachers should also articulate what a sophisticated response to the problem is.