What Did You Learn Today?

 The often lamented and laughed about classic scene around the dinner table after a long day of school goes something like this:

Adult: What did you learn at school today?

Student: Nothing

The scene is short and not likely to win an Oscar but makes a compelling point. While the dinner table has changed a great deal over the years, the question remains important. Do our students know what they learned at school today and are just cleverly veiling it from the adults in their lives? Or, is there insufficient articulation and clarity around what students should be learning?

My guess is, students would love to discontinue the back-and-forth dinner time interrogation by having a clear answer about what they learned.

Teacher clarity has a .75 effect size on John Hattie's visible learning scale. This means that when both the teacher and student have a clear and shared understanding, the learning almost doubles. As teachers, of course, we believe we have been very clear about what we are doing in class that day. However, clarity breaks down in the gap between an activity students are doing and the transferable learning they should be taking away. Students might do some annotations in a book for English, some scales and drills in music, and some guided notes in history. But what were they supposed to learn from those activities?

According to educational experts Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, there are four basic practices that create teacher clarity. First, there must be clarity of organization. Do students know where to physically and digitally find and use everything in the classroom? Can they quickly and easily locate the agenda for the day, the homework, and any other information they need for a clear vision of the class? Do they know how to use all of the digital tools? Sam Kary, of New EdTech Classroom, has fantastic video tutorials to help students understand the basics of most tech tools they might need. Additionally, Angela Watson is incredibly helpful on the teacher side with articles full of management suggestions. When students and teachers have the tools they need and understand how to use them, mental space is free for learning.

Organized materials and spaces only go so far if the explanations around the learning are unclear. Thus, Fisher and Frey next recommend clarity of explanation, as well as clarity of examples and practice. Creating clear explanations of learning requires the teacher to connect learning to standards, transferable concepts, and vocabulary. To increase clarity in this area, try a standards wall such as the one described by the Maricopa County School District. The visual of a standards wall helps create clarity, but the essential part is continually referring to it throughout the unit by adding vocabulary, student work examples, and reflection.

All of this energizing clarity culminates with clarity of assessment. If the other elements of clarity are not in place in a classroom, knowing what to assess and how to grade it is difficult. Teachers want their grade books to reflect accurate, timely, and meaningful grades. However, I know my grades often became a list of activities with arbitrary points assigned instead of a clear map of student learning. To create more clarity around assessment, try these formative assessment ideas from Edutopia and then implement these fixes for broken grades by Ken O'Connor. As clarity in the classroom increases, our assessment practices will follow.

My children have left the beauty and chaos of K-12 education, so I no longer have the opportunity to stare them down at the dinner table and ask them what they learned. As you begin this new school year, you can make clarity around transferable learning a hot dinner time topic.