Rigor by Design, Not by Chance with Dr. Karin Hess, ep. 184

Rigor by Design, Not by Chance with Dr. Karin Hess, ep. 184, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

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Chrissy Beltran  00:28

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Chrissy Beltran  01:04

Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach and every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an elementary teacher who became a coach, and I had to create my own coaching program that worked. Now I teach coaches how to design their coaching programs, build a school wide action plan and use differentiated strategies to support teachers. Plus, I’ve got a special spot in my heart for literacy coaches. Now let’s dig into the episode.

Chrissy Beltran  01:31

Hey, coach, and welcome to episode 184 of instructional coaching with Miss B. We are talking today about planning for rigor with Dr. Karen Hesse. Isn’t that amazing? I am so excited because I can remember being a coach, a campus coach. And we were getting training on depth of knowledge and training on rigor and the cognitive rigor matrix and learning about all these things and using them for instructional rounds and doing all this cool stuff. And now I get to talk to the person who made it. And that is amazing to me. So I cannot wait to share this episode with you. If you’re a literacy coach, and you’re trying to figure out where to start, go to my five priorities free email course. And you can get that at buzzing with Ms. b.com. Slash literacy coach five priorities with a little video sent right to your inbox that will tell you what to focus on if you are unsure. And it’ll give you a good place to start. So back to Dr. Karen Hesse, Dr. Karen has to has done all this amazing work around depth of knowledge and rigor. And I feel like so many times we get the information kind of shared with us after it’s gone through many voices. So like as a campus bass coach, you might have a district personnel that trains you in something that they went to, right, they get to go to the conference, they come back and they train you, you turn around train your teachers. And so we have this trainer of trainers model and this kind of information flowing downhill, you know, over time, and it loses something right. And so I’m really excited to bring Karen has directly to you today, so that you can hear from the horse’s mouth exactly what this learning is intended to look like. So let’s welcome Dr. Karen Hesse to the podcast. Welcome.

Dr. Karin Hess  03:08

Thank you.

Chrissy Beltran  03:09

I’m so glad to have you here today. And I really appreciate you making time to chat with us. Before we get started in talking about rigor, specifically, I would love to hear about a few things so we can get to know you a little better. Who do you help? And how do you spend most of your time and energy at work?

Dr. Karin Hess  03:26

Well, that’s a big question. Primarily, I work with school leaders, instructional coaches. And I think it’s important because if I’m only working for a few hours with people, I want someone on the ground to support the work. That doesn’t mean I don’t support teachers as well. But I like to engage the school leaders and the instructional coaches. So the work continues. It’s

Chrissy Beltran  03:55

such a good point. Yeah. So and then the other question that I would love to hear about is what are your favorite pastimes?

Dr. Karin Hess  04:04

Yeah, it’s, I’m a busy person. So it’s hard to have pastimes, but I get it. Um, I have six grandchildren. So they keep me busy. And I’m glad that they live close enough that I can see them engage in all kinds of sports and activities. I also a master gardener. And so for that. We contribute time community service. I’m not a lot out of prison with community service and we do community service to take care of gardens locally in our local library. We grow a food shelf garden.

Chrissy Beltran  04:38

Oh, that’s so neat. I love that.

Dr. Karin Hess  04:41

Yeah. So that keeps me busy. All the good weather days and then we get together and plan gardening.

Chrissy Beltran  04:49

Talk about gardening when you can’t garden. So Right. I love that. All right. Well, thank you so much. Okay, to get started, I would love to just start with a basic definition. If you can define rigor for us, and then maybe explain some misconceptions that you’ve seen about rigor and depth of knowledge,

Dr. Karin Hess  05:06

right? So there are, it’s almost like you have to start with the misconceptions. To define rigor. Many people define rigor as harder. All kids can’t do it, give kids more work. And actually, I always use the phrase cognitive rigor, because cognitive rigor is not rigid. It’s flexible thinking involves a combination of the tasks that you asked students to do, as well as the complexity of the content they’re working with. And if you kind of think about ways those two interact, I could give you content you already have learned and asked you to do something more complex with it. Or I could give you a very complex content and give you easier tasks to begin with. So if that combination, until we get to the point where cognitive rigor is, I can tackle a complex problem, I can self direct the tasks that I do with that. And that takes a lot of planning. It really

Chrissy Beltran  06:12

does. It really does. That’s why I call this episode planning for rigor. Because whenever we’re supporting teachers and thinking about this, they have to be very thoughtful, because sometimes you’ll see, okay, here’s my checklist, and I’m just gonna, I’m gonna throw in a very rigorous question here, I’m gonna throw in a very rigorous, rigorous assignment we’re going to do and they just kind of want to jump in there. And the kids have not had the scaffolding to get to that point. Yeah,

Dr. Karin Hess  06:34

absolutely. As a matter of fact, I think sometimes people think it is that one question. Or what I talk about is, it’s a series of questions, if you don’t get the answer the first time, dig a little deeper, ask another question. And so some of it is spontaneous. But you have to plan for all the possibilities, if you want to get to a deeper understanding.

Chrissy Beltran  06:57

That’s a real I love that idea of planning for all the possibilities, because we want kids to uncover and discover, but we also have to have some kind of an idea of where it could go, and how we can guide it. Right,

Dr. Karin Hess  07:09

right. It’s like, it’s like you’re planning a trip, you do know what the destination is, but you’ve got different routes to get there. And I think sometimes we are so narrowly focused on there’s one way to get there that we don’t allow for the flexibility where often, if we give kids the opportunity to say how would you like to approach this problem? We find out that they are bringing your prior knowledge into the task,

Chrissy Beltran  07:35

which is learning. Yeah.

Dr. Karin Hess  07:38

And a little productive struggle? Yes.

Chrissy Beltran  07:40

Yeah. I love it. Okay, so I have a specific question about the HEC cognitive rigor matrix. Because I have personal experience in using this as a classroom or as a campus coach, whenever we were first trained on rigor and depth of knowledge several years ago. Well, actually, Pitts coming up now on about 10 or 11 years, or nine or 10 years ago, it’s been a while, I guess. We were, you know, given these cognitive rigor matrices, and we were using them to, you know, analyze lessons and to do some planning. And as part of our instructional rounds, we would actually visit classrooms, and have conversations about what we were seeing. So what is your what is the way that these are intended to be used? Because sometimes by the time it trickles down to schools, it doesn’t look like the intended use anymore? Sure. Sure.

Dr. Karin Hess  08:27

Well, first, let me say, I started with just two of these matrices and ELA, social studies and math science. And I thought that that would help people to just see the difference between Bloom’s Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge. But as I read cognitive science, I discovered that each content area has its own schema, that means it has its own protocols, concepts, skills. And so I started to expand what I what I had into social studies, fine arts, and other areas. So expanding the idea of depth of knowledge. So then the second intent was to show how it might look in your content area. And you could analyze the kinds of questions you ask on tests, or you could analyze your lesson planning. But there’s a lot of information in each matrix. So then the third step became when people said, well, how can we simplify this so that it doesn’t become cumbersome? I started to think about the role that the teacher plays in planning and what they want the students to do the success criteria. And so I’ve, I’ve proposed that there’s a simplified version of all of those matrices. It says, here’s the thing a teacher could do. If you’re focusing on depth of knowledge, one, you might model you might provide direct support But as you move through the depth of knowledge levels, the teacher questioning changes, the teacher support changes, and what the students are asked to do changes. So if we want kids to think deeply, we need to make that shift to stand back, give students a little bit more control. And so that’s an opportunity to look at the matrix and say, Well, what are some possible ways I could give students the opportunity to design a model, for example, or find supporting evidence? Because that’s when I get out of the way as the teacher? And I allow multiple possible right answers. Hmm.

Chrissy Beltran  10:38

Yeah, you know, one of the things that I can remember, in working on instructional rounds with this matrix and going to classrooms and observing is, I can remember people debating whether what the child said was at a certain depth of knowledge or not, not whether the assignment was structured in that way. Right. And so that was, that kind of depended on which child you asked at what point in their work, I felt like. And so that was a to me, I was like, I don’t know that I would settle on this being depth of knowledge to because this one child said this whenever the whole classroom is doing this kind of work. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Dr. Karin Hess  11:20

I do. And it’s a question that comes up a lot. So that’s why a probing question is important. That’s why scaffolding is important. Because if my intent is for a student to find supporting evidence and provide reasoning for why that’s good evidence, a student might provide a superficial piece of evidence, I don’t settle for that. I say, Well, how does that support your thinking, I need to keep probing because if I want the response to be at a DNA three, I have to work sometimes to get that response. And so I think it’s sort of like, I just read a really interesting article that said, it’s like the first draft, when a student is writing an essay, the first draft is, doesn’t have all the information you need. And you go back and you revise until it’s a completed draft. And you might have to go back to three or four or five times. And for some reason, we don’t think of that when we’re teaching. We don’t think of it. Well, that’s a first draft answer. Yeah, I need to continue to support your thinking, or have you talked to a partner and then see if your thinking has changed. So it’s not just what the initial responses of the student, but if the success criteria is the student will uncover a flaw in the design of this investigation? And I have to work to get this to teach the student how to do that. And then to get the students to do that. And so it’s not like fill in the blank. You got it right, or you got it wrong?

Chrissy Beltran  12:58

Yes, yes. So sometimes, you know, in those rounds, visiting a classroom for 10 minutes, and watching a lesson, you may miss the pieces that really tell you what level that student was going to think at after they’ve gotten through all of the pieces of this lesson.

Dr. Karin Hess  13:13

Yeah. So one of the things I have, and I know we’re going to get into my rigor by design book, I designed a simple walkthrough tool. So you would write down what you saw, then you’d go back and you say, Well, where does this fit in terms of the student responses and what the teacher structured. And you would find that if the teacher did a good job structuring the task, then they’re probably going to get the results. But if they, if you said, Turn and talk to your partner about this, and you didn’t give any parameters, you’re not going to get quality response. If you said, Turn and talk, I want to come up with three examples and explain your reasoning by those examples. Now, that’s structure. And I would be jotting down the teacher question. And then I’d be watching for what are the students say, because it’s so clear what the expectation is, they’re going to be more successful. It’s about clarity, clarity of expectations,

Chrissy Beltran  14:11

yes. And then the scaffolding over time, because the first time I asked children to do that, I’m gonna have to model it, I’m gonna have to have the, you know, partners, we’re gonna have to do lots of things in order to get kids to be able to learn that on their own.

Dr. Karin Hess  14:23

Absolutely, absolutely. Yes. And

Chrissy Beltran  14:26

that’s real teaching. That’s real. To me. It takes time. It’s fun. Yes, shocking. Take time. It takes so much work to get to kit get kids just to even understand what it is that you’re asking them to do sometimes asking them to do things that are not found in the wild,

Dr. Karin Hess  14:41

most of the time. Yeah. And the more we can connect it to their personal experience. That’s one thing that I’ve also found with this engagement is higher when we start with the personal connection, and then we move to the cognitive engagement. We weren’t cognitive engagement. We’re not going to get it If this isn’t meaningful to you, so I have to cook you personally. And then you’re willing to go deeper with me. Hmm, that’s a huge takeaway. And often in my workshops, that’s the takeaway people mentioned is like, they hadn’t thought about it before. Like, we just read a story. And I want to know, would you want that person as a friend? So respond on a personal level? First? What are the characteristics? What are the character traits of that person? What did that person say? Do? What are the motivations? Now we’re getting into character traits, finding supporting evidence, but had to book you to think about the character on a personal level first, yes.

Chrissy Beltran  15:41

And so many people would say, well, that question is kind of like a, just a kind of a throwaway personal connection, they wouldn’t realize that you could take that question and use it to get into so much learning about character traits and analyzing and making inferences about you know who they are. And, yeah, that’s great. Yeah.

Dr. Karin Hess  15:58

And it’s what the research tells us. Engagement starts on a personal level, while you open the podcast saying, tell us about you. That makes people interested in hearing what I have to say, if they make a connection with me on a personal level.

Chrissy Beltran  16:13

That’s true. That’s why I moved the question to the front, actually, but I didn’t think about it in that way. But I thought, just, you know, it would make more sense that people might want to know a little bit about the person before we got into the information instead of at the end, when we ask a fun question, you know, at the beginning, because then you know, the person is a person, not just by their information. So that’s true. Good point. Well, then I will definitely keep that question at the beginning, because I was unsure if I liked it, but I do. I like that. Okay, so you mentioned your new book, rigor by design, not by chance. And I would love for you to dig into that book and kind of introduce, I know that one of the concepts in the book is actionable assessments. So could you talk about that a little bit?

Dr. Karin Hess  16:53

Sure. That’s a phrase we see in the literature a lot. We want actionable assessments. When I thought about this book, I couldn’t find a good definition of actionable assessment. So when you can’t find a definition, you create a definition that makes sense. So I see three things. One, it’s an assessment that uncovers the thinking of students. It doesn’t just tell us what they memorized. So when, as a former math teacher, I used to say, show your work. And then I would be looking at the homework. And I’d be saying, I wonder what they were thinking when they did this other words, they weren’t showing me their thinking they were showing me calculation, but I didn’t know why they were doing what they were doing. Yes. So uncover the thinking is the first thing. The second thing is that on a tell me where they are on a continuum, so because I know where I’m going, I know. But they have to pack to get go on this trip. So I have to know where they are, so I can move them to the next level. And then the third is, it allows me to give them feedback that’s actionable, so that they can take action they can own what they might do next, I might it might be come as a suggestion. Here’s some possibilities of how you might do this. Here’s how close you are to the final expectation. What do you need help on. So it turns it back to the student and becomes actionable for the student. A lot of times we think feedback is just teacher giving advice. Grant Wiggins used to say there’s a difference between advice. Here’s what you have to do. And feedback. Here’s how close you are to where you’re going. And here’s some ways to get there. Now you you pick, pick your path. Do you want to work with a partner? Do you want? Do you need some practice on this? You know, there are a lot of different ways students could choose to take action. And what we know from the research is that when kids can see their own growth, they are more motivated by seeing their own progress than anything else. So if that’s the number one reason kids are motivated to do better, we want to help them see how they can take control and actually make progress. A lot of times kids will tell me, I have to work harder. And I’ll say what are you working on? I don’t I don’t know. I don’t know what to work on. I just working hard. So it’s like, if I know what the goalpost is, then I can know if I’m getting closer to it. Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran  19:30

that makes so much sense. I think instructional coaches have probably done a lot of thinking about advice versus feedback because we know telling a teacher will try this do this rarely sticks because it was your thought and your solution to the problem. But if we can give them feedback and some possibilities and then say you know you may have another idea, then they will take it and actually can can try something out and see how it works for them.

Dr. Karin Hess  19:54

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s hard because if I know if I feel like I know More than you, then I want to, I want to say, here’s, here’s what you want to do. It’s hard to pull back. But it’s just like teachers have to pull back a little bit from students. And to say you’re this close. Let’s look at the what the rubric says, Oh, you need more? Let’s find your descriptive wording. Do you have do you think have enough life, partner up with a peer and get some advice or feedback from them? So often, it’s taking it off of the teacher to be giving advice and getting feedback, hearing three other possibility possible suggestion from other students? Yeah.

Chrissy Beltran  20:36

When the teacher is your only audience? And the only place? Yeah, we I mean, especially in writing, you know, I love teaching all content areas. But writing is just one of those things that it’s just bring so much joy. And when you’re the only audience for that child, they’re not. They’re not engaging in that authentic writing for different purposes and different people. And oh, yeah, that’s a good, really good point. So now, it will you also outline in your book, these five teacher moves that can foster deeper thinking and learning. And so can you talk us through a little bit of why you settle on these specific moves? Yeah,

Dr. Karin Hess  21:12

I’ve done a ton of reading and researching. And it all came back to, if you will, these five broad areas, the way we ask questions, and there are a lot of books on questioning strategies. But the way I word it is ask a series of probing questions that increase in complexity. So in other words, my questions are going to probe for information, I’m not just going to have one good question, I’m going to have another one. Another one, even if it’s like, what else do you know? What else can you tell me? Can you say more about that, I’m going to keep probing until I get to something deeper. So there’s all different ways you can do that. Everything from a turn and talk that takes 30 seconds to a Socratic seminar that takes a lesson to plan it. And another lesson to perform that Socratic seminar, there’s a whole range. The second is building schema. And this is a thing that teachers might accidentally do, but not intentionally do. And it’s allowing kids to build mental maps of how the content fits together. So I’ve been in classrooms where the teacher writes notes on the board and the kids copy it. That’s not building schema that’s copying the teachers notes that’s being compliant. But it starts with drawing as well as writing. So sketching doodling, some teachers are called Doodle notes. Doodle something, doodle a word did a little picture that helped me remember this. And it might start with just reading a simple story to kindergarten students. And in the first box, doodle, something that will help you remember how the story began. And then doodle something else. And let’s write one or two words that remind you who the characters were. And I’ve seen examples of this all the way through high school. And what the research says about building schema, building mental maps, is that students will retain more because it’s their words, their doodles, it’s one of the best test taking test prep skill set strategies, because they’re looking at things that remind them where information goes. So the idea is, when new information comes in, I know where it belongs, it fits somewhere. And when I look at something like an essay or a math problem, I have a schema for what to look for in that problem. So I know what the parts are, know how the parts work together. And it’s a simple concept. But it’s very powerful. And if we want kids to have long term memory, it’s matter of fact, research says that, when we experiencing when we experience something, it’s an episode, we remember it better than if we just try to memorize things. So we have to take all the things that one could soaring, have them create that episode, in their minds, like how do these pieces fit together?

Chrissy Beltran  24:07

Yeah, that’s like, you know, I feel very smart right now, because that is one of the strategies that I would have students use on their assessments and for better comprehension, and different is lots of doodling and lots of like, let’s pull out what’s important and make a sketch is called quick sketches. And it was I found it very powerful. And I think sometimes people were like, Oh, I just haven’t write three or four words, and that’s okay. But I felt like the sketches just gave them such a better. It’s stuck better.

Dr. Karin Hess  24:34

It connected the words in some way. Yeah, yeah. So they always say a picture’s worth 1000 words. And it’s really true for your brain. If you draw a little sketch, you remember more of it than if you just write a word? Yes. And

Chrissy Beltran  24:47

then they can pull words out from the sketch once they have it, but I felt like starting with that sketch was just really powerful. So I led to it,

Dr. Karin Hess  24:54

add to it, build it. Yes,

Chrissy Beltran  24:56

I love that’s

Dr. Karin Hess  24:57

building schema. There it is. Sit are ways to strategically scaffold. A lot of teachers use scaffolding. But my point here is, Do they really think about? Does every student need this strategy? Maybe everybody, the class doesn’t need the strategy. Maybe only certain students need it. So I identify three key times when we ought to think about scaffolding when we’re trying to build language skills. And all students might not need those strategies, but they’re really going to help those students. A second is to support executive functioning. Those kids who can’t keep everything straight, there are ways to break it down into smaller parts. So you remember all the steps. I remember as a teacher saying, This is what we’re going to be doing today, you’re going to do these three things. And within five minutes, there were always a few students who’d say, wait a minute, what are we supposed to do? Where do we get that? So it may be all kids, but maybe some kids who will benefit from checkpoints, check in with him, when you get this done. Check in with me. That’s okay. It, it’s like it’s okay, if you learn it a little bit more meticulously than someone else does, because the idea is learning not doing it as fast as you can. Right. And then the third is scaffolding. So you go deeper. And so I have sentence stems for all of those because we know sentence stems, sentence frames are good starting points. But they look different. When you’re building language. They look different when you’re building executive function skills, and they look different when you are deepening the understanding. So that whole chapter says there’s a lot of ways to help kids go deep, because a misconception is, I’m sorry, all kids can’t do this. And they can if we change what we’re doing. So when it comes down to and then and you might have noticed a is ask probing questions be is build schema C is considered scaffolding, we’re up to D. D is designed complex tasks. And sometimes we stopped short of giving kids a challenging task. We want them to learn the foundational skills. And then we go to more foundational skills and more foundational skills. And students are saying, Why do we have to learn this, they don’t see the connection? What if we say, well, we’re going to create a podcast, you’re going to put this together to share with your peers, oh, now there’s a purpose for it. And sometimes they need to know the purpose, the purpose is something more complex, and it’s going to produce some productive struggle, because I might not I had students say, Mrs. House we don’t know how to do, I don’t know how to put a video together. That’s what I’m here for. I will help you learn those skills, I will guide you through putting, you know, putting a shooting script together and then using the camera is just a lot of skills. But sometimes we think how am I going to have time to do a complex task. And I would say that it should be embedded in instruction, it should transfer what they’ve already learned into some realistic way you might use the skills. So you know, you mentioned you know, the audience of one is the teacher, while just changing the audience and saying, we’re gonna write poetry, we’re gonna have a poetry slam. That’s a way poetry is read into an audience. And we’re, we’re maybe we’re gonna vote on what got the best reaction. So just creating authentic opportunities to share what they know. And, and I’ve got a lot of easy tools and examples to be able to do that. And then the final E is engaging kids in metacognition reflection. And this is about the process of learning. When you are learning, you’re being metacognitive. Right now, you are processing a lot of what I’m saying, and you’re connecting it to things that you did in your own career. After the podcast, you’ll be reflecting on maybe something you heard. So they’re both important. So during the lesson, that’s where we stop and say, Don’t do the exit card at the end, do it every 10 to 15 minutes process during the lesson. And then the reflection is what did you learn from this? How would you do this differently next time? How could you improve upon this? That’s powerful because it says even if my project kind of was a flop, I learned a lot from doing it, and I could do it better next time. In the real world. Adults do that all the time. Hmm, absolutely. Those are the teacher moves. And with each teacher move, there are probably 20 to 30 suggested strategies that go from least to most complex so you could easily pull from the examples or modify many examples and a lot of teachers will say, I see some of the things I’m doing so I validates But what they’re doing and why they’re doing, which is powerful to absolutely,

Chrissy Beltran  30:03

yeah. And then they can maybe be more thoughtful about why they’re doing it because they’ll have more of the background. Maybe they can round it out a little bit, because that’s sometimes you think, Oh, I kind of do this, but I can adjust it to do that, right? Absolutely.

Dr. Karin Hess  30:16

Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. And so the last piece is the actual assessment cycle. This isn’t about, I’ve seen books with tons of great strategies, I haven’t there on the shelf behind them. But it’s like, how do you put it together? So I like to think of, we all often talk about a learning cycle. And I thought long and hard about this. For actionable assessment. When you uncover thinking you start with something small, you uncover what kids are thinking, you say, this is what they must know. Here’s where we go. Next, I’m going to give you something a little bit more complex. And I uncovered the thinking there and something a little bit more complex. So I’m building to that complex task. I’m not just saying it’s Thursday, we’re going to do math problem solving today. We didn’t do any lead up to that. It’s teaching you how to plan all the parts of writing a play before you actually write the play. So the actual assessment cycle begins with saying, What’s my overarching learning goal. So that would be like the the goal for the unit. If the goal for the unit students will apply their understanding of division and fair shares, to be able to solve real world problems, let’s say I’ve got to teach them about division. I’ve got to teach them about fair shares. Those are some of the earlier learning targets. And then I’m going to give them more than one more than one problem solving tasks using division and understanding the concept of a fair share. So that’s the other piece to this, I talk about it as drills, like you’re on the team and you come to practice and you do the drills, then you do a lot of scrimmaging, the scrimmaging are multiple opportunities to apply it before you go play the game, the summative assessment, and I think sometimes a lot of teachers will jump to the summative assessment, like you made the team now we’re gonna go to a game and like, wait a minute, I need more practice. So the scrimmages are powerful. And that’s all part of that cycle. And you have enough evidence that’s compelling to say, a student is proficient. And it’s different than saying, you’re proficient on the standard about how to do division. That’s one little piece of it. But there’s the problem solving piece. There’s the conceptual piece, why, what does division give us it’s about a fair share. And then it’s like, can you apply it in a problem solving situation? So that bigger piece to show proficiency, you’ve got to show how you can transfer your knowledge of those little pieces into something more complex. So

Chrissy Beltran  33:00

that’s kind of speaking to that, that relationship of the actionable assessment, right, looking at the gradient of the skills that kids need to be able to progression, a thing right need to be? Absolutely,

Dr. Karin Hess  33:10

absolutely. And I will say that the way I sometimes these things come to me, you know, middle of night, in the shower, I don’t know where they come from. But I discovered that if you just write your learning goal for your unit, and then underline all the phrases in that goal that are things that kids have to learn. You can develop learning targets, from the things you’ve underlined. And then you could say, what’s the least complex? What’s a little bit more? And where am I going to end up? And even teachers who already have learning targets for a unit will honestly say, the first learning target doesn’t get us to the second one, the second one doesn’t get us to the third one. They’re just new information learning target new information learning target. And this is what makes it a cycle. And not, you know, episodes of different stories, if you will.

Chrissy Beltran  34:03

Yeah, that makes sense. Because it is a progression. And it should be kind of building right instead of discrete information.

Dr. Karin Hess  34:12

Yeah, so it’s a lot packed into a not huge book, but I’m excited about the feedback that I’ve gotten so far, from people I’ve worked with.

Chrissy Beltran  34:25

I love it. I mean, the moves I think are just fantastic. Because it’s so actionable. These are things that we can look at our units and say, Are we building these in? Are we giving kids opportunities to get good at some of these things as well over time? And you could take just

Dr. Karin Hess  34:40

one teacher move and just work on that a lot of schools will say we’re just gonna work on questioning. I said, That’s okay. Because questioning kind of flows to route. I can ask you metacognitive questions, I can ask you questions that build your language skills. So it’s not like it’s like all good. in teaching and learning, it takes a while to acquire the use of all those and to know when to use them optimally. So that’s a way that a lot of people have found works really well. I had a principal who contacted me, they’ve been reading the book. And she just asked her teachers on little sticky notes from one chapter. What would be the strategies you already are using? What are strategies you don’t think you’d ever use? And what are some you’re willing to try? So they just, and then they kind of found a few that they wanted to try and then share? Excuse me?

Chrissy Beltran  35:40

Yeah, that’s a great way to do it. For them to interact to kind of make a plan, whenever people kind of make a commitment to try something out, we’re more likely to see that transition into doing

Dr. Karin Hess  35:49

it with colleagues. So they can come back and say, I tried it this way, I tried it that way. There are certain strategies I know, are winners, people will say, they’ll come back and maybe say I tried, oh, I tried it, I try that same one. And they share how they tried it and now work. And they’re not, they don’t take a lot of planning. Some do. Sure, if you were going to do a big performance task, or like a project based learning type of thing. But a lot of pieces of project based learning could benefit from some of the meta cognitive tools, some of the way to design a Performance Task. So students, the key about those is students have some input, have this tool called stars, you describe a situation in the real world, you describe a task you have to do, who your audience is going to be, what resources sta are. And then what are the success criteria. And so you start with content processes and products as a success criteria. And then you look at all that you say, where can students have choice? Where can they have input, they’re all not going to create the same product. Maybe that’s where they have choices. Or if I want them all to write an essay, maybe the topic becomes a choice. But the process of drafting and getting feedback is the same for everyone. So then you start to see how it plays out. Where there’s student voice, and there’s choice. And that’s what hooks hooks learners, yes, to give them options, give them choices.

Chrissy Beltran  37:26

Yes, that’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing all of this today. I mean, I’m sure that people are going to just hop out and buy this book, because it just sounds so good. There’s so many good things, good pieces in it that are easy to turn around on your campus, but can make a huge difference. And because it’s it’s got practical, actionable resources in it, people can use it to make change happen. You know, it’s something Yeah, that’s great. Yeah.

Dr. Karin Hess  37:51

Thank you. So I have a website, it’s carried by Finn has.com. There’s tons of resources there that you can download, that are supporting activities in the book as well.

Chrissy Beltran  38:03

Perfect. That’s a great place to follow up and keep learning. Okay,

Dr. Karin Hess  38:07

thank you,

Chrissy Beltran  38:08

thank you. That was pretty cool. I’m not gonna lie. It was really neat to be able to speak with with Karen. And then though I’m not kidding, those moves are just so good. You’re gonna have to get that book because that is going to be such a great way. If you have a teacher that you’re like, kids are just not learning what is happening. This is a really great place to start for better instruction, which is the theme of this mini series, better instruction, rigor going about it this way, honestly, these lessons, I mean, making a sketch. That’s not complicated. So we attach rigor to complicate things. And it’s not it. We’re not complicated things by by doing these strategies, we’re just helping kids learn at different better levels, right. So that’s a great thing to do that we can all do. Next week, we’re going to continue our work on better instruction. I actually have a really great guest Brian Goodwin, and we’re going to talk about the new classroom instruction that works. He’s going to share some of his favorite strategies and why we are kind of redesigning some of the practices that we know are important. And until then, happy coaching.

Chrissy Beltran  39:20

Now that you’ve got so much to think about, head over to buzzing with buzzingwithmsb.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIP, and check out the podcast show notes. Happy coaching!