Standards are fraught with challenge.
The foremost challenge is not a student challenge, but rather is a
teacher challenge. Teachers must first understand each standard. What does the
standard expect the student to know, understand, and be able to do? Then they must be able to teach not only the
content knowledge, but also the expected skill performance.
Marzano
posits that teaching the Common Core standards requires a different skill than
most teachers have experience with in the classroom. It is essential that we
teachers open ourselves to learning and to improving our craft. I’ve witnessed many examples of instruction
and assessment that don’t rise to the standard; I believe lack of
understanding of the standard and lack of strategies prevent instruction
and assessment from meeting the demands of the standards.
On that
note, this post offers a strategy for teaching students to analyze.
Instruction
must follow from a deep understanding and thorough unpacking of the
standard. The backward design process
challenges many veteran teachers whose experience with curriculum involves
selecting their favorite activities and chapters from an assigned textbook.
Perhaps these
are the teachers who test hundreds of obscure facts from the text under the premise
that a student should read every word of the book and remember it verbatim; or,
given standards, they seek out only the key content terms rather than the
performance the standard expects. For
example, the test question may ask students “What is the organizational
structure of the piece?” or “What is the Preamble?” The focus here is on identification of key
terms.
It is
likely that students must know this background information in order to analyze
it well, but when the assessment is comprised solely of identification and
memorization items, the students will not build the skills they so desperately
need to prepare them for college and career.
The days of
identification level only tests are gone.
Or, they should be gone,
replaced by a focus on standards, targets for student learning. Granted, students must know facts and terms
in the context of the standard’s required performance. More precisely, though, what does the language
of the standard tell us students must know, understand, and be able to do?
For the
sake of example, let’s analyze this Georgia Performance Standard for a high
school American Government class:
Analyze the purpose of
government stated in the Preamble of the United States Constitution.
First, isolate
the key terms.
Analyze the purpose of
government stated
in the Preamble of
the United States Constitution.
Under a
standards-based curriculum, I cannot simply teach these terms at the identification
level. This standard assumes the student
knows the terms (or will learn them here).
I also find
the noun purpose. Students will need an understanding of what
purpose is, but it is not an identification term like the other three.
Analyze the purpose of government stated in the Preamble of the United States Constitution.
Now my work
is to determine what students must do with these terms.
Isolate the
action (the doing part!) of the standard.
Analyze the purpose of government stated in the Preamble of the United States Constitution.
That’s it: my students must be able to analyze.
Analyze what? Analyze the purpose of government. But not just any purpose of government. The purpose of government stated
in the Preamble of the United States Constitution.
So there it
is, my students must know what the
Preamble is, what the U.S. Constitution is, and what government is; they must understand each of the terms and the
term purpose; and they must be able to
analyze the purpose of government as stated in the Preamble of the United
States Constitution.
Once we
know what to teach, we have to know how to teach it. We can’t just tell
students to analyze something. After
all, what does that really mean? How do
we analyze?
Expecting
students to be able to “analyze the structure of texts” or to “analyze the purpose of government” without
teachers understanding how to teach the skill of analysis and having tools to
teach this skill will result in frustration more so than in increased
achievement.
Analysis breaks a whole into its component
parts. Close reading provides us an
avenue for finding the parts. What are
the parts of the Preamble? In this case,
it is possible to separate the phrases to more easily see them as separate
items.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect
Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common
defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the
United States of America.
Who: We the People of the United
States
Operational
term that let’s me know that what follows is the purpose: in Order to
To do
what? Heads up; the purpose is coming:
·
form a more perfect Union,
·
establish Justice
·
insure domestic Tranquility
·
provide for the common defence
·
promote the general Welfare
·
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves
and our Posterity
So they
created (“do ordain and establish”) this product (this Constitution for the United
States of America) in order to do all of the phrases
above.
Highlighting
and creating a bulleted column of items are strategies to help students visualize the
various components of the text. Graphically organized. Isolated.
Easy to see. Broken apart.
Once we’ve
identified the components of the text, venturing into understanding the meaning
of each phrase really begins. I believe
it is important for teachers to work through this process with students to
demonstrate how to locate the parts; then approach how to explain the meaning
of the parts, and finally, how to bring it all together for a summary
explanation of the text as a whole.
Explicit
teaching is paramount. Name the
work. Students need to know that the
work here is analysis. I’ve demonstrated two strategies, or tools, to use to analyze text. Students need to become familiar with a
variety of tools to do the work.
How do you
teach analysis? How do students break
down information into meaningful chunks or component parts? What visual organization tools do you offer your
students to aid in this process?
Comment to share your ideas.
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