The Promise Of Proficiency
While learning targets/goals are being incorporated into more and more classrooms of schools across America, we are not necessarily seeing that the language of a proficiency expectation being built into the learning experience of students. Current instruction and assessment practices suffer from what I call a proficiency deficiency – the routine practice of creating learning experiences to students that lack a means or mechanism for the student to determine what the expectations are for their learning and achievement. To combat this proficiency deficiency teachers must first clearly state what their expectation of competency is and then create learning experiences that promote achievement of that expectation. A focus on proficiency can promote skills such as efficacy, self-motivation, self-monitoring, and self-evaluation.
To help students focus on proficiency teacher must build an expectation awareness in their students. Expectation awareness can be defined as the level to which a student uses a learning target as self-assessment metric, a feedback tool and as a reflective catalyst. While teachers have lots of learning targets, I am not sure that all of the learning targets that are being offered to students are very effective at building proficiency. Let me be absolutely clear… I am not suggesting that teachers re-create the learning target wheel… I just want teachers to be highly conscious of what they expect from students. Be able to articulate it. Be intentional with its presentation. Ultimately be able to articulate 'how well?" you want students to perform or know something.
While the team has learned the importance of being able to clearly articulate what a learning target is and the importance of a gradation of learning, there remains a lack of clarity, awareness among the team, regarding the “how well” aspect of the target and the proficiency expectation in their rubrics, instruction, and assessments.
Susan Brookhart’s definition of a learning target, “Student-friendly descriptions – via words, pictures, actions, or some combination of the three - of what you intend students to learn or accomplish in a given lesson.” (pp. 79, 2012)
By not using proficiency as a core aspect of teaching, teachers unknowing and mistakenly remove any rigor and complexity out of the learning process due to the preoccupation that students must know tons of stuff for test. Therefore most teachers idea of proficiency defaults to a list of tasks to be completed or a list of criteria to include in their work. What a focus on proficiency allows teachers to state is yes, students will ultimately come to a problem, situation they don’t know how to navigate, but instead of them searching for the answer, they will realize that they don’t know something, they will stop and observe the expected proficiency, observe themselves against it, and observe their thinking that is emerging from it.(Wiliam, 2011).
Proficiency helps students see connections between class work, performance and a specific learning criteria (Brookhart, 2012). Proficiency allows for teachers to build explicit connections between thinking and performance and thread that growth through increasingly rigorous concepts or skills. If instruction and proficiency have a mutual relationship then the teacher can begin to move curriculum, assessment and instruction closer together and ultimately merge them into one entity.
What we mean by the power of proficiency is that through proficiency students can now identify what mental frameworks are wrong, what content was applied incorrectly or stored incorrectly, and most importantly, what thoughts are they mobilizing to complete the problem. Students can now know and become more familiar with their thinking. They can become intimate with it to learn. Very few catalysts can capture student thoughts, ask students to observe that thinking and then ask them to grade the quality of their thoughts to the extent that proficiency does. In short teachers must allow students to become pragmatic observers of their own learning and help them to develop the skills to self-assess their own ability.
To help students focus on proficiency teacher must build an expectation awareness in their students. Expectation awareness can be defined as the level to which a student uses a learning target as self-assessment metric, a feedback tool and as a reflective catalyst. While teachers have lots of learning targets, I am not sure that all of the learning targets that are being offered to students are very effective at building proficiency. Let me be absolutely clear… I am not suggesting that teachers re-create the learning target wheel… I just want teachers to be highly conscious of what they expect from students. Be able to articulate it. Be intentional with its presentation. Ultimately be able to articulate 'how well?" you want students to perform or know something.
While the team has learned the importance of being able to clearly articulate what a learning target is and the importance of a gradation of learning, there remains a lack of clarity, awareness among the team, regarding the “how well” aspect of the target and the proficiency expectation in their rubrics, instruction, and assessments.
Susan Brookhart’s definition of a learning target, “Student-friendly descriptions – via words, pictures, actions, or some combination of the three - of what you intend students to learn or accomplish in a given lesson.” (pp. 79, 2012)
By not using proficiency as a core aspect of teaching, teachers unknowing and mistakenly remove any rigor and complexity out of the learning process due to the preoccupation that students must know tons of stuff for test. Therefore most teachers idea of proficiency defaults to a list of tasks to be completed or a list of criteria to include in their work. What a focus on proficiency allows teachers to state is yes, students will ultimately come to a problem, situation they don’t know how to navigate, but instead of them searching for the answer, they will realize that they don’t know something, they will stop and observe the expected proficiency, observe themselves against it, and observe their thinking that is emerging from it.(Wiliam, 2011).
Proficiency helps students see connections between class work, performance and a specific learning criteria (Brookhart, 2012). Proficiency allows for teachers to build explicit connections between thinking and performance and thread that growth through increasingly rigorous concepts or skills. If instruction and proficiency have a mutual relationship then the teacher can begin to move curriculum, assessment and instruction closer together and ultimately merge them into one entity.
What we mean by the power of proficiency is that through proficiency students can now identify what mental frameworks are wrong, what content was applied incorrectly or stored incorrectly, and most importantly, what thoughts are they mobilizing to complete the problem. Students can now know and become more familiar with their thinking. They can become intimate with it to learn. Very few catalysts can capture student thoughts, ask students to observe that thinking and then ask them to grade the quality of their thoughts to the extent that proficiency does. In short teachers must allow students to become pragmatic observers of their own learning and help them to develop the skills to self-assess their own ability.