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Using the Ladder of Feedback to Support Self-Direction

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  In Chapter 6 of Rigor By Design, Not Chance, Karin Hess explores the critical need for engaging students in metacognition and self-reflection. Keenly aware that these two skills are often used interchangeable, Hess argues that both are necessary and closely related, metacognition asks students to make “in the moment” considerations while reflection allows students to think about their past learning and draw  connections that support transfer.  I found Hess’ use of the continuum of engagement (from actively engaged to actively disengaged), important.  Equally important was her argument that even incremental movement from passive to active engagement, or from disengagement to passive participation, is critical. “As students become engaged, they learn more,” (Hess, 2023, p. 129). However, as with most skills, students will need explicit instruction and guidance in building their metacognition and self-reflection skills. Often, teachers invite metacognition or self-reflection as a perso
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Backward Design and Its Impact on Designing Complex Tasks

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     Chapter Five of Rigor by Design, Not Choice by Karin Hess discusses the importance of performance-based assessments and tasks. Hess begins this chapter with a quote from Howard Garner and then delves into the evolution of performance-based assessments and what high-quality, performance-based assessments look like. She emphasizes that "Complex performance assessments not only apply multiple skills, concepts, and strategies but also must provide opportunities for disciplines inquiry and critical and creative thinking" (Hess 2023, p. 96). Authentic assessment requires students to exhibit near or far transfer skills. Near transfer involves students applying skills and concepts in the way they were taught, and far transfer involves using what they already know in ways they may have yet to be explicitly taught (Hess, 2023, pp. 95-96). Performance-based assessments share seven common characteristics, with the first four deepening authentic learning and the last three pushing s
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Maybe Teachers need to Struggle First

  In Chapter 5 of Rigor by Design, Not Choice , Karin Hess discusses the importance of rigorous performance-based assessments (PBAs). The chapter is filled with powerful and practical advice for teachers who want to integrate authentic assessments into their classroom.   Talking about the need to “push students out of their comfort zone,” (Hess 2023, p. 96), Hess indicates that these assessments include: 1.        Open-ended contexts 2.        Productive challenge (or productive struggle). 3.        An opportunity for students to uncover thinking 4.        Authentic opportunities for students to authentically   perform and share the tasks 5.        Asking students to “stretch” their thinking. 6.        Using that “stretch thinking” to develop transfer. 7.        Using that “stretch thinking” to spark reflective and metacognitive thinking.   Hess spends time talking about the continuum of engagement and complexity, which I found extremely important. There is room for l
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Week 4 Scaffold Learning

  Week 4 Rigor By Design, Not Chance   Chapter 4 of Rigor by Design, Not Chance is called “Consider Strategic Scaffolding”. I like this chapter a lot because it breaks down the advantages of piecing information together. This is a very interesting idea because it allows young learners to get a better understanding of learning material. Being able to try different methods of scaffolding allows educators to distribute learning material selectively which will help learners connect the knowledge to a bigger topic or idea. In the chapter Karin Hess gives a good reason why scaffolding should be used during instruction. She stated “ Keeping the focus of learning on deeper understanding for all students means that teachers must be willing to shift their role as the person who delivers direct instruction to being more of a strategic learning coach.” “In turn, this will shift the role of students, who, instead of simply acquiring information, will be called on to produce and deepen knowled
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Understanding Working Memory to Improve Scaffolding

  In Chapter 4 of Rigor by Design, Not Chance, Karin Hess talks about the use of scaffolds to support students as they engage with complex learning tasks and texts.   Hess makes it clear that scaffolds are not the same as differentiation, an important distinction because I think that many educators use the terms interchangeably. While differentiation is about offering students a different task to show their learning, scaffolding “doesn’t change the rigor of the task, but it can reduce the demands on students’ working memory during learning” (Hess, 2023, p. 72). Scaffolding can be done in many ways; importantly, high-quality scaffolds are also good teaching practices, such as encouraging peer to peer discourse or breaking complex tasks into smaller bits. Hess identifies four ways a teacher might scaffold a rigorous task. These include ·          Teacher and peer scaffolding. These can be understood as intentional times for learners to hear from and gather “help” from teacher or peer
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Why Engagement Is not Enough

  Karin Hess wants teachers to know that schema matters. In Chapter 3 of Rigor by Design, not Chance , Hess shares citation after citation that establishes that expert learners have schemas that support the learner in the construction of “mental representations, search for appropriate problem-solving strategies,” and allows learners to “evaluate the strategies and store information for later use” (Hess, 2023, p. 56).   This suggests that schema, which is built from prior knowledge and experiences, can serve as the glue that holds together learning and enables students to dig deeply into content, knowledge and skills.   Not only that, because “learning activities that build schemas (mental models) in each content domain is crucial to students’ long-term retrieval,” teachers need to consider how to build schema if they want students to transfer their new learning to different situations (Hess, 2023, p. 56). Building schema is not as easy as going over a few slides with background knowl
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Chapter 2

       In the book Rigor by Design Not Chance chapter 2 is about asking probing questions. “Coming up with the right question involves vigorously thinking through the problem, investigating it from vicarious angles, turning closed questions into open-ended ones, and prioritizing which are the most important questions to get at the heart of the matter.” (Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. The thing that I found to be the most important were Tips for effective questioning.      The chapter gives 4 tips on effective questioning, those tips are, practice using wait and think time, brainstorm without judgment, ask all students to simultaneously respond, rather than just calling on a few and model curiosity by making your thinking visible. The resource that I found on questioning also gives 4 different strategies to try which are to design higher thinking questions, develop a sequence of strategies, increase wait time and respond to answers using redirecting, probing and reinforcing.       In bo
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