Making the Opportunity Myth a Reality

 I learned about Karin Hess's work during a professional learning a few months back. The person who shared had attended a workshop led by Hess, and she spoke at length about our misconceptions about rigor. My colleague was so passionate that I needed to learn more about Hess, and so when I was invited to teach this course, it seemed like an obvious fit for the course and an opportunity for me to go deeply into Hess' work with other educators. 

Chapter 1 really offers the reader an opportunity to consider what is meant by the term "deep learning." I think this matters because so often, educators use pretty terms with little understanding of what it actually means, and even less consideration of teaching implications. The competencies Hess outlines seemed to address not just the CONTENT but the THINKING each content might compel. This matters to me because I often see teachers discussing the content as if that is their end goal, when in reality it truly is more a way to help engage our students as thinkers. The competencies Hess identifies are:

• Mastering core academic content.
• Thinking critically and solving complex problems.
• Working collaboratively on complex tasks.
• Communicating effectively.
• Learning to how learn.
• Developing an academic mindset. 

Hess goes on to say "deeper learning is only possible when students become actively immersed in challenging tasks that require them to see out and acquire new knowledge, apply what they have learned, and build on that learning to construct new knowledge" (p. 8). While this is an obviously constructivist mindset, seeing this in connection to the core competencies outlined above offers teachers an  understanding of how to help learners construct new knowledge. 

 

Throughout the first chapter, Hess explores the intersection between rigor and CCSS, but she also looks at the disconnection between those standards and effective teaching and learning. The standards, she says, offer high expectations but little guidance for teachers on how to meet those expectations. I had not thought about the standards  this way before, and it makes me think of a very important study propelled by the New Teacher project that is called "The Opportunity Myth." The purpose of the study was to look at students' expectations for post-secondary life and examine how their education may have prepared them for those goals. The study included student survyes of 30,000 students in grades 6-12 and a review of 5,000 assignments and 20,000 student work samples, as well as intense weekly teacher observations across five different schools. Researchers were examining four components: 1)did the content in the assignment align to relevant grade level standards? 2) did the assignment offer opportunities for students to engage in content-specific practices , such as citing rigorous and important texts, 3) did the assignments give students a chance to learn about content in a way that builds upon the knowledge they already bring to the classroom, and 4)how was student performance measured?

 

The researchers found a complete disconnect between students' aspirations and the preparation they were given. In their report, the study's authors report that "When students collect their diplomas, they believe they are prepared for what's next -- because that's what they have been told throughout their K-12 careers," (The New Teachers Project, 2018, p. 19). Despite observations that demonstrated that the students were overwhelmingly doing the work that was asked of them, researchers concluded that the teaching students were receiving was consistently below grade level. Thus, students' aspirations will often fail to be attainable because they were not prepared to achieve them despite being told their education would. In the end, they identified four key resources at the "heart of high-quality academic experience for students" as: 

• grade appropriate assignments
• Strong instruction that lets students do most of the thinking in the lesson
• A sense of deep engagement in what they are learning,
• Teacher who hold high expectations for students and have dispositions that assume their students can meet those standards (The New Teachers Project, 2018, p. 23). 

In this sense, "The Opportunity Myth" frames Hess' work but also offers a sense of urgency. While these observations may hold true across many districts, the fact remains that it serves to truly replicate inequities and perpetuate opportunity gaps. All students deserve access to rigor, and I believe that Hess offers a framework for such access. In the following table, I have created a crosswalk between the key resources The New Teachers Project outlines for meaingful reform that serves to prepare students for the demands of life beyond K-12 schooling and Hess' core competencies. 

Opportunity Myth resources	Hess’ Core competencies
Grade appropriate assignments	Mastering core academic content. Thinking critically and solving complex problems.
Strong instruction in which students do the thinking	Working collaboratively on complex tasks. Communicating effectively.
Deep engagement with the learning	Working collaboratively on complex tasks.
Teachers hold high expectations	Learning how to learn. Developing an academic mindset.

 

 As you can see, Hess' framework and the pedagogy she lays out for teachers will go far in helping to make the opportunity myth an opportunity reality. At its core, education should allow for equitable opportunity and access to the rich lives that come from economic, social and civic opportunities, but the reality remains that in order to achieve that, we need to acknowledge the academic demands that such a access requires, By laying out her matrix rigor and an assessment cycle that is designed to advance learning, Hess is offering teachers a roadmap that busts the misconceptions about rigor she identifies in this chapter (that all students can't think deeply, that DOK is a strict taxonomy, that verbs and DOK levels are interchangeable, that DOK means "harder", that multiple choice questions are enough to assess rigor, that deeper understanding is always gained through higher ordered thinking and that complex tasks necessarily lead to deeper thinking) and prepares teachers to support their students in achieving their highest potential. 

 

Sources:

Hess, K. (2023). Rigor by design, not chance: Deeper thinking through actionable instruction and assessment. ASCD.

The New Teacher Project. (2018). The Opportunity Myth: What Students Can Show us About How School is Letting Them Down – and how to Fix it. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED590204.pdf