The January 2015 issue of Principal Leadership, highlights some interesting ideas on matching instruction to the rigor-level of learning targets. According to Rosemarye Taylor and Mark Shanoff, authors of “Hitting the Learning Target: How to Facilitate Student Motivation and Resilience,” teachers at Ocoee Middle School in central Florida were concerned that “many students were not proficient in reading or mathematics because the teachers misunderstood the language of learning goals” (28). Administration at the school was also concerned because “student achievement was not improving continuously” (28).
Teachers and administration decided to take three key steps to improve student achievement in their school:
Focus on learning targets - Teachers must have clear intentions for student learning. Teachers should fully “understand the academic language of their learning targets and how student work might look and sound at those specific levels of rigor” (29).
Scaffold instruction - Beginning with direct instruction that includes teacher modeling expectations, teachers should scaffold instruction that begins “with high teacher support, then decrease gradually until students could independently demonstrate mastery with low teacher support” (29).
Systems Development - Administrators adjusted the systems in the school to allow for more collaborative planning time and allocated other resources to follow through with monitoring teacher and student success.
Teachers and administrators at Ocoee Middle School now feel that “Through carefully scaffolded instruction; heightened, clear expectations; self-monitoring; and quality feedback, students’ self-esteem grew, as did teachers’ beliefs that they could impact all students’ learning, including those who had previously underperformed” (30).
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