Zak's Weekly Musings (October 4, 2023)
A couple of weeks back, we chatted about the importance of learning targets. This week, let’s dig a bit deeper, focusing on the language of learning targets and how this fits into a mastery-based or proficiency-based classroom.
For those of you who follow me, you know that I am pretty prolific on Twitter (you’re not going to catch me calling it “X”). Last week, on the heels of a rather challenging conversation with a parent regarding the comparative “rigor” offered by a rival school of ours, I took to Twitter to share my thoughts about what rigor is not.
I Tweeted, “Rigor is the most misunderstood word in education. Rigor isn’t hours of homework, stressed and anxious students, grading on a curve, or prioritizing the curriculum over student well-being.”
What I didn’t Tweet, however, was what rigor actually is.
Fortunately, it’s not terribly hard to define; we just have to borrow some wisdom from Norman Webb of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. In the late-1990s, Norman Webb created Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, commonly known by its acronym DOK, as a way to define the degree or complexity of knowledge that a task, standard, or learning objective requires.
According to Webb, rigor is about climbing the conceptual ladder, pushing our students to delve deeper, question more, and connect the dots between the known and the unknown. It’s about fostering a learning environment that nurtures critical thinking and encourages students to challenge their own understanding in a deliberate and sequential manner.
When we think about our own units, modules, or learning menus, it’s worth asking ourselves – how can the tasks that students are working on get progressively more rigorous?
Next week, I’m going to share a bit about Helen Parkhurst’s 3Ps to help explain when to use each of the four levels and how to introduce rigor into your lesson; in the meantime, I want to show you a sample of three learning targets associated with a module on Lewis structures in an 8th grade science class:
(Webb's DOK Level 1): Students will identify, list, and define the what, why, and how of Lewis structures.
(Webb's DOK Level 2): Students will predict and then construct a foundational understanding about how different elements bond using Lewis structures.
(Webb's DOK Level 4): Students will apply their learning to analyze and evaluate complex chemical scenarios, formulating hypotheses about the behavior of molecules.
Please consider how you can incorporate Webb’s DOK into the formation of your own learning targets as a way to both increase conceptual rigor and also to clearly telegraph for students the depth of critical thinking that a task, module, or lesson requires of them.