Empower Student Learning
Empower Student learning is when classroom decisions are made with intentionality to promote learning. Students should identify what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how they will know what they must learn.
The first step in gaining clarity is to communicate clearly to students what we expect them to learn, called learning intentions This way, students are more willing to engage with the learning process and develop a greater sense of their own learning.
An important tool for teaching with clarity is to give students purposeful design opportunities to show their learning and make visible their thinking. This can be formal or informal. These opportunities to show learning help teachers appreciate the learning experience from their students’ perspective.
Feedback is an important part of the learning process for teachers and students. For feedback to be effective, they should give it in a timely manner. We should explain what needs to be improved, and we should deliver it in a constructive tone.
Getting Started with Teacher Clarity book will show us how.
Getting Started
Marine Freibrun, author of the book Getting Started with Teacher Clarity, mentions teacher Clarity is a culture of teaching and collaboration. It is also a mindset, one that is essential in supporting students.
Teacher Clarity is a complex process that might seem daunting to take on, but we take it step by step and break down each factor that goes into it.
What We Need to Teach
To truly understand what we need to teach, we need to look closely at what the standards are asking of our students. We do this by deconstructing the standard and identifying the essential skills needed to meet the standard. It involves creating and setting learning intentions.
Learning intentions are what teachers want students to learn, and these need to be clear to both the students and the teachers. The advantages of this are if we have a better understanding of what we need to teach in a lesson, unit, or activity, then we are more capable of articulating information to our students. Finally, when students know what success looks like and what steps they need to take to get there, they can meet and exceed standards. All this equal SUCCESS!
How to Teach It
When you identify what to teach, you will gain a better understanding of how to teach it. When we think about teaching the standards, we have to know how we are grouping specific standards together, what we want our students to achieve by the end of learning a group of standards, and how to plan with the end in mind to communicate the final learning goal to our students. So, there is more layer added to it than just how to teach material, lesson planning, and design.
How We Measure Student Success
We look at where students are in the learning process when measuring student success. Freiburn emphasizes, “Through teacher clarity, students can also assess their own progress through success criteria, specific, concrete, measurable statements that describe what success looks like when the learning goal is reached.”
This allows teachers to be more aware of and engaged with the effect you have on your students. Teacher clarity amounts to how clearly teachers and students communicate with one another to explain their level of understanding of learning intention, activity, or goal.
Teacher Clarity ensures visible learning goals are reached and provides evidence of learning’s relevance to the student, so that learning is meaningful according to John Hattie. Please visit https://visible-learning.org/ to learn more about visible learning goals.
Conclusion
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