Effort-Based Education
Students have the responsibility to
put forth the effort required to complete complex, rigorous assignments
that help them reach high standards of achievement. At the same time,
they have a right to demand as much time and expert instruction as they
need to support their efforts.
Educators have the
responsibility to support students through this difficult work by
providing the resources they need. We set an absolute standard for what
we expect in the way of results, and allow time and the other resources
that go with it to vary. Some students need more time and support than
others but this does not change expectations according to the initial
starting point.
In our Standards/Research-Based Education delivery model, the 3 key Principles of Learning we are focusing on are:
Clear Expectations
- If we expect all students to achieve at high levels, then we need to
define explicitly what we expect students to learn. These expectations
need to be communicated clearly in ways that get them "into the heads"
of parents, the community and, above all, students themselves.
Descriptive criteria and models of work that meets standards should be
publicly displayed, and students should refer to these displays to help
them analyze and discuss their work. With visible accomplishment
targets to aim toward at each stage of learning, students can
participate in evaluating their own work and setting goals for their
own effort.
Academic Rigor in a Thinking Curriculum -
Thinking and problem solving will be the "new basics" of the 21st
century. But the common idea that we can teach thinking without a solid
foundation of knowledge must be abandoned. So must the idea that we can
teach knowledge without engaging students in thinking. Knowledge and
thinking are intimately joined. This implies a curriculum organized
around major concepts that students are expected to know deeply.
Teaching must engage students in active reasoning about these concepts.
In every subject, at every grade level, instruction and learning must
include commitment to a knowledge core, high thinking demand, and
active use of knowledge.
Accountable Talk - Talking with
others about ideas and work is fundamental to learning. But not all
talk sustains learning. For classroom talk to promote learning it must
be accountable—to the learning community, to accurate and appropriate
knowledge, and to rigorous thinking. Accountable talk seriously
responds to and further develops what others in the group have said. It
puts forth and demands knowledge that is accurate and relevant to the
issue under discussion. Accountable talk uses evidence appropriate to
the discipline (e.g., proofs in mathematics, data from investigations
in science, textual details in literature, documentary sources in
history) and follows established norms of good reasoning. Teachers
should intentionally create the norms and skills of accountable talk in
their classrooms.
principles of learning
Principles of Learning for Effort-Based Education
metacognition and self-regulatory capabilities are widely recognized as a key aspect of what it takes to be a good learner. Moreover, there is little argument that metacognitive strategies are both learnable and teachable. But effective strategy instruction depends on certain conditions. For example, students need to know how and why the strategies work. They need to understand that their mastery of the strategies is a developmental process and that sustained effort will produce increasing competence. They need scaffolding at first—in the form of modeling, direct teaching, and prompting—and then that scaffolding needs to be gradually removed so students assume responsibility for using the strategies appropriately. In other words, the spontaneous and appropriate use of metacognitive strategies is teachable only if we broaden our view of teaching to include not just specific lessons, but a much broader socialization process into a learning orientation, or what Ted Sizer calls "habits of mind": a way of taking responsibility for what you know, what you can learn, and how you use it.
According to the latest National Research Council report (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, Eds.,1999) on how people learn,
Individuals can be taught to regulate their behaviors, and these regulatory activities enable self-monitoring and executive control of one's performance. The activities include such strategies as predicting outcomes, planning ahead, apportioning one's time, explaining to one's self in order to improve understanding, noting failures to comprehend, and activating background knowledge.
This, then, is where the two bodies of research begin to converge in support of the claim that human capability is open-ended, and where the convergence begins to point the way to a pedagogical approach based on a new definition of intelligence. A growing number of educators and lay people are now coming to believe that an environment that routinely challenges learners to use metacognitive strategies fosters learning-oriented habits of mind, and vice versa. The idea is that environments in which a lot of strategic problem-solving is going on are ones in which people view themselves as getting smarter. And they actually are getting smarter because they are learning a whole body of skills, processes, habits of mind, and attitudes that are what we now can define as intelligence.
Socialized Intelligence is a set of beliefs about oneself—one's right and obligation to understand and make sense of the world, and one's capacity to figure things out over time
* a set of problem-solving and reasoning capabilities—both a toolkit of cognitive strategies and the social skills of knowing how and when to get help
* the disposition to use the skills of intelligent thinking regularly.
Cited by: Individual Differences and School Learning Environments
MC Wang, CM Lindvall - Review of Research in Education, 1984 - JSTOR
Individual Differences and School Learning Environments. Margaret C. Wang. C. Mauritz
Lindvall. Review of Research in Education, Vol. 11, 161-225. 1984. ...
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