When students learn the target, they hit the bullseye!

Intentionality matters (I may have just made up the first word). The Humanities Unit that I just finished co-teaching with Joy Peterson was eye opening. Westward Expansion could be a dry, boring unit largely focused on memorizing trivial facts. However, the approach Joy and I took was to focus on the learning targets. What skills did we really want students to know at the end of our unit? Memorizing the dates of the Lewis & Clark expedition, no? Being able to look at topics like that, along with, the Trail of Tears, the Goldrush, Manifest Destiny, and the Vermont experience of the 19th Century and take away big ideas and themes of human interaction, most definitely!

Starting with what we wanted students to know helped us frame out our summative task. Students would work through a series of workshops regarding Westward Expansion in 19th Century America and create an e-book to share their major takeaways. We helped them learn how to use a graphic organizer called a Snow Globe to help them sort their learning from topic details, to big ideas, to universal truths. The skills we wanted them to demonstrate while sharing their content knowledge was: Determining Big Ideas, Presenting Information and Grammar, Usage & Mechanics (GUM). Here's the task sheet we provided students with for their summative work. It includes scales for each of the learning targets.

To help students understand the Learning Target, Big Ideas, we taught the target directly. Taking the content away to directly introduce the skill that we were really looking for mastery on. I blogged about how we did that here. The power of that direct instruction, and providing students with a tool like a snow globe to help them sort their understanding allowed them to move along the scale. It was easy for them to self-assess because they knew where to look to see the difference between the 2, 3, and 4. When building their e-book on bookcreator they could use the Big Ideas for headings on the page, or if they wanted to try for the 4 when it came to Presentation of Information, they could use their Universal Understandings as page headers. You'll notice on the task sheet that we broke the scale down for Presentation as a checklist. Making the 3 or "target" easy to hit if you followed the list with clear distinction between the different levels of how they score would be recorded.

What you'll see in the links below to actual student work is clear understanding. Not only have students mastered the content understanding of Westward Expansion, but they were able to do it in a way that demonstrated their understanding of the Big Ideas and Universal Truths associated with good learning in general, in any content area. Feast your eyes on some work that shows the power of where proficiency-based learning meets student interest and results in deep learning for all.

5th Grade Student A

5th Grade Student B

6th Grade Student A

6th Grade Student B