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Feeling overwhelmed—constantly, on a daily basis—has unfortunately become the status quo among educators. But it doesn't have to be.
The Clarity Paradox
From Clutter to Clarity
Focused Success Criteria
PrefaceWhen I started writing this book in early 2019, there were three questions I knew would be central to the text:
I've asked these questions hundreds of times to thousands of educators over the years. I'm always impressed with the depth and thoughtfulness with which individual teachers and administrators answer the first two questions. However, even among teachers working in the same schools or departments, they tend to answer the first two questions in very different ways. This makes responses to the third question very complicated. It is difficult to help students prioritize when we haven't established our own shared priorities. In the absence of shared priorities, we are making a choice to do more work and attain fewer results. Unfortunately, rather than acknowledge this conundrum as a failure to prioritize, it is usually diagnosed as a failure to put forth enough effort. Teachers and students assume—or are told—that the reason the outcomes they seek haven't been attained is because they just aren't working hard enough. Teachers rise to the challenge by searching for more materials, resources, and activities to make class time more productive. They do more, cover more, assign more, give students more options, test more, and grade more. "Good students" comply … yet there is little evidence that covering more or teaching more results in more learning. For students who struggle to keep up, we double down and ask them to do even more. Ultimately, this response only increases their frustration and our exhaustion. At some point, it's as though "busyness"—rather than learning—became the purpose of schooling. Frustration is accepted as a proxy for high expectations, and exhaustion is worn as a badge of honor. Then, in March 2020, the busyness of teaching in classrooms around the world came to a complete stop. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the tools and resources used for teaching were taken away, but the expectations for learning remained. It was difficult. It was stressful. Helping students thrive in this new context required less busyness and more clarity. Take away the busyness of the activities and coverage that dominate most school days, and the three questions that would guide this book were all that remained. It is said that crises don't create weaknesses—they reveal them. On its surface, schools' responses to the global pandemic revolved around the twin crises of instructional delivery and technology access. At a deeper level, it revealed a crisis about how schools prioritize and clarify the shared expectations that guide students' strategic efforts for learning. If schools acknowledge technology-related challenges but fail to clarify and align their priorities for student learning, then—once we reach a post-pandemic world—we'll have merely added online learning as another tool to deliver and access more busyness, frustration, and exhaustion. The central questions of this book haven't changed since its inception. I argue that incremental changes over the last 30 years mean clarity about what it means to understand—and what is important to understand—is more important than ever. The dramatic challenges we all faced during the pandemic revealed an urgent need to discard a lot of the clutter that fills our school days and distracts us and our students from effective teaching and deep learning. This book is about choosing clarity. Printed by for personal use only |
When I started writing this book in early 2019, there were three questions I knew would be central to the text:
What does it mean to understand?
What is most important to understand?
How do we prioritize our strategic effort to help students understand what is most important?
I've asked these questions hundreds of times to thousands of educators over the years. I'm always impressed with the depth and thoughtfulness with which individual teachers and administrators answer the first two questions. However, even among teachers working in the same schools or departments, they tend to answer the first two questions in very different ways. This makes responses to the third question very complicated. It is difficult to help students prioritize when we haven't established our own shared priorities.
In the absence of shared priorities, we are making a choice to do more work and attain fewer results. Unfortunately, rather than acknowledge this conundrum as a failure to prioritize, it is usually diagnosed as a failure to put forth enough effort. Teachers and students assume—or are told—that the reason the outcomes they seek haven't been attained is because they just aren't working hard enough.
Teachers rise to the challenge by searching for more materials, resources, and activities to make class time more productive. They do more, cover more, assign more, give students more options, test more, and grade more. "Good students" comply … yet there is little evidence that covering more or teaching more results in more learning. For students who struggle to keep up, we double down and ask them to do even more. Ultimately, this response only increases their frustration and our exhaustion.
At some point, it's as though "busyness"—rather than learning—became the purpose of schooling. Frustration is accepted as a proxy for high expectations, and exhaustion is worn as a badge of honor.
Then, in March 2020, the busyness of teaching in classrooms around the world came to a complete stop.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the tools and resources used for teaching were taken away, but the expectations for learning remained. It was difficult. It was stressful. Helping students thrive in this new context required less busyness and more clarity. Take away the busyness of the activities and coverage that dominate most school days, and the three questions that would guide this book were all that remained.
It is said that crises don't create weaknesses—they reveal them. On its surface, schools' responses to the global pandemic revolved around the twin crises of instructional delivery and technology access. At a deeper level, it revealed a crisis about how schools prioritize and clarify the shared expectations that guide students' strategic efforts for learning. If schools acknowledge technology-related challenges but fail to clarify and align their priorities for student learning, then—once we reach a post-pandemic world—we'll have merely added online learning as another tool to deliver and access more busyness, frustration, and exhaustion.
The central questions of this book haven't changed since its inception. I argue that incremental changes over the last 30 years mean clarity about what it means to understand—and what is important to understand—is more important than ever. The dramatic challenges we all faced during the pandemic revealed an urgent need to discard a lot of the clutter that fills our school days and distracts us and our students from effective teaching and deep learning.
This book is about choosing clarity.
