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Criteria
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Exemplar |
Descriptors
and Examples to help clarify the criteria |
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Safe and Nurturing
Environment
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The lesson is designed
to create a classroom environment where students feel free to think critically and express their views without fear |
· Friendly, comfortable atmosphere
· Opportunities for student altruism
· Community building activities
· The assumption that all students will be called on and will have fun
· Techniques for maintaining class control and controlling the pace of the lesson
· Development of personal relationships with students |
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Public Speaking
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The lesson is structured
to require and nurture public speaking, in pairs, and small groups as well as in front of the entire class. |
· Individual students are singled out to speak before the whole class
· Spokesmen for groups
· Each student frequently addresses the entire class
· Group work that is structured to require all students to engage in content-focused conversations
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Opportunities
For Success
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The lesson is designed
to provide every student with frequent opportunities to experience success. |
· The lesson starts with the familiar
· The lesson contains some limited repetition to keep all students engaged
· The lesson engenders a community of learners feeling
· The lesson provides early success |
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Validation of
Student Work
And Responses
|
The lesson is designed
to let each student know when his/her efforts are praiseworthy. |
· The lesson provides opportunities to demonstrate understanding
· The lesson provides opportunities for students to stabilize understandings
· The lesson uses individual students as stand-ins for the whole class; the lesson provides opportunities
for trail and error (retrials, experimentation);
· The lesson allows for frequent praise |
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Student Ownership |
The lesson provides
learning tasks that enable students to feel pride in and assume responsibility for their own leaning |
· The lesson uses/modify students’ responses to lead class activities
· The lesson creates assessments using student criteria
· The lesson provides a selection of ways for students to demonstrate their understanding.
· The lesson draws on students prior knowledge
· The lesson moves students to look at how they move ahead on tasks |
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Quality Student Achievement |
The lesson requires
students to demonstrate deep understanding on standards-based content and concepts |
· The lesson is based on an expectation of excellent performance for all
· The lesson require independent learning
· The lesson requires students to apply knowledge
· The lesson requires students to perform operations
· The lesson requires the students to design inquires
· The lesson students to draw conclusions
· The lesson requires students to analyze data |
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Grab Attention
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The lesson begins
in a manner likely to encourage students to look forward to what comes next. |
· Questions and activities that tap into the students’ personal experiences
· Small group activities that have students share their experiences
· Activities that require students to frame their own questions on a topic
· Lesson-connected physical activities that get the students moving |
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Assess and Access
Prior Knowledge/ perceptions
|
The lesson involves
activities that will help students and the teacher access and assess their prior knowledge, interests and understandings regarding
the concepts and skills presented in the lesson. |
· Questions and activities that create curiosity
· Questions and activities that challenge prior knowledge
· Questions and activities that assess students’ own experiences and expertise |
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Prepare Students
to Engage
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The lesson involves
activities, exercises and dialogues that focus student thinking, excite their imagination, and prepare them to meet the lesson’s
learning objectives. |
· Activities that create student disequilibrium
· Activities that challenge student thinking
· Activities that prime students using their own experiences
· Create ways to make students feel that thinking is a good and rewarding thing;
· Opportunities for students to elaborate on their thinking |
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Learning objectives |
The lesson clearly
states the one, two, or three specific things the teacher wants the students to learn.
The lesson casts
these specific objectives in terms of what the students will understand (student friendly).
The lesson is aligned
to the learning standards. |
Examples
· Students will be able to use details from a story as evidence to justify predications.
· Regarding the writing of thank-you notes, students will demonstrate an awareness of audience for whom
the note s intended, express its purpose and demonstrate control of the conventions of written English.
· Students will be able to solve multiplication problems using their array drawings as tools and as a
way of explaining
· Students will be able to accurately construct line graphs, bar graphs, and pie graphs from real-world
data.
· Students will be able to design a concept map that shows the relationships that exist between/among
force, friction, motion, and inertia.
· Students will understand the ideas and concepts expressed in the Declaration of Independence. |
|
Authentic Tasks |
The lesson provides
students with learning tasks that are as authentic (real-world like) as possible and that allow students to demonstrate their
understanding of the lesson’s learning objectives |
Descriptors
· An audience beyond the teacher
· Engender intrinsic motivation.
· Simulations (less authentic)
· Complex problems (more authentic)
· Identify and working on real-life problems (most authentic)
· Real-life data
· New conclusions
· Expected outcomes.
· Variety of resources
Examples
· Writing a thank-you note to a museum guide.
· Creating multiplication problems for classmates.
· Constructing graphs from real-world data, making
predictions and comparing those predications with company reports.
· Creating a pinhole camera and comparing it to a 35mm camera.
· Rewriting the Declaration of Independence in language that a second grade student would understand. |
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Options |
Proving students
optional ways to accomplish the learning task (reach the learning objectives). |
· Creating different groupings (individually, small groups)
· The lesson allows students to select from a number of tasks.
· The selection of tasks takes into account the students’ multiple intelligences
· The lesson allows students the option to create their own task based on criteria. |
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Multiple Intelligences
|
Providing students
with frequent opportunities to utilize their strongest intelligence (recognizing that there are going to be times when they
will also have to rely on their weaker ones.) |
· Different modality options regarding tasks and assessments (e.g. writing, speaking, diagramming, acting,
constructions, etc.)
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Interventions
|
The lesson is based
on intervention as the primary opportunity for instruction. The lesson plans in and anticipates opportunities for the teacher
to intervene either in response to student questions or in reaction to student work by “working the room” while
students are engaged in an activity/task. |
· Interventions can be:
o theory introduced through student-teacher interaction, while the student is engaged in a learning task.
o mini-lessons given when a group or groups need new information to proceed with their task.
o questions that will break log jams and get the thinking process going again
o questions that focus on “apparently” unrelated information
o suggestions that present different avenues of thought
· Interventions are effective (just-enough, not-too-much)
scaffolding
· Intervention capitalize on the multiplier effect of interaction
· Interventions lead to convergent thinking |
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Opportunities for Reflection
|
The lesson provides
opportunities for the students to think about their thinking: to assess their progress and their decisions. |
· Opportunities for Reflection may include:
o End-of-the-lesson closure activities that elicit evidence of what has been learned
o Questions/activities that move students to externalize their thinking and observations
o Putting concepts together and pulling them apart through the lens of a learning activity
o Journaling
o Guided discussions
o Carouseling on the main points learned from a working on a task
o Concept mapping exercise
· Asking students to frame questions that challenge their classmates’ concepts on content |
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Cognitively Rich
Questions
|
The lesson anticipates
the teacher posing questions that will require students to think critically and to require students to pose their questions
that require critical thinking. |
· Questions that help students visualize
· Questions that don’t reward quick responses
· Questions that refocus the small group on the underlying concepts
· Questions that introduce contradictory concepts
· Tasks framed to pose questions that require critical thinking |
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Appropriate resources
|
The lesson’s
design makes the resources necessary to accomplish the task available or provides ways these resources can be accessed. |
· Resources that support every task option.
· Resources that support students’ multiple intelligences
· Resources such as:
o lots of data that students can sort.
o Books, videos, experts, contacts, websites.
o Opportunities
for students to see each other as resources. |
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Multiple Assessment measures
|
The lesson utilizes
multiple forms of assessment using rubrics to judge student achievement and improve instruction.
|
· Numerous Opportunities for the teacher to assess students’ understanding, for instance:
o Demonstration
o Design
o Essay
o Construction/produce products
o Accomplish tasks
o Teacher observation as assessment
· Individual student assessments of student understanding and knowledge acquired through group work:
· Clear connections between the dimensions of the rubric and the lesson’s learning objectives
· A clear distinction between task specifications and the criteria of the rubric |
