LANGUAGE ARTS: Leah Boon graduated from the University of Oregon with a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies with an emphasis in International Education. She was always (and always will be!) interested in language, learning, and traveling. Shortly after an inspiring undergraduate experience in Eugene and Spain, she moved to Bend and started her MAT program at OSU Cascades. Leah has been teaching at Cascade Middle School for the past 10 years. Having taught 7th grade TAG Humanities, 6th grade Humanities, Yearbook, Journalism, and developed the Broadcasting elective, she’s finally settled into 8th grade Language Arts and Social Studies for the past four years. While her Spanish has been dwindling over the years, Leah has been passionate about the direction the MS ELA department is headed and the work being done district-wide to better support all students. Leah was lucky enough to work this past year on the Middle School Diversity Project and is excited about where this work will lead. What is a goal you have for yourself? I have a mix of some weird traits — I’m competitive, stubborn, super curious, and obsessed with reading & research, which I think makes for a great teacher who consistently wants to do better for my students. This year I really want to work on effective feedback (and TIMELY feedback, which can be so hard) so my goal is to try a lot of different combinations of quick, formative, and specific feedback for students. Process-over-Product is my goal this year. How will you celebrate it when you accomplish it? Well, it’s going to be an ongoing goal to work on this year. I think I’ll know when I see students making strong gains as a result. I just know I’m my best self when I consistently prioritize self-care like reading, Barre3 & running, coffee, a few reality TV shows, and time outdoors with my family.

LANGUAGE ARTS: Michele Clements started teaching for Bend-La Pine Schools in 1998, as a student teacher for Helen Webre at Mountain View.  Over the next twenty years, she earned two Master’s Degrees and taught all high school grades and levels, as well as serving in a variety of committee and leadership roles.  Added to the mix, Michele coached competitive speech and debate for fifteen years, and had a part-part-part-time job as a wedding coordinator for five years – both of which came with surprisingly useful skill sets to acquire.  After several years leading the Diversity Project, CDA development, and a regional PLC made up of high school English teachers and college writing instructors, she transitioned out of the classroom and into a Language Arts coordinator role.  Her husband still teaches Language Arts for Mountain View and their two children LOVE to read!  At the dinner table, they practice writing literary essays for fun.  (Not really.) (Or do they…?) QUESTION:  What is a goal you have for yourself?  One of my goals is to offer useful, meaningful, hopefully high-quality professional development experiences to our district on a regular and ongoing basis.  This will happen in a variety of ways, from trainings, to book chapters, to resource lists, to blog posts. QUESTION:  How will you celebrate yourself when you accomplish it? There are so many opportunities here, and many of them cover large spans of time, so I don’t think there will be a big “I did it!” celebration.  However, I am assure you:  the two days after the Mary Ehrenworth trainings, I took off, off, off!

MATH: Linda Adams found her calling in teaching while living abroad. Her first teaching position was middle school girls’ PE in Seoul, Korea. After 3 years of wonderful experiences, she repatriated back to Oregon to complete her Masters in Education at Eastern Oregon University. Linda did her student teaching at Lapine Middle School then continued to teach in the Bend LaPine SD (3Rivers, Skyview, Cascade) for 10 years. In the last 8 years she taught in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for 3, coordinated the Math-in-Real-Life Project for HDESD for 3 and finally spent the last 2 years as the Secondary Math Coach for Jefferson County SD. Linda has two adult children who grew up and thrived in our wonderful Bend schools, both going on to study engineering at OSU. QUESTION: What is a goal you have for yourself? One of my professional goals is to grow into being a better agent of change. I will do this by becoming a stellar listener, by using coaching strategies that help others realize their own professional goals, and by adding value to a vision of possibilities that allows our students to thrive in education. QUESTION: How will you celebrate yourself when you accomplish your goal? While I am always about celebrating milestones (think dancing and travel), I believe this is an ongoing goal that gives my life meaning and I will always be refining it!

SCIENCE: Colleen Behrens Teaching science and being a leader in the science community has been Colleen’s passion since she started teaching.  She began her teaching career in Bend, Oregon at St. Francis School (now McMinemins) as a middle school science teacher.  When St. Francis moved East, she moved West to Corvallis to earn her MS degree in Science Education. Colleen returned to Bend to teach science at Pilot Butte Middle School.  Since joining BLPS, Colleen has participated in committees focused on district and school improvement, science literacy, curriculum and standards adoption, and equity.  She has been an ICCL leader for 15 years, a PLC leader for PBMS transition to an International Baccalaureate and has an ESOL endorsement.  Colleen loves birding, hiking, camping and exploring Eastern Oregon with her husband and chocolate lab, Chet. QUESTION:  What is a goal you have for yourself? My goal is to create a collaborative culture where teachers feel excited about becoming their best selves in the classroom.  When our collaboration is done, I want teachers to feel valued as professionals and empowered to make positive changes in their teaching.  QUESTION:  How will you celebrate yourself when you accomplish it? Professional and personal growth is continuous and energizing.  I think celebrating the small steps in the journey is as important as celebrating the arrival at the destination.  Sometimes the celebration is more quiet and reflective, other times it’s high fives and dancing.

WORLD LANGUAGES: Julie Montoya started teaching in Bend-LaPine Schools 21 years ago and is currently in her 20^th year of teaching languages at Summit High School.  Her 30-year high-school-level career has involved an equal blend of teaching English Learners from all over the globe to Spanish at all levels including AP Spanish Language and Culture.  Julie has been involved in district trainings, including S.I.O.P for district teachers and SPARKS presentations for new teachers.  Additionally, she achieved National Board Teaching Certification in 2017 and enjoys helping other teachers along their National Board progress as a reflective peer reader.  As a member of her schools’ Equity committees and advisor of the student Equity and Inclusion Club, Julie also loves working with students, staff and community partners to empower all students to have the best experience possible in our schools.  Question: What is a goal you have for yourself?  One of my goals is to help our district World Language teachers collaborate around a common vision and curriculum for our students.  We have an incredible staff who are passionate about promoting bilingualism and cultural competence.  Our mission now is to articulate our programs clearly so that students will have smooth and successful transitions on their way through language acquisition. Question: What’s a sign that you’ve had a true impact on your students?  My heart is full when I receive an e-mail or surprise visit from a previous student who has continued their language learning beyond high school and has realized that their language abilities opened doors to job opportunities, new friendships in far-off places and deeper appreciation for the diversity of Spanish-speaking communities.

Can you tell us about one of the teachers in your life that had the greatest impact on you as a student?

The teacher when I was young was my English teacher Mrs. Hodge – she was my teacher in 8th grade.  She was the first teacher ever in the history of the district to do book clubs.  It was so radical!  No one had ever done anything like that!  In my district, as early as the third grade, we all read Charlotte’s Web and then we all read Little House on the Prairie or something like that.  The fact this woman came in and said, “Would you be interested in choosing your own books to read? We didn’t even know what to say!  “Yeah. I guess.”  It was such a beautiful thing.

And she also did something that was incredibly radical at the time, which is she let us choose who we wanted to read with.  Which was such a relief because I was in middle school and I was terrified of half the kids in my class.  Half of them I really adored, but half I was terrified of, so the idea that she would let me choose what I wanted to read AND who I wanted to read with was just so terribly revolutionary.  

And that was part of the reason I fell in love with her – because of course you fall in love with your teachers – and then I fell in love with English, and then I fell in love with teaching.

Why did you decide to dedicate your life to education?

Unlike some of you who chose your careers really early, I did not do that when I was young. 

I was actually finishing a doctorate in art history, and working at the Metropolitan Museum and teaching in a very privileged school.  It was such a privileged existence – I walked across Central Park to go to school; I spent most of my days with kids and in the museum looking at beautiful things.  One day, I just happened to be invited to a salon with Maxine Greene, and you might not know her but she has an amazing book called The Dialectic of Freedom.  She was the first woman philosopher at any Ivy League University, and she was this amazing woman.  She was in her 80’s and she ran the Lincoln Center for Education and somehow, by the end of the salon, she invited me to take the next day off from school.  

She picked me up in the Lincoln Towncar and she took me to two schools in the Bronx – one was Riverdale Country Day which was like the school I was teaching at – a very elite, privileged, independent school.   And the other was a high school less than half a mile away that had something like 261 kids in its freshman class, and it graduated 13 of them.  It had bathrooms that were always locked or doors that were always left open so kids had no privacy.  There were metal detectors.  There was not a book in the school that kids could read.  Maxine finished the day with me and then she literally said, “Mary, I think you need to do something more meaningful with your life.” 

I went home that night and dropped out of my doctor program and re-enrolled in Education and Curriculum Theory at Columbia. And that was it.  I decided that I wanted to work inside education.

Can you tell us about 1 or 2 of your biggest ah-ha moments around inequity in education?  When and where did that awareness begin for you?

That episode with Maxine Green was one of them.  I was in my late 20’s – it’s amazing the things you just don’t know, or are blind to…some of us live these lives of privilege and I did not know that NYC has some of the most segregated schools in the country despite Brown vs. Board of Education.  That day with Maxine was one of the most eye-opening days for me.

For a second moment, fast forward five years later and I’m in Washington D.C. and I’m with a whole group of principals.  We’d been touring schools together trying to figure out how to give feedback to teachers.  And there’s this boy whose desk is off in a corner, by the side of the room.  I ask why he is separated from the rest and I expect to hear that he has an IEP and he works best in a quieter space, or to find out he has chosen to locate his desk that way.  But instead the principal turns to me and says, “Oh.  Well, he’s homesexual.”  

This was twelve years ago!  This was not fifty years ago; this was TWELVE years ago and it was just so heart-wrenching.  And the bigger thing that was so heart-wrenching is that the people around me – the people that knew – didn’t protest.  That was a huge eye-opener.  Inside public schools, there is huge amount of work to do in terms of equity, but also in terms of compassion.  Also in helping affirm kids’ identities.

I think I thought that because I did my doctorate in queer theory and in gender theory, and I had done a lot of work with Critical Race Theory at the time that I understood the issues.  But this was now 18 years ago.  

For all of us in education there is a whole new generation of people to know and read.  We need to know Abram Kandid, Betinna Love, Gholdy Muhammad, Zaretta Hammond.  There is so much new thinking in Critical Race Theory.

To be alive and to be an educator now means you’ve got to be reading again.  

In your opinion, what was the watershed moment for turning our attention towards equity in education?

That’s a question I find hard to think about.  I think about Judith Butler and how she talks about the mundane violence that happens every single day in schools.  And Betinna Love’s amazing book We Want to Do More than Survive about abolitionist teaching. There are so many micro-aggressions that are happening every single day.  Sometimes in the hallways and in the caterias, sometimes between adults and children, sometimes between children and children.   It’s not like I look back on one single political moment as I think about the humiliation and suffering that kids should not have to endure in school, but do.  

What are a few key teaching moves you would love to see happen in every classroom in America?

The first thing I would say is Belle Hook’s idea of teaching with love.  For this job, you have to love kids and you have to love the work you are doing.  If you do, then that love is contagious and it’s transformative.  If you love books, your kids will love books.  If you love reading, your kids will learn to love reading.  If you love writing, your kids will learn to love writing.  

Love is at the center of teaching being a beautiful job and if you stop feeling that love, then it’s time to take a break for a little while if you can.  

The other key teaching move would be the notion of mentorship, of seeing ourselves as being on our kids’ sides.  How are we mentoring their growth as writers? How are we mentoring their growth as thinkers?

We need to be open with them that we are learning all the time too, and it’s hard.  When you share with them that you’re reading a book and it’s hard, just like they’re reading a book and it’s hard, that communicates to them that we’re all on the same learning path instead of communicating to them we are the experts and they are the apprentices.  We, too, are always learning and that role of mentorship is really helpful.

What are some of the pedagogical lessons you have learned from Covid-based education you hope to see brought forward to in-person classrooms?

That teachers and kids can innovate at incredibly radical rates that we didn’t know we could.  Is it causing huge psychological strain on every kid and adult?  Of course it is! Are we exhausted and overwhelmed?  Yes, we are!  At the same time, there are things to keep.

I was working with a classroom of fifth graders the other day.  They are back in school now, but they have decided that they like meeting with their book club virtually.  The group decided they are going to meet on Wednesday nights from 7-7:30.  And these kids – using choice and agency to make choices about what will work best for them – is a beautiful thing.  They are recording their sessions and sending 2-3 minute clips to their teacher. 

The group next to them was made up of mostly language learners and they have decided to meet asynchronously.  They are using a Padlet, and they are making notes to each other that way. That is working so well for them.  

Two years ago, we would have said, “You are meeting Wednesday at 10:30 because that’s when I have English class.”  But the notion that kids and teachers can give each other more independence, but can also use technology in such a way to give students more agency, has been an eye-opener.  

These are things we should have been doing before but we just weren’t, because we didn’t have to.  Paul Anderson, who is one of the great thinkers and leaders in science in education, co-led an institute with me at the start of the pandemic.  He said, “Constraint leads to innovation.”  I was really struck by that.  There were so many constraints in Covid, but out of those constraints, there was a lot of innovation.  

The other thing that has been super interesting – and I would be curious to find out what kind of experiences you had in Bend – was that there were some kids who had been very quiet in class, but when learning went virtual, they found ways to be heard.  In virtual education, there were ways to democratize talk by pulling out the social strains.  Much of that was about situational introvertism.  And we want to keep looking at that, and thinking about that.

And then the last would comes from the fact that a lot of classrooms I work with are very writing heavy.  And that’s a good thing most of the time; that’s how kids become strong writers.  Tony Wagner (The Global Achievement Gap)  has shown writing is one of the seven most important skills you can have in your professional lifetimes.  

Because we were virtual, there were a lot more kids explaining things orally.  You might think that, if you had them writing about something in science, you then assume they don’t know that much about it because of what they wrote; but when they spoke about the subject, it turned out they knew a lot.  When you write a literary essay, that is not capturing the same exact of understanding as when you talk about a book.  

Using more talk activities to help kids practice their writing, and access what they have to say, is a valuable lesson for us to think about.

Who are some of your favorite authors discussing issues in education today.  Are there any texts you would especially recommend? 

For high school teachers, my team has been reading Felicia Rose Chavez’s book The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop  and she’s writing part memoir and part recommendation about what she would like to see changed in writing workshop at secondary and college.  She’s writing about her experiences teaching writing at the university, but everything she’s writing about we’ve inherited at the high school level.  How can you make the teaching of writing more invitational and more transformative for more young people.  It’s really humbling and really beautiful.

My other recommendation is Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius.  I was sort of forced to read it twice – the first time I read it, I got everything out of it I was already comfortable with.  The second time I read it, I began to realize there were many things that were challenging some of my own teaching norms.  She teaches us that every kid has some kind of literary heritage that we should be bringing back into classrooms.  

Any final words of advice for teachers, Mary?

Teachers should not be so hard on themselves.  Teachers have taught in extraordinarily versatile ways for a year and a half now – and it’s exhausting.  There have been moments of real beauty but sometimes they’re hard to see because you have in your mind all the things you used to do.  Focus your mind not so much on going back, but on going forward.  There are a lot of different ways a classroom can look, and there are a lot of different ways students can learn.  Forgive yourself and appreciate these small beauties you have created.

Q:  Tell us  a little bit about yourself and your family.  Why are you looking forward to moving to Bend?

A couple of things about me:  I have three grown kids.  I have been a teacher, a building administrator. I have never taught my kids, but I have been a building administrator for all three of my children in some way, shape, or form.  My wife, Stephanie, is a former critical care nurse, and also a retired school nurse.  We have both worked in education, myself my entire adult life.  I’m just finishing up my 32nd year in education.  I spent 13 years as a teacher, 12 years as a building administrator, and getting ready to start year 8 as a district administrator. 

My wife and I have been fortunate enough to find a house here.  I’m going to finish out my contract in Coeur d’Alene and be here sometime in mid-June. We are also bringing a puppy with us – a rescue dog named Alfreda.  She was a stray and my wife fell in love with her the moment she saw her.  

I am also extremely excited to join the Bend community.  I feel so grateful for the opportunity to work with you all and others – to get to be eyeball deep in making the best learning experiences we can for kids and to help teachers and administrators and staff facilitate and grow that kind of collaborative learning experience for kids.  

Q:  Tell us about your biggest life moments around the topic of equity.

The biggest one for me was by far the largest learning experience I’ve had around equity – and it happened as an adult.  I’ve grown up in pretty diverse areas.  I grew up in Topeka, Kansas until I was 10, and then we moved to Dodge City so my parents could take over the family farm.  And then my second teaching position, where I spent for the majority of my teaching career, was in Bonner Springs.  All three of those areas were quite diverse.  

As a teacher in Bonner Springs, I was telling a story about growing up in Topeka.  Both my parents were teachers and we lived in a fairy frugal house, in a very diverse and poor neighborhood.  The middle school was right next to the elementary school and sometimes the older kids would pick on the younger ones.   

So there I was in the Bonner Springs staff lounge, remembering all of this, and telling a story about how one day some African American boys were chasing us, trying to beat us up: they thought we had theme park tickets and they wanted them.  To make it all worse, I was taking band and needed to take home my practice drums each day.  So there I was: a scrawny little 4th grader, trying to get to a block mother’s house without dropping my drums.  But I couldn’t run as fast, and the boys caught me and beat me up pretty bad. 

Now, the secretary of the high school was Mary Kimbrough. She was African American and had worked at the high school forever, and was one of those names that was known throughout the town and commanded respect.  And there I was in the staff lounge, telling this story for the laughs and the jokes. My audience was in stitches over this story of how the African American kids beat me up. Mary came up to me and she was furious. She wagged her finger in my face and she said, “Steven Cook! Those kids are just kids!”  

I was stunned.  I felt so small.  It was the first time I’ve ever recognized that I was delineating around race – there was no reason to specify the race of those boys.  Never in my life did I even consider race to be a thing.  It was the first time in my life I was made to recognize my own whiteness.  After that, Mary Kimbrough was so graceful and so kind to me, and helped me to grow through my own ignorance.  

It impacted me deeply and personally.  

Q:  And the second most impactful moment?

The second one was later on, after I became a principal and was embedded in the expeditionary learning network, when I was really gaining experience and starting to feel comfortable in the shoes of an instructional leader.  The training I got, and the professional development I received, as an Expeditionary Learning principal is the most transformative I have received in my career.  

Q:  Can you tell us a little bit more about Expeditionary Learning?

Expeditionary Learning (EL) is a style of learning that came out of Outward Bound, a project-based learning experience.  And these projects are very complex and many times they involve giving back to the community in some way.  One of the biggest differences between EL and the mainstream model is that we don’t compete with one another; the competition is my own to be better than I was yesterday, to engage with my own self-growth and self-efficacy.  EL was absorbed by many of the inner-city charter schools and challenged the dominant culture of low expectations and helped transform it into a culture of high expectations.  We have two EL schools in the Bend-La Pine district  – the middle and high schools of Realms.  

Q:  And it was EL that was so transformative to you as an instructional leader?

Yes.  It’s because of the explicit intentionality and importance they place on not just the moves you make as a teacher, and not just the moves you make as an instructional leader, but also on the moves you make that are empathetically connected to that student that is sitting right in front of you.  EL asks us:  are you truly doing what you can to maximize that learning experience for that student?  When you think about teaching in that way, you become much more attuned, and much more connected.

Q:  So when we’re talking about providing equitable instruction, what does that mean beyond providing an accessible learning experience to every student in the room?

The first thing is:  can we start by agreeing that there are two moves every instructor can make right away?  1) Aspire to the best quality, Tier 1 instruction you can.  That you are always looking and evaluating and making new decisions about the moves you are making.  2) Creating a community and a socio-emotional experience for every student in the room that gives them a felt comfort and a safe environment, so that they feel like they’re a part of that community.

And on the basis of both of those things are strategic moves that we can train upon.  Those strategic moves are things you do as an adult that are going to create that feeling of felt safety and create that empathetic kind of relationship so I know, recognize, and understand who my learners are as individual people, and what value they are bringing into my classroom.

I came to know the Platinum Rule: don’t treat others the way you want to be treated; treat others the way they want to be treated.  And if you can start to build and connect with kids on that level, you can start to recognize what their needs are.  

Q:  Is it those relationships and that self-reflection as a teacher that make learning accessible?

Accessibility is such a broad term…It’s almost too vague in some regards.  But it starts with knowing and understanding who that kid is and what they’re bringing in the door – who had breakfast, who had a rough morning (as adults, we even struggle with rough mornings; they’re tough!).  We bring whatever we have into our world.

We can talk about specific ways to do that, but creating an environment in which every kid feels welcome starts with simple things like creating an environment in which every kid gets eye contact, in which every kid gets a smile, every kid hears his or her name in a positive way.  You don’t let kids off the hook, you don’t give them an opportunity to bail out of the learning experience, but you also treat them with respect and dignity when they say, “I’m struggling with this.” 

As adults, we’ve all had a moment – whether it’s something you remember from your childhood, or something you’ve experienced as an adult – where someone has done something that makes you feel less than safe, or less than comfortable. Recognizing when we do that as adults, stepping back and apologizing in front of kids, might be some of the most powerful things we ever do.  When we do that, we show kids that we still have a lot to learn.  And if I’m aspiring to do that better than I did the day before, it means I’m taking some risks and I’m doing some things I’m not perfect at yet and I’m going to fail sometimes.  

It is important to create an environment where we do that together, and embrace those mistakes and own them.  And if we can do that in a way that empowers how we engage with each other, those are the kind of relationships I want to be in.  If we’re afraid to make mistakes, that’s not a safe environment.

Part 1 of 2. The rest of this interview will be published next week.

Curious about EL? Here’s a great link to get you started: https://eleducation.org/

OUR ELEMENTARY COLLEAGUES LOVE IT FOR A REASON! IT CAN BE JUST AS GREAT FOR SECONDARY STUDENTS.

Skyline and CDL’s math teacher Gabe Schepergerdes loves it and uses it on a daily basis. At Skyline, it is used so commonly that a subscription is provided for the staff. The CDL team was converted immediately upon seeing a demonstration about how he uses it. Throughout K-12 education, the teachers that know it, love it. No matter what grade or subject you teach, if you use slideshows, PearDeck is a fabulous engagement tool that is as easy for you as for them. Are you curious?

Gabe sells it better than I can. He provides a demonstration about how he uses it on a daily basis with his class. Because his demonstration was provided for an audience, you will be able to see both the teacher view and the student view of the experience. If you are someone who struggles to keep students engaged, or if you are also looking for new engagement tools, Gabe’s video explores this fantastic option.

GABE’S TRAINING SESSION (16min): https://bls.webex.com/bls/ldr.php?RCID=5d0c5c95db134b91adf591b635a3aa68 PASSWORD: YcqQSNP2The Pros of Pear Deck:

• The Pro’s of Pear Deck:
  • Screen-sharing take A LOT of bandwidth and students don’t always have enough as it is. Pear Deck allows students to open your slide show, thus allowing you to remain in a regular WebEx session which is much more manageable for the bandwidth capabilities of many families.
  • Pear Deck works with either of our slideshow platforms: PowerPoint or Google Slides.
  • You get a real-time typing view of student work, meaning that you don’t have to wait until they press ‘Send’ to begin to prepare your responses. This also allows you to message students directly based on the direction you are seeing them heading in, rather than having to wait until they are finished to offer guidance.
  • Students do not see each other’s responses unless you share screen so that they can. You see everybody’s, but they do not. This allows you to ask more challenging questions, or for students to complete more challenging tasks without needing to send work to you through a different platform.
  • Pear Deck is free as a Google Add-on. This means that if you click on the 3 x 3 buttons on the top right of your screen, Pear Deck will be one the of the options.
• The Con’s of Pear Deck
  • The platform improves significantly with $150/teacher. (To see the comparison list: https://www.peardeck.com/pricing) I know we are not there yet, but hopefully, in the future, we can begin to consider site or department tech subscriptions as part of a site’s curriculum or tech budget, rather than only available if provided by the district or if a department is willing to pay the entire bill (which would take most of a department budget).
  • One of the improvements in a Pear Deck subscription is a student-paced option, which would allow you to use Pear Deck for asynchronous presentation as well. Free Pear Deck is live delivery/teacher-paced.
  • Also with a subscription comes the options for students to use a drawing feature to show their work in more ways than typing words.

On balance, Pear Deck is a superior application that dramatically enhances the engagement potential of our slideshows. Whether in a live or virtual classroom, this is an app you can use. If you agree that Spring Break is an excellent time to pick up a new tech skill, we encourage you to consider this one.

Last week’s blog focused on the importance of communicating clear learning intentions: the WHY of our lessons. This week, we focus on student success: WHAT does success look like?

LEARNING INTENTIONS tell students where I am going; SUCCESS CRITERIA help students know how they are going to get there, and what choices they will make along the way. Students must have a clear expectations about what it looks like to be successful in the learning endeavor they are about to engage in. Success criteria provide a framework, a set of rules that students will use to understand their success in learning.

Success criteria tells students how far they will swim before they dive into their learning.

Well-written criteria give students feedback about learning. Feedback does not always have to come from the teacher. Because they know their success criteria, students can engage in more meaningful conversations with their peers about their work. Such peer assessment is they type of assessment that we get in real life. (I assure you that I shared this blog post with my peers, received feedback and made adjustments before posting it!)

Well-written criteria also enables students to engage in more effective self-assessment. Rather than asking them “How do you think you did,” we can ask them, “Where do you believe you scored and what justification do you have for your reasoning?”

Not providing success criteria is similar to coach telling their team to play a game, but not telling them how to win or, even, very many of the rules. We’ve all been there at one time or another: think of that time on the playground when nothing was clear and we had to figure out the game as we went, hoping we got it right. Sure, some of us kept playing. Many of us walked away, accepting lesser playground status, feeling like outsiders because we didn’t seem to know what the other kids understood innately.

Clear learning intentions and success criteria have been shown to increase levels of engagement and motivation because the rules of the game are clear, and students no longer feel unsure of what to do next or what they are trying to accomplish.

When kids know their success criteria, the playground works. When students know their success criteria, the classroom works.