Teacher Clarity

What is Teacher Clarity?

Teacher clarity is a measure of the clarity of communication between teachers and students in both directions.  It can be described across four dimensions:

  • Clarity of Organization: Lesson tasks, assignments, and activities are linked to the objectives and outcomes of learning
  • Clarity of Explanation: Information is relevant, accurate, and comprehensible to students
  • Clarity of Examples and Guided Practice: Lessons include information that allows students to gradually move toward independence, making progress with less support from the teacher
  • Clarity of Assessment of Student Learning: The teacher regularly seeks out and acts upon the feedback he or she receives from students, especially through their verbal and written responses.

Using clarity as a benchmark, it can be said that excellent teachers:

  • Have appropriately high expectations
  • Share success criteria with their students
  • Ensure alignment between their lessons, tasks and assignments
  • Make lessons relevant, accurate, and comprehensible
  • Give worked examples to illustrate the level of cognitive complexity desired from their students
  • Provide feedback about where to move to next

Source

Fisher, D., Frey, N., Amador, O., and Assof, J. (2019). The Teacher Clarity Playbook. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Publishing.

From Standards to Assessments: Elements of Teacher Clarity

1. Identifying Concepts and Skills Based on Standards

Knowing the standards well allows teachers to determine the necessary prior knowledge and to determine the expectations for student success. A useful method for determining the concepts students must master and the skills they need to attain is to analyze the standard’s nouns and verbs.

2. Identifying and Sequencing Learning Progressions

Learning Progressions are the essential core concepts and processes that underlie the standard. They articulate the pathway for proficiency and can be used to design assessments of of mastery.
 
To create Learning Progressions, teachers should consider what underlying knowledge students must possess to master a given standard and how the concepts and skills within that standard might be sequenced in a logical way.
 

3. Stating Learning Intentions

Learning Intentions are daily statements describing what knowledge, skills, or concepts a student is expected to learn in a given lesson. They come from breaking each Learning Progression into lesson-sized chunks and rephrasing them in student-friendly language.

4. Crafting Success Criteria

Success Criteria tell students what the learning destination looks like and provide a map for how they will get there. They come from breaking each Learning Intention into clear, specific, attainable goals for students.

5. Communicating Relevance

The relevance of much school-based learning is not readily apparent to students. Taking the time to address relevancy fosters motivation and deepens learning as students begin to make connections to larger concepts.

6. Designing Formative Assessments

Checking for understanding is usually accomplished by asking questions, analyzing written tasks, and administering low-stakes quizzes. Effective teachers respond to this information in meaningful ways and then plan for subsequent instruction. 

7. Creating Meaningful Learning Experiences

This refers not to a random collection of instructional strategies, but to an intentional set of moves that the teacher makes to scaffold student learning.

One framework for intentional instruction is the gradual release of responsibility model in which scaffolding is gradually reduced as instructional strategies progress from teacher modeling of critical thinking to guided instruction to collaborative learning and finally to independent learning. 

8. Establishing Mastery of the Standards

Summative assessments include end-of-unit and end-of-course tests, projects, writing assignments, and performance tasks. Summative assessments are important because they provide a measure of student performance against an exemplar – the standard. 

To develop a sound summative assessment that effectively measures the standard, teachers should return to the elements used to design the instruction in the first place: concepts and skills, learning progressions, learning intentions, success criteria, and relevance.

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