The New Art and Science of Teaching. Robert J. Marzano
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_ddfa9b9f-6ced-5724-add0-89f740838ba7">Table 1.3 (page 16) lists the strategies for this element.
Table 1.3: Celebrating Success
| Strategy | Description |
| Status celebration | The teacher celebrates each student’s status at any point in time, including at the end of a unit. |
| Knowledge gain celebration | The teacher celebrates knowledge gain, which is the difference between a student’s initial and final scores for a learning goal. To do this, the teacher recognizes the growth each student has made over the course of a unit. |
| Verbal feedback | The teacher emphasizes each student’s effort and growth by specifically explaining what a student did well on a task. |
Source: Adapted from Marzano Research, 2016d.
The first two strategies in table 1.3 address formal ways of acknowledging students’ status and growth. The teacher might have celebrations, such as by ringing a bell, each time a student reaches score 3.0 on a proficiency scale. At the end of a unit, the teacher might also acknowledge all students who have increased their original score by 1.5 or more scale points. Students might simply stand and receive a round of applause from their classmates. Verbal feedback might involve private or public comments to students. The structure of a proficiency scale allows for multiple celebrations of both status and growth.
When the strategies in this element produce the desired effects, teachers will observe the following behaviors in students.
• Students demonstrate pride regarding their accomplishments in class.
• Students appear to strive for higher scores on a proficiency scale.
• Students say they enjoy celebrations.
Planning
The design question pertaining to providing and communicating clear goals and objectives is, How will I communicate clear learning goals that help students understand the progression of knowledge they are expected to master and where they are along that progression? The three elements that pertain to this design area provide specific guidance regarding this overall design question. Teachers can easily turn these elements into more focused planning questions.
• Element 1: How will I design scales or rubrics?
• Element 2: How will I track progress?
• Element 3: How will I celebrate success?
For a given unit, a teacher should think carefully about the content and select what is essential. This is not an easy task in an era of standards. It is a common practice for teachers to plan their instruction around a specific standard. For example, a fourth-grade science teacher might plan a unit of instruction around the following science standard:
Make observations and/or measurements to provide evidence of the effects of weathering or the rate of erosion by water, ice, wind, or vegetation. (Achieve, 2013, p. 35)
This single standard has a wide array of embedded content. In fact, the following content is implicit in this single standard (Marzano & Simms, 2014).
■ Students will be able to make observations.
■ Students will be able to make measurements.
■ Students will understand what evidence is and be able to provide evidence.
■ Students will understand what weathering is and will be able to recognize the effects of weathering.
■ Students will understand what erosion is and be able to recognize erosion.
■ Students will understand how water, ice, and wind affect erosion.
■ Students will understand how vegetation affects erosion. (p. 108)
The teacher’s first tasks relative to this design area are to unpack the standard, identify what is essential, and organize the content into a proficiency scale. Such a scale for this standard appears in figure 1.3.
Figure 1.3: Scale for weathering and erosion at grade 4.
With the scale in place, the stage is set for students to track their progress. As figure 1.2 (page 14) shows, the student began with a score of 1.5, indicating partial success at score 2.0. By the end of the unit, the student achieved a score of 3.5, indicating success at score 2.0 and 3.0 content and partial success with score 4.0 content. The student gained two full points on the proficiency scale.
Implications for Change
The New Art and Science of Teaching is a framework for change. Indeed, each of the ten design areas has implications for substantive change. The change that providing and communicating clear learning goals and objectives implies is the manner in which educators view content. The prevailing view is that classroom content directly equates with standards. A teacher receives standards from the state or district. These standards represent the content to teach. Unfortunately, such a process is almost impossible to execute. A historical perspective provides evidence for this assertion.
The modern standards movement began in 1989 at the first Education Summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has continued to evolve. (For a discussion, see Marzano & Kendall, 1996.) Every state now has its own set of standards, which the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA & CCSSO], 2010a) and mathematics (NGA & CCSSO, 2010b) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) influence to some degree small or large.
After decades of evolution, one might think that standards in every subject area have been fine-tuned to a high degree of precision and focus. However, this is not the case. To illustrate, at the beginning of the 21st century, researchers estimated that it would take about 15,500 hours to teach all the standards identified for K–12 students, yet there were only about 9,000 hours of instructional time available to do so (see Marzano, 2007; Marzano & Kendall, 1996). In effect, it was impossible to teach the content in the standards in the time available.
The trend in the disparity between the amount of content the standards addressed and the time available to teach it persists. For example, Marzano, David C. Yanoski, Jan K. Hoegh, and Simms (2013) identify seventy-three standards statements for eighth-grade English language arts in the CCSS. As shown in the previous section, each of these standards contains a number of unique topics. Assuming an average of five topics per standards statement, there are 365 English language arts topics eighth-grade teachers are expected to address; obviously this is an impossible task within the confines of a 180-day school year.
Proficiency scales provide a solution to this problem. Individual teachers could take the initiative to unpack the standards they addressed in a unit and create one or more proficiency scales that focus on the important content. However, such a task is better addressed at the district level. That is, district curriculum experts working with teachers should create proficiency scales for each subject area at each grade level. Tammy Heflebower, Hoegh, and Phil Warrick (2014) articulate specific steps as to how a district might do this. Additionally, at Marzano Research, Julia Simms (2016) led a team identifying the essential topics (referred to as measurement topics) for English language arts, mathematics, and science. Figure 1.4 lists the