What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
—Pericles
If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, then, you are an excellent leader.
—Dolly Parton
I grew up on a farm in Southern Ontario in Canada. My parents and I lived with my grandparents and my aunt in a big farmhouse about 60 miles west of Toronto. In the first years of my life, my grandfather made a lot of time for me. He let me pretend to help when he built things around the farm, brought me along when he did chores, and taught me to love books and how to read.
When I was four years old, my grandfather started a tree-planting project with me. Grampa would walk with me a half-mile down the gravel road to a large willow tree at the end of the farm, and we would we cut small shoots of branches off the tree. Then we put the shoots in mason jars filled with water and waited for roots to sprout. Eventually, little roots grew out of our twigs, and our willow shoots were ready to be planted as little trees. We planted them in many places on the farm and around the little village of Sheffield where my grandparents eventually moved.
At the time I didn’t realize it, but with hindsight I believe that my grandfather was planting those trees with me so that I would remember him. The trees were something I could go and see to be reminded of him after he died. And he was gone much too soon. My grandfather died of a heart attack when I was seven years old.
Unfortunately, one by one, the trees had to be removed. One was too close to a fence; one was too close to the house, and eventually none was left. For a while I felt sad about that, but then I realized that the actual trees were not what was important. What mattered was the act. What I remember was my grandfather and me doing the planting together. The trees were gone, but the legacy my grandfather left me lived on. Now writing this when I am 57 years old, I still remember my grandfather like I was 4.
To leave a legacy is as important in teaching as it is in life. Like my grandfather with his grandson, teachers have the chance every day to plant something that takes root and shapes the minds, hearts, and lives of their students. I learned this firsthand when I started doing research on learning at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning.
For my first research project, I studied what happens when teachers write personal visions. One of the teachers I was working with was Maryfrances Wagner, a wonderful language arts teacher in the Raytown School District, outside of Kansas City. One day I met Maryfrances to discuss the vision study, and I asked her how her day was going. “Today,” she said, “is a good day.” She had received a letter from one of her former students, a girl she had taught in twelfth-grade English. Mary shared the letter, written on the letterhead of a legal firm. In part, as I recall, it read as follows:
Dear Mrs. Wagner,
You may not remember me, but 12 years ago I was in your AP English class. During the class you asked me what my plans were after I graduated. I told you I was planning to be a legal secretary, and you told me, don’t be a secretary, be a lawyer. Well, today I was just named partner in my law firm. I want you to know that it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for you …
This letter was a beautiful testament to Ms. Wagner’s successful teaching and a gracious gesture by a student, demonstrating the impact teachers can have on their students. But I don’t believe the impact that Maryfrances had on her former student was exceptional. This is what teachers do. Through their love of learning and their love of children and young adults, teachers profoundly affect the future.
Teachers have the chance, each day, to open their students up to possibilities that children often don’t have any inkling they hold within them. With what they teach, what they believe, and how they act, teachers help shape the lives of their students. There is no doubt that teachers leave a legacy with every student they teach. To teach is to leave a legacy.
This then is the critical question: What is the legacy I want to leave with my students?
Teachers answer that question every day they meet with children, and their legacy is passed on through modeling, instruction, encouragement, feedback, smiles, and suggestions. But the importance of considering the legacy is nowhere more important than when teachers sit down to plan their courses, units, and lessons. When teachers think about what to emphasize, what to ensure students master, what to skip, and where to go deep, their driving question should be this: Ten years from now, what do I want my students to remember about our class? High-impact planning is where teachers begin to answer that question.
High-impact planning involves (a) creating guiding questions that point toward the big ideas, skills, and knowledge students need to learn; (b) developing formative assessments that enable teachers and students to monitor progress and that serve to guide teachers as they adapt and differentiate instruction to increase learning; and (c) crafting learning maps that graphically depict the learning students will experience. Guiding questions, formative assessments, and learning maps provide a structure for student learning, and they make the outcomes and sequence of learning transparent so that students understand the key ideas and when they will be learned.
There seems to be no preferred or correct order for high-impact planning. Wiggins and McTighe (2005) suggest that some teachers benefit from starting with assessments and working backward in a kind of creative and artful task analysis. They write, “Backward design calls for us to make our goals or standards specific and concrete, in terms of assessment evidence, as we begin to plan a unit or course” (p. 19). For many teachers, backward design means starting with the assessment, and they aren’t comfortable writing their questions or drafting learning maps until they’re sure what they will be assessing.
Other teachers, in my experience, prefer to write their guiding questions at the start of planning. They say that they need to create the guiding questions first because they have to think deeply about the learning objectives before they write the assessments.
A third group of teachers would rather start with the map. “I have to get all the content out there so I can see it before I can write my questions and assessments,” they say.
Having worked with hundreds of teachers on curriculum development, I’ve found that most teachers prefer to start in one of these three places, guiding questions, learning maps, or formative assessment, and most know what they prefer. Teachers, I’ve concluded, should start where it feels most appropriate for them, in part, because that is where they will start anyway. What matters is that all three aspects of the planning process help refine the other parts of development.
Teachers who have written guiding questions may find the questions focus their development of their learning maps; similarly, developing a learning map may enrich a teacher’s guiding questions. In addition, when a teacher creates formative assessments—which is largely about breaking down and clearly articulating the knowledge, skills, and big ideas into what I call specific proficiencies and then determining how to assess students’ acquisition of those specific proficiencies—that act often leads them to refine their questions and learning maps. On many occasions, I’ve observed that after teachers write the specific proficiencies for their guiding questions, they realize they have to change the questions to better point to the answers they want students to discover. “If I can’t answer this question,” they say, “how can I expect my students to?”
High-impact planning is largely about using all three components of planning to be intentional about what students will be learning and how learning will proceed. When we live unintentionally in learning, we make a big mistake. As Wayne Dyer has famously stated, “Our intention creates our reality.” An unintentional life squanders opportunity because days, months, and sometimes years fly by before we realize that we are missing what is most important. The same can be said about teaching. An unintentional classroom is one in which opportunities are lost because too little thought is given to what is most important. Hours, days, and months fly by and opportunities for learning evaporate.
High-impact planning helps teachers create an intentional classroom by guiding teachers to think deeply about each learning opportunity. When teachers create guiding questions, they identify what is most important for their students to learn. When they create formative assessments, teachers ensure they know and their students know how well they are learning, and teachers are able to use that knowledge to appropriately adjust learning in school. And when they create learning maps, teachers consider the sequence of their instruction and the connections between the knowledge, skills, and big ideas their students will be learning.
In Chapter 2, I’ll describe how to develop guiding questions. In Chapter 3, I’ll describe how teachers can (a) identify the knowledge, skills, and big ideas that students need to learn; (b) assess whether students have learned what they are supposed to learn; and (c) adjust instruction to ensure that students do learn the content. In Chapter 4, I’ll describe how to develop learning maps and how teachers should integrate guiding questions and learning maps into the daily rituals and routines in the classroom to enhance teaching and, especially, learning.