Leverage

Borrow instructional time to focus on what matters most

Not all things are equally worth learning. Some things, once learned, have much greater utility than others. Some skills, when acquired, are more useful than others. Prioritize teaching things which will make the greatest impact. Schools can borrow instructional time for higher impact things at a very low interest rate because those things are such a good investment.

Any decent curriculum or even entire educational system does this to some extent without realizing it. We teach letter-sounds first and then, 12 years later, Anna Karenina. Not only are letter-sound correspondences more useful than Anna Karenina, but better sequencing also allows students to learn more total. A fluent reader can learn more in the same amount of time than a dysfluent one. It's faster to learn to read then learn Anna Karenina than the reverse order. And with the saved time you can go learn something else. A kid who is computationally quick can learn more algebra in an hour than one who is computationally slow because less of that hour is spent computing and more time is spent learning algebra.

All instructional decisions involve trade-offs, but they are not zero-sum. Some will allow for more total learning than others because they leverage things with higher return on investment, which means the other things can be learned faster. Reading is the most obvious candidate for this, but so too are spelling, handwriting, sentence writing, math facts, and whole number operations. This is obvious enough that every school will do it to some extent, but also intuitive enough that we rarely think about it intentionally. Reading, for example, just helps you do basically everything so much better. The kid who reads better learns more science, social studies, and math. They read more for pleasure even if reading for pleasure the exact same amount of time. We should be leveraging these foundational skills!

In literacy, we might reframe the reading wars as the degree to which they leverage the impact of foundational skills.

Literacy instruction is a useful microcosm for education because it's inignorably important enough to have accumulated a fairly large evidence base. So, we know with some degree of confidence what things are best to optimize at which times. We know that at various points in a child's development as a reader that phonemic manipulation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, word-reading fluency, orthographic and morphological knowledge, syntactic knowledge, vocabulary, and background knowledge have differing degrees of importance. If I try to optimize my third grader's phonemic skills when they are already reading 120 words correct per minute, I am making a mistake just as a kindergarten teacher optimizing word-reading fluency before the students have learned GPCs. Leveraging is about knowing what areas yield the best return on investment at what moments.

Ineffective approaches to literacy don't necessarily do harmful things (although some definitely do); they may just spend instructional time poorly. They prioritize love of reading when letter-sound knowledge matters more. They prioritize genre knowledge when reading multi-syllable words matters more. They prioritize automaticity with high-frequency words when phonetic decoding matters more.

The retort here is, invariably “We can do both!” It's true. That's what balance is. Let's balance all the things so we get it all. And all approaches to literacy will have some degree of balance because it’s never the case that only one thing matters. And, even if only one thing mattered at a time, you could never identify it with the degree of confidence needed to focus on it in isolation of other components. And even if you could, it’s remains prohibitively unlikely that all students would need exactly the same thing at the same time. So we always end up with some mix and some variety.

Yet, what I have come to believe is that we probably always bias towards too much of a mix and too much variety. It's probably optimal for almost all of us to be more leveraged. For example, if we have evidence saying repeated reading is one of our highest impact tools in teaching foundational reading or literacy intervention, we should probably do more of it. I use it more than any other teacher in my school (most use it not at all but that's another story), but even that was only 10 minutes a day. Would my students have been better off if a few times a week I had them do additional fluency practice during our science or social studies block with a content-area text– maybe 80 minutes a week instead of 50? Definitely.

As with everything, there is a point of diminishing returns, but concerns about that point serve mostly to prevent us from ever getting close to it. The thing about a point of diminishing returns is that being short of it means you could do more and still get good returns on your time investment. The point of diminishing returns is exactly where we want to be, not beyond it, but not short of it either. I suspect on almost all the best instructional practices, we're leaving a lot on the table.

Leveraging our instruction requires good knowledge of the evidence base in our subject. We need to know what instruction yields the best returns for learning, and also what things can be safely ignored or deemphasized and left for later. The chief characteristic of ineffective literacy instruction is that it knows not what to ignore. It does not focus on what matters. Every minute spent on something low impact is a minute taken from something high impact. Inclusion of weak practices is a difficult error to avoid without good knowledge of the evidence base. Variety is what happens when you don’t know what’s optimal.

There are two different ways to better leverage our instruction.

The first is selecting more effective instructional practices. Replace weak ones with strong ones. This is best done with practices for which we have a large degree of confidence about their efficacy or lack thereof. In literacy instruction, we have a decent idea about how well many different practices work. So we can do a lot of the ones that work the best at the right moments.

But we don't always have that degree of confidence about our practices. Luckily, we can leverage a second way: find the quickest way to teach something or have students practice it. Teach things didactically. Inquiry takes forever to get to the same place. Maybe the journey is richer (and only maybe, and only for some), but that effect is dwarfed by the didactic route being just so much faster. Spending twice the time for the same return is unwise. But also, sometimes effective leveraging is more mundane, more a matter of eliminating unnecessary steps and materials than anything else.

Some of the best regarded literacy interventions fail to do this well. One example is letter tile manipulatives, which are common in many Orton-Gillingham interventions. The evidence of their efficacy is very weak. Spelling a word with letter tiles requires the pupil to find the correct tile among their set, pick it up, place it down, and repeat for each letter of the word. When the word is finished they must then put the tiles back. This is all a very expensive way of spelling words. The hypothetical benefits of the tactile or multi-sensory component are beat out by just spelling more words in the same amount of instructional time using a pencil and paper. A kid spelling 10 words on paper learns more than one spelling 5 with letter tiles (not including any benefits from additional handwriting practice).

Finally, we should avoid non-instructional tasks as much as possible. This might be taken to mean crayola activities but also superfluous assessments. We should assess exactly as much as needed to make instructional decisions, and not much more. Dylan Wiliam has a good term for this: decision-driven data collection.

A well leveraged curriculum is very confident and very precise about what kids need to know at what moments and can very efficiently determine whether they are there or not. It will result in frequent but very quick checks. Information about whether kids are ready to move on is important to making sure time isn't wasted on something they already mastered. However, because a well-leveraged curriculum is focused on a few important things, the breadth of information required will be narrow, and assessments can be very quick.

The less leveraged our instruction, the more bloated our assessments tend to be. A poorly leveraged curriculum ends up with larger and less frequent assessments. Take no better example than a running record, which marries the reliability of a coin flip with the duration of a Seinfeld episode. It is so comically time consuming because it seeks evidence of too many things and ends up finding evidence of nothing at all. Meanwhile student-made posters, powerpoints, and other projects or portfolios are another example of how a poorly leveraged curriculum leads to bloated assessments. We don't really know what matters, so we need an assessment that captures all of it. Making that poster or diorama takes up a ton of instructional time for very little learning. Holistic assessments usually just mean we don’t know what we’ve actually taught and what we actually expect students to have learned.

To summarize, leveraging requires us to:

• find the best practices and do more of them

• be suspicious of high-variety instructional plans

• simplify tasks and reduce material overhead where possible

• get kids to where they need to be as smoothly and as fast as possible

• assess only what is necessary to make instructional decisions