The ongoing debate in education about what we want all children to know and be able to do has raged on for decades and leaves us all to question and argue the merits of our current standards, assessments and pacing guides that seem to expect so much of our students and teachers with little regard for whether any of this is really doable.The instructional shifts required by newer national and state standards has contributed to this notion that these core competencies must required of all children and all we have to do is practice them over and over. What rarely surfaces in all this dialogue is the very real issue of foundational skills that must be mastered in order to grasp these more challenging standards.
One obvious example is the movement afoot to put complex texts (and tasks) in front of children who have not yet mastered the foundational skills (such as fluency and vocabulary) needed to access those texts. As educators, how we go about this is a debate worth having. Trust me, I certainly understand the argument on both sides of the instructional aisle and I am not taking a side today as this issue is too complex and too long-standing to simply check one box or the other.
Making rigor a reality. What mastery of standards really requires.
What is more even important than a debate over standards is this issue of mastery and what we mean by it. Why? Because getting kids to master things is the real trick to this thing we call school. Why? Because mastery of something makes the next something easier to learn. Why? Because once you really, really know how to do something (let’s say fractions), it is so much easier to do the harder thing (let’s say Algebra).
There are endless examples of this in school and in life. Go ahead and pick something fun like riding a skateboard or even more fun like reading Shakespeare. I can assure you that it is quite impossible to complete 360 flips of one’s skateboard if you have not yet learned to balance and ride down the sidewalk without falling. It’s equally unlikely that any child is going to read and understand Othello without reaching some mastery of silent reading fluency and a moderate command of high school vocabulary.
By comparison, it is equally implausible for a student to command the complexities of plot, tragedy, diction and rhetoric by simply reading Othello over and over. More to the point, we must be careful to not mix our metaphors when discussing the instructional shifts. Though getting students to master the art of reading and analyzing complex texts is the right course, it is unlikely that they are going to get good at it unless and until they share in some foundations that are prerequisites for mastery of such tasks.
Alas, so we can avoid the age-old debate described above, let me be clear that I am not suggesting that we don’t expose children to complex texts from an early age (because we should) or that the instructional shifts to more rigorous tasks are not good first steps (because they are). Still, I am suggesting that we cannot lose sight of the role that foundational skills play in making rigor a reality.
Perfect practice makes perfect. Why kids must master every skill, every time.
So what does mastery of foundational skills look like? Where is this balance that we seek? Why are some kids gaining traction in mastering these complex standards and others are just not getting it?
A good place to start is to remind us again of the “100 percent rule.” This idea has been well-articulated by Doug Lemov in his popular book titled “Teach Like A Champion.” In short, Lemov describes this rule related to classroom management – that a teacher must require that 100% of her students are tuned in and on task for learning. I bring up the 100 percent rule here because our best instructional leaders (like our best teachers) do not allow some students to do things while other students do not and do not allow some teachers to do things while others do not.
The same can be said in clarifying what we mean by “mastery.” There is simply no way to expect children to master complex tasks if they have not yet mastered foundational skills. By “mastery,” I mean 100 percent mastery. The student who says: “I sort of know my times tables” is not ready to master Algebra because “sort of” knowing is not knowing at all.
Among the foundational skills that must be mastered at 100 percent are the following (feel free to add others):
- Tier 1 / Sight Words
- Tier 2 / Vocabulary Words
- Greek and Latin Roots (and prefixes to a large degree)
- Multiplication Facts
- Fractions
To be sure, this is messy and heady pedagogy indeed. The complex reality at play here rivals the difficulties found in any Greek tragedy or complex Chemistry experiment. So let’s close with an even more nuanced conclusion for us to chew on: While learning strong foundations to a level that we would call “mastery” or “automaticity” (such as knowing how to decode complex words without even thinking about it) is very, very hard, getting to 100 percent mastery of these essential skills makes the more complex tasks that come later a breeze. An example? Just think about how hard it is for a student to pick out the themes in a Shakespeare play when he or she is struggling with the words. And think about how easy it is for the student who is fully fluent and has a strong command of vocabulary.
We simply cannot ask our students to master these foundations most of the way. We must require them to master foundational skills all the way, for knowing something at 95% is hard while knowing something at 100% is so very, very easy.
