Although it’s been out for over a year, I finally got around to reading Mike Schmoker’s latest book Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improving Student Learning and it hit the mark. Schmoker is somewhat of a folk hero to me when it comes to my passion for making practical the heady and complex academic work of human learning.
It would be easy for a critic to say, “If you’ve read one Schmoker book, you’ve read them all”, but such an insult overlooks the brilliance of a leader who knows the dire need in public education to stay on message, driving home a few solid principles that people can rally around. Focus returns to these repetitively without being redundant, by citing multiple pieces of evidence across decades of research. There is a solid connection between the strategies advocated for all students in Focus and research on closing the achievement gap for students of disadvantage. If it resonates with you that holistic, good teaching isn’t segregated into subgroups, check out this book.
For me, the most compelling reason to deeply explore Schmoker’s rationale with your peers is how his arguments for sound instruction complement current directives of the Common Core State Standards. I find myself frequently discussing the Common Core cycling between “the what” and “the how” we teach. That ended up being the incidental lens through which I read this book. Here are some key points, or teasers, that to give you a taste of Schmoker’s logic:
The What
- Teach topics, not verbs when looking at standards
- Identify power standards from those topics
- Use common scoring guides (rubrics) for writing across all content areas
- Increase the number of quick writes using these guides and collect formal samples
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The How
Simple, effective lessons look like this:
- Clear Learning Objectives
- Teaching/Modeling/Demonstrating
- Guided Practice
- Checks for Understanding/Formative Assessment
In an overwhelming time where we’re grappling with “key shifts”, “what”, and “how”, what we need is inspiration, depth, and focus. This easy read provides all of the above and gets 5 of 5 Sutterstars!