Podcast Episode
Episode Description
In this episode, I chat with Jay McTighe about Stage 3 of Understanding by Design and what it really means to create learning experiences that move beyond content coverage toward understanding and transfer. We unpack the different types of learning goals related to acquisition, understanding, and transfer, and explore how those goals should shape both the teacher’s role and the student experience in the classroom.
Our conversation also examines the ongoing pressure schools feel to “cover” large volumes of content in preparation for standardized exams, and why that mindset can work against deeper learning. Jay shares practical insights into formative assessment, feedback, and the use of authentic performance tasks as opportunities for learning, not simply evaluation.
We also discuss how AI can support both teachers and students in designing richer learning experiences, clarifying goals, and creating more responsive pathways.
Check out Jay’s Work
Related Resources
- 8 Quick Checks for Understanding
- How to Provide Better Feedback Through Rubrics
- Instructional Shifts to Support Deep Learning
- You Can Teach for Meaning
- Making the Most of Professional Learning Communities
Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using AI transcription tools to support accessibility and provide a searchable, readable version of the podcast. While we’ve reviewed and lightly edited the content for clarity, there may still be occasional errors or omissions.
Catlin Tucker
Welcome to The Balance. I’m Doctor Catlin Tucker and today my guest is Jay McTighe. Jay is an accomplished author, speaker, and consultant. He’s best known for his work with Grant Wiggins on Understanding by Design, and has been just such an incredible mentor for me as an educator in this space. And this is the second of two conversations. So in our earlier conversation, which I will link to in the show notes, we talked a lot about the first two steps of backward design. So identifying the desired result for learning and then deciding on assessment evidence. And it was such a vibrant conversation that we did not get into the third step, which is the learning pathway. So I asked you if you would join me again today to have the conversation about how we design the learning pathway to ensure that hopefully all of our students are making progress toward clear transfer goals. So very excited for the second part of our conversation. Well, I’m very excited to continue the conversation with you, Jay. We kind of spent our last conversation a couple of months ago really digging into those kind of first two steps of backward design, and didn’t get to the learning pathway, which I was so excited to chat with you about. So I’d love for you, for anybody who’s just kind of catching up, like, set the stage of kind of what we’ve talked about and how it kind of how we kind of transition to thinking about those things as we shift to that, that third step of backward design and thinking about the learning pathway.
Jay McTighe
Yeah, I’m happy to do that. And it’s a joy to be back with you, Catlin, I love your podcast. So in our last session, I talked largely about the Understanding by Design framework, but with a focus on stages one and two of what has come to be known as backward design. So just a quick summary stage one of backward design is where we identify the learning goals toward which we are teaching. You know, it’s obvious you should have goals for any time you’re planning anything. But in Understanding by Design, we propose different types of learning goals. And those differences have impact on how we teach as well as how we assess. So I’ll come back to that in a moment. In stage two of backward design, we asked people to think like assessors before they think like teachers. Thinking like an assessor means it’s one thing to identify goals or select standards or portrait competencies that you’re going to focus on. It’s another to ask the question, what will I look for as evidence to see if students understand this or can do that? So thinking like an assessor proposes that we think about the assessment evidence tied to our goals up front in our planning as opposed to something we think about later on to get to a test and have a grade. So stages one and two literally set the stage for stage three of backward design which is planning or instruction and formulating the learning plan to help students achieve our goals and hopefully do well on the assessment evidence that we will be collecting. So that’s, that’s the context to say it a little more, directly teaching is a means to an end, right? Not an end in itself. And so decisions about what kind of instructional techniques to use or resources to employ, or how we use our time should be ultimately determined by what are our learning goals, what are the needs of our students, and what will we need to achieve these goals for our kids? So that’s kind of the construct. So let me riff on what Grant Wiggins and I proposed are, categorically speaking, three different kinds of learning goals. And think about their implication for, how we teach.
Catlin Tucker
Okay.
Jay McTighe
So we’ve described three familiar categories. They’re not unusual or radical. They are interrelated but they’re not identical. So one categorical type we simply call acquisition goals, namely what knowledge and skills should students acquire when they’re learning new material? Well, of course this is familiar territory. In the old days. We call them knowledge and skill objectives. What should students know and be able to do? And those are the basis largely for state standards. Let’s specify often in great detail knowledge and skills. Now by knowledge in this case, I’m referring largely to factual knowledge or knowledge of basic concepts at a fairly literal level. So I remember this stuff. And skills include very basic skills for younger children or basic skills for a new area. The things that we want students to be able to do, and they’re often initially learned in discrete ways. We’re looking at very specific skills, sometimes subskills. So that’s one category. The second category are what we’ve referred to as understanding goals. Understanding refers to coming to a deeper comprehension of an abstract idea in the form of a concept, a theme, but also a process can be an understanding goal, right? Whether it’s reading, writing, design, thinking, research, argumentation, or the creative processes in the arts, these themselves are abstract ideas. And then you need to understand the nature of the writing process or design thinking in order to enact those processes effectively. So it’s not just you can memorize five steps of a process, but that doesn’t mean you understand and can apply it. The third category of goals we summarize as transfer. Transfer is the ability of the student to take what has been learned and effectively apply that learning to a new situation, something that they haven’t seen or learned directly. And my argument has been and I think I mentioned this probably a lot in the last podcast, that to me, a modern education is ultimately targeting transfer. We want to prepare our students to be able to apply their learning, not just in a rote way, but in a flexible, adaptable way as they confront new information, new opportunities, new challenges. Because if we know anything about the world today, it is not static.
Catlin Tucker
Correct.
Jay McTighe
Rote learning
Catlin Tucker
Right.
Jay McTighe
will not equip you for the kind of unpredictability and excitement and challenges that we face today and kids will face even more so, after graduation. So those are the three goal categories. Let me kind of pull this thread together and then turn it back to you. And we can keep moving. The distinctions of these categories are important. They’re important because how kids develop and achieve these goals is not identical. And that has implications for how we teach and also how we assess. Just briefly on the assessment front, I hope your listeners would agree that if a teacher wants to see if kids know certain facts that are important. A fact-based test or quiz will tell us that. And if you think about it, a fact-based test essentially is binary right. You know it or you don’t know right. And say Jay got 88% correct on this test of historical facts on this unit or math facts or rules or grammar, whatever it might be. For skills, the best assessment of a skill is to watch students do the skill. Yeah. Or look at the product of their skill. Maybe it’s a drawing or perspective drawing, for instance. And we can place a skill proficiency along a continuum. So that’s pretty straightforward. But if we want to see if a student really understands something deeply and can transfer it, we need something more than a fact-based test. To me we need a performance-based assessment that requires students to apply their learning to something new and be able to explain it. So those are, those are the assessment implications of these goal types. And let’s think then about the instructional implications. If I want a student to learn a fact and remember it well we know how to teach for that. We show them the fact we, we explain it if necessary we might give them a mnemonic device or we might engage them in making a visual representation, rehearsing and practicing the fact, and over time you come to remember it. Similarly, with skill teaching, there are very well-established skill teaching protocols. You explain the skill, you demonstrate it. You give kids practice in simplified form with a lot of feedback, and then you increasingly let them be more independent and apply the skill to more complex situations. So that’s a skill teaching model. But I’m going to hold off because I’m going to go in deeper into what that means when our goals are understanding and transfer. But I’m going to summarize by saying we can’t really think seriously about teaching until we’re clear about the goals to which we are teaching. And because we have different types of goals, that impacts how we think about and how we actually, do our teaching.
Catlin Tucker
Well, I’m curious, so I go into and out of a lot of classrooms and like you work with educators, all of the time. Do you see, like, I see a lot of focus on what kids need to know and what they need to be able to do. And in observing the way a lot of instruction unfolds in classrooms, I feel like even just meeting the acquisition goals the way a lot of lessons are being taught and that in and of itself is challenging, right? I don’t think the instructional strategies, the learning pathways that are being designed, even just for that first set of goals, is actually helping a lot of students to learn, retain, be able to do like basic information and skills. And so when I hear you talk about, you know, deep understanding, like, what is it that we want students to understand when it comes to complex concepts and themes? And, what do we want them to be able to, like, take this learning and transfer it to do something totally new and novel like that’s absolutely where I see that we need to be, especially to your point in this world where kids are going to like the new and novel it’s going to be, they’re going to have to be adaptable and flexible. But like, if we’re not even teaching in ways that meet acquisition goals, it makes it so challenging for me to like, how do we get teachers into those kind of understanding goals, into the transfer goals, which require a lot more in terms of what our learners are actually able to do with the content they’re being exposed to.
Jay McTighe
Yeah, that’s a very astute observation. And I think it’s a fair generalization. There are a couple of thoughts on that. One thought is something I know we talked about in the last podcast is the, the, the volume of content in most subjects that could possibly be taught. And the problem, as I see it, of putting states and national groups putting too much content into standards that are expected to be learned, which puts the burden on the teacher to cover so much. But they can’t spend time to go deep because there’s so much content. That, to me, is a systemic problem. But it may be one of the drivers of having teachers feel they have to cover all this stuff, often at superficial levels. But let me, let me proceed though, to share some thoughts about teaching for understanding and transfer. Okay. First of all, I imagine that many of your listeners are familiar with the name Doctor John Hattie. Hattie is a researcher who’s done, noteworthy research on teaching methods and styles and techniques and calculated or determined their quote effect sizes on student learning. And while some people will quibble with statistical methods, his findings about what factors really impact student learning and achievement for the good are consistent with other meta-analyses, such as those from Bob Marzano and others. But one of the findings that I think is most germane is a factor that Hattie highlights as important to learning is what he calls teacher clarity. Yeah. And one dimension. In fact, I think the big dimension of teacher clarity is being clear about the goals toward which you are teaching and recognizing that different goals require different instructional methods. And so going back to my three categories of goals knowledge and skill, objectives, understanding and transfer. I’ve found that over the years to be a useful framework to use to unpack standards. Yeah, because what I’ve observed is the standards in many subject areas at state or national level, are an unhelpful mix of different goal types. Right. Sometimes the goal, the standards, that are very specific facts to be learned. And you see that in science, social studies, history for instance. Yeah. Often they identify some skills and then subjects like language arts. There are a lot of skills. It’s a skill based discipline. You see conceptual understandings, concepts, principles, all included, but kind of in the mix with the facts. And then you see what I would describe as transfer goals highlighted. And yet what’s interesting about transfer goals is they may not be as obvious in grade level standards. That’s where all this stuff is.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah.
Jay McTighe
It’s often in the beginning pages of standards documents where they articulate the larger purposes for teaching all this content. That’s where they articulate the transfer goals. Yeah. Teachers don’t read that because.
Catlin Tucker
You skip right over that part.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. So my part one of my long answer is if we aren’t clear about our long term goals and the most important things to understand in the content we teach, we can get lost in the weeds of covering low level stuff in ways that A, aren’t interesting or relevant to students or relevant. And so they don’t put effort into learning them or B, the methods of teaching them are coverage, which like a bedspread or a tablecloth, may skin the surface but not engage the mind in something that’s going to help kids retain that learning.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. Well, and it this conversation about the massive number of standards and almost like they’re convoluted the way that they’re written is not super helpful. Something that you one of the articles that you’re sharing that we’re kind of going back and forth with before this episode was the was highlighting how like in Japan, they have far fewer standards or things that they’re focusing on, but they go so deep, and students have these opportunities to like, really interact with concepts in very tangible ways and explore and experience and they far outperform us, by the way, and so it’s just like, I don’t understand how we haven’t started to question, like, there are just all of these different standards and all of this pressure to get through this just enormous amount of information. And I talk to teachers every single time I’m out and about who are just like, I can’t do that. And by that it’s like chunk instruction, pause, ask students to engage with each other or use a cooperative learning strategy. Like present them with a scenario or whatever. They’re like, I don’t have time to do that. I just have to get through this. And I’m like, what are we talking about here? If you get through it and they don’t understand, I have no idea. Yeah. What have we just spent this time doing? Like, it’s it’s so it doesn’t make any sense to me.
Jay McTighe
You’re absolutely right, Catlin. And that’s it. What you just said is a perfect setup for where I want to go now. Yeah. So what does it mean to teach for understanding and transfer? So here are some thoughts. One of the mantras that Grant Wiggins and I espouse is understanding must be earned. I love that. It must be earned by the student. It’s earned in the mind of the student. The teacher can help the student, but they can’t understand it for the student. So what does it mean to earn your understanding? It requires an active mental process of thinking, of considering ideas, listening to different points of view. Which means talking to others, trying to solve perplexing things. Try to make sense of new text or a piece of art or music? Debating. Maybe even changing your mind. It’s an active mental process that my understanding of the cognitive science involves taking and accessing prior knowledge and experience coupled with new ideas, new information, new situations, new challenges through an active thinking process.
Catlin Tucker
Right? The productive struggle piece of this is so important.
Jay McTighe
Productive struggle is one of the best characterizations. Grant Wiggins and I refer to this as meaning making. The student has to make meaning earn their understanding. It’s an active intellectual process. It’s not immediate trying to come up understanding an abstract idea or an abstract process doesn’t happen immediately. It’s more efficient for me to tell you a fact and you write it down right. That doesn’t ensure you understand or can use it. But having said that, it’s the active mental process that helps us build and develop understanding and understanding is needed for transfer. If you don’t understand something, you cannot apply it to anything new. You get that you can remember it and give it back the way it was told to you. That’s rote learning.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, I have to just. So I was just talking to my daughter, who’s a college student at University of Washington, and she’s tutoring, and she was tutoring students in chemistry, and she said, they understand the steps to do X, y, or Z. She goes, but they don’t. They don’t. Or they know the steps, which is a better way to put it. But they don’t understand why it’s important or what they’re trying to achieve. And to me, I was like, I see that all the time. I see teachers give students information, give them steps to a process and say, okay, here, do this thing with it. But that struggle, that productive struggle, that meaning making moment or moments are kind of skipped over. It feels like in so many classrooms.
Jay McTighe
Grant Wiggins used to call that the expert blind spot, that expert. Well, teachers who know their subject or their processes. Have developed their understanding over years, maybe decades. And it’s so natural to them. It’s just obvious. Right. But it’s not obvious for the learner. And I’ve always said we have to make the invisible visible for the learner in such cases. But so let me let me throw out another couple thoughts about teaching. Okay. Grant and I also in one of our books, proposed that we can think about three, categorically speaking, three roles for teachers and related roles for students. And and this idea is not original. It’s derived from writings of Mortimer Adler, who wrote The Paideia Proposal and was very, very smart guy. Anyway, here are the three categories. There’s direct instruction. There’s facilitative teaching and there’s coaching. And those, not too sharply but relatively are connected to the three learning goals that I mentioned. So let me unpack those briefly. Okay. Direct instruction is familiar. Right. We present the students. We lecture. We have a slide deck and we’re sharing information. It’s efficient. It’s effective. And we use it for things with no apology. There’s a place for direct instruction, especially when we’re teaching skills. We need to directly explain and demonstrate model as a student is learning a new skill. So there’s a place for that. And those methods are particularly well-suited to knowledge and skill acquisition. Facilitative teaching gets us into the realm of meaning making. And you know this because you promote this and have for your whole career. Facilitative teaching is where you’re presenting students with a challenge. Maybe it’s let’s make sense of this text, or let’s try to write a really compelling opening statement. Or let’s try to explain this anomalous data that doesn’t seem to make sense from our science experiment, etc., etc.. So we present students with a challenge of some sort or a question. And then our role is to prompt them, question them, engage them in discussion, watch them solving a problem. We’re facilitating their thinking, their collaboration, their meaning making. That’s not to say that the teacher might not step in. And if the kids are just completely lost, right. No. To say we’re going to step off the stage, we’re going to facilitate your meaning making, because understanding must be earned. And there are lots of methods Socratic seminar, collaborative learning, design thinking, problem based learning, writing process, etc., etc. that engage the learner in the doing and the teacher as facilitator. When we get to transfer, when we’ve built the knowledge and skill base that kids need because foundational knowledge and skills are needed. And when we’ve facilitated their meaning making now we’re now they’re in the role of performing. That’s where the role performance tasks and projects kick in. We’re going to step back. And you’re going to tackle this project or this task. And our role is going to be as a teacher that of a coach. And what a coaches do, especially if they’re good. They get feedback. Yep. And it’s the feedback role that again. Now the learner is much more in control. But they need help. They need feedback to get better. So those are three interrelated but not identical roles for teachers. And they’re tied to our goals. Yeah. That’s acquisition versus understanding versus transfer. Now let me do two more little riffs on this. Okay. So what does it mean for students. Because the role for students now shifts right.
Catlin Tucker
Right.
Jay McTighe
If your goal is for having kids learn basic skills or facts and you’re direct instruction. Ideally the student’s role is to pay attention, take notes, ask questions, or if it’s a skill, watch carefully and try. That’s a good student. When you’re shifting to meaning, making the students got to be much more active. They can’t just sit back passively and let you do all the work. They’ve got to engage. They’ve got to try things out. Collaborate. Debate. Give reasons for their thoughts. And so it moves from passive to active learning. And what I’ve observed over the years is some teachers want to make that shift, but they don’t tell the kids that the shift is going on. So the kids are sitting back waiting for them to tell them what to do when they post an open question.
Catlin Tucker
Right.
Jay McTighe
Right. So you have to you have to discuss what you’re doing and why and what their role is. And when they get to the third category of transfer, students playing the game, teacher is the coach saying, hey, when you ran it this way, the other team doubled you up. So we got to step back and try a different approach. Yep. And so the student, in the role of transfer needs to be listening to the coach’s feedback and trying to apply it.
Catlin Tucker
I love that. I’ll be honest with you when I have like talked about the teachers role often like I focus on I talk about facilitation all the time, but I never really thought about delineating between facilitating like really supporting students in meaning, making, constructing knowledge, doing all that pieces of facilitation and then the coaching being that feedback often like one on one. Here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s the next steps for improvement. And it’s such an it makes so much sense when you have clarity about the three different types of goals, depending on where the focus is, what kids are doing, what role the teacher is in. I just fascinating, I think I always kind of lumped like facilitation and coaching as kind of one thing, but it makes a lot of sense. The way you’re framing it to think of that coaching is it’s almost like you’re at that gradual release moment where now the kids are doing it and you’re just kind of stepping in to provide that feedback, to allow them to keep kind of independently trying to apply and transfer, which I love. I love that, but I honestly haven’t talked about it that way.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. So it’s a it’s a useful construct. And obviously the three categories overlap a bit. It’s not like we’re going to shift that at 2:00 this right. They’re distinct enough that that it merits clarity about the distinctions and the role. And so the teacher needs to understand the role in the learning process, but also let the kids in on it. So they know, hey guys, now it’s your turn to perform. You’re working on this task. I’m going to give you feedback or I may give you feedback. And we’re going to analyze their work and give feedback.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. But I even love because when I talk about just basically taking a 15, 20 minute lecture and like, let’s segment it into 4 or 5 minute chunks so we don’t overwhelm like cognitive overload, overwhelm working memory. And then you use like a cooperative learning, strategy between each segment. Then you’re like basically bouncing between, here’s direct instruction in my role. In your role. Here’s the cooperative learning. Now I’m facilitating in you’re in a different role and like that. Yeah. So I could see how they come together and really complement each other in certain ways. But that framing around the goals is actually really clarifying for me, probably for people listening to where.
Jay McTighe
Now, let me circle back then to the opening concern that that you have observed. And we all all know from teaching that the worry about there’s too much to cover, but the kids don’t seem to be remembering it even though we’ve covered it. Right. Well, that’s where the importance of meaning making in the mix. Because when you engage kids in meaning making even about factual information where you say, okay, get together and summarize the key points from this lecture, or make a graphic organizer about the chapter you read in their textbook, or explain this to someone who was absent. That’s taking factual information that is arguably important, but rendering it through a meaning making filter of the kids having to be much more active.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah.
Jay McTighe
So if, if we want students to remember even the factual stuff, we still have to engage them in meaning making, active thinking. Otherwise it will remain on the surface and fade away pretty quickly.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, I love that. And then. Okay, so do you want to talk about formative assessment or feedback because you just mentioned feedback as part of that coaching role. But I also know that like this conversation about formative assessment is critical. So which one of these do you want to tackle first? Because they’re both so important to ensuring that students are already making progress.
Jay McTighe
I want to inject one more idea as a bridge to formative assessment feedback. Okay. And here’s the idea. I know we talked about it in the last session, but it really fits now. If we think about our job as teachers not to cover stuff, but to prepare students to be able to apply their learning to new things, which is transfer. It behooves us then to think about our curriculum not as content to be covered or our list of standards to be marched through on a calendar. But think about our teaching and our learning and what we want students to do with that learning. Hence, think about your goal through the lens of performance. What do I want my students to be able to do with their learning when confronted with meaningful, authentic texts situations problems, opportunities. So I’m a little more radical idea about curriculum mapping and planning is we’re going to map our curriculum around desired performances. Authentic tasks as culminating experiences. Examples of what we want kids to learn. But they’re not just something we do at the end to get a grade. They’re not just performance assessments. They’re how we organize our teaching. So that to prepare for performance you need knowledge and skills. But you need understanding and you need opportunities to perform which is transfer. So those things have to come together through performances. Yeah. Grant Wiggins has, I think, a rather famous quote and I’ll give you the essence of it. He said it’s not teaching that causes learning. It’s the learner’s attempt to apply their learning with appropriate feedback that causes learning that sticks. Yeah. So that means we need performance goals that embody knowledge, skills understanding and culminate in transfer.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. Like I imagine.
Jay McTighe
Together.
Catlin Tucker
I imagine like somebody who teaches like imagine like a driver’s ed if the, if the goal of the end result was it, you’re going to get in a car and you’re going to actually drive somewhere and like put all this collection of things you learned into practice. If that wasn’t the end result, like learning how cars work and how you drive would be a totally different experience, right? But like as a teacher, if you’re like at the end of this learning pathway, kids are going to have to try to do this with what they learned. It is such a different endeavor to try to get them there, as opposed to, “Here’s all the stuff I want them to like the facts and the knowledge and the skills.” It’s like all of a sudden they’re going to have to come together in this dynamic way for kids to accomplish something totally like that, that transfer to apply to something new and novel. As a teacher, I would be constantly thinking about, are we going to be able to do that? Am I equipping them with the opportunities to practice? So when we get there, they can be successful, right? It’s so much more high stakes.
Jay McTighe
Oh, that’s exactly right. And the I don’t know if I’ve talked to you about it before, but I actually use driving as an illustration of the three goal types.
Catlin Tucker
No, I haven’t heard that one.
Jay McTighe
Okay. Well think about driver’s ed. Okay. There’s things you have to know. Rules of the road and basic car parts. What to do in case of an accident. And there are lots of skills that we practice. Right. So that’s acquisition. Yeah. And you need that. They’re foundational. What are there understandings associated with driving. Well here’s one. Defensive driving. That’s not a fact. It’s more than a skill. It’s a conceptual understanding that while you might be safe and attentive, you’re sharing the road with idiots who do it, who will do unexpected or dangerous things. So it’s not just about you. You have to be ever on the defensive. That’s a big idea. It’s a conceptual understanding and it develops over time. Here’s another one. Adaptability. You have you understand that, variables of weather, traffic, road conditions even vehicle. You know, driving a rental car on moving that is different than your little, you know, small car. That one needs to adapt their driving to different conditions. One size fits all. Driving is dangerous. That’s a conceptual understanding. And ultimately transfer. We’re teaching learners to drive with knowledge, skills, conceptual understanding. So ultimately, they can do this safely on their own and benefit both society and themselves for self transport. That’s our transfer goal. Yep. Right. Let me add one more thing to to riff this example. Think about the assessment. Think about the driver’s test. It’s the two parts. And every driver says there’s a written part of the model choice because it tests what drivers need to know. But there’s a performance-based assessment which is the driver’s test itself. Yep. I wouldn’t want to live in a state that gave a driver’s license to someone who could only pass a written test.
Catlin Tucker
For sure.
Jay McTighe
Now think of the implication of that. We need multiple types of assessments to assess different goal types. That tests are great to assess knowledge and skills. Performance-based assessments are needed to assess understanding and transferability. Yeah, it’s a great analogy.
Catlin Tucker
I think I love the oh, it’s such a good analogy. I love that you already had that ready to unpack for me.
Jay McTighe
I use that a lot. So let me let me then continue to your question of feedback, but I’m going to go through the door of another analogy. Think of the game in athletics, particularly team sports. The game is authentic performance. Think of the equivalent as a performance task or a project for a subject. Okay. What games do we want kids to play. Well. And then we plan backward from the game with the kids we have. And their developmental level or their age. And we build knowledge and skills they need. That’s foundational. You can’t play the game if you don’t know the rules. Right. We’re going to practice skills both individual and team skills. And that’s critical to good game play. But we’re also concurrently developing understanding known as game strategy. So those three goal types knowledge skills understandings are part of coaching. That’s what we do in practice. But every coach knows that the goal is to get better at the game. Authentic performance. Yeah. And here’s where this analogy goes. In an interesting direction. I’ve never heard a coach of a team sport say to me, Jay, I don’t have time for those games, right? How can I ever get it through my playbook? I got to cover my playbook, right? Right. The coach understands the playbook is a resource. The game is the goal. Teachers, for a lot of reasons, some of which are pressed on them. Think their job is to cover the playbook which are cover all the standards. And I don’t have time for that performance test because I got cover the playbook. Right. You never hear a coach say that. So that’s where I’m going with partly with the analogy as a setup for feedback.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. Well and that’s I mean I took I actually feedback is what amazing coaches do so incredibly well isn’t it. It’s personalized where you as a player, what is the specific thing that you need to work on? Here are the next steps for how we do it. And and here’s something you can now take after this conversation to like work on this thing. Right.
Jay McTighe
Absolutely. So in Understanding by Design Grant and I have tried to communicate, although it’s not always clear to people that we want to distinguish the assessment evidence in stage two from formative assessment in stage three. Right. We think formative assessment is part of the teaching learning cycle. And it’s different from evaluative assessment in stage two. Now I prefer the term evaluative assessment rather than summative assessment. But summative is the primarily the most widely used term. But I prefer evaluative assessment because it describes the purpose. The purpose in stage two is to evaluate the extent to which students have achieved the goals we’ve highlighted in stage one.
Catlin Tucker
Right.
Jay McTighe
And for teachers that have to grade and most do grading should come out of evaluative assessments. Standards based grading is just that here in the standards we’re teaching. If we have good assessments of them, we’re going to report or grade on how well you learned them. Yeah. So that’s proper. But formative assessment has a different purpose. The purpose of formative assessment is to inform right. Formative assessment informs the teacher how well my teaching is going. Oh gosh, the kids didn’t get it. I’m going to reteach that and also inform the student as to what they’ve done well and what they need to work on. So formative assessment provides feedback to inform improvement in teaching and improvement in learning. Yeah. I have a very strong position that formative assessments, whatever form they take should not be graded.
Catlin Tucker
No. Why?
Jay McTighe
Because their purpose is not evaluative. Yep. A lot of teachers I’ve heard it. Oh, They won’t do it if we don’t grade it. I would say, hold on. Formative assessment has a different purpose. But feedback is needed for learning. And so let me, let me describe kind of two lanes of possible feedback. The first is specific feedback on the particular things a student is trying to learn. And that includes even facts that they’ve gotten wrong or basic skill weaknesses. We’re going to be very specific to say, hey, you’ve learned this body of content, but not this, and here are some things that can help you learn that, or you’re making a common error mistake when you’re doing this skill. And and here are some things you can do to fix it. So that’s very specific feedback to particular learning goals. The second track though is something that even teachers who understand and use performance tasks sometimes miss. And let me come back to the coaching analogy to bring this one forward. How do coaches prepare their players for game day? Well, they work on knowledge, skills and strategy in practice, but they do one more important thing. They have a scrimmage. What is a scrimmage. It’s game like conditions in practice but with feedback. Because in the game that a coach can’t stop the game. And so you didn’t run that play the right way. But in practice you can you can. But a scrimmage is a game simulation with real time feedback on transfer performance. And think of the analog in theater dress rehearsal. before
Jay McTighe
Opening night where you’ve learned the pieces. You got to put it all together. And that’s not going to be perfect right away. We’re going to give you feedback on your overall performance. So those are the two tracks of feedback that I advocate. Specific feedback. And there’s a whole lot of techniques we could talk about. As you’re learning stuff. But don’t forget the scrimmage. Don’t forget the dress rehearsal before the actual game. Is the other mantra.
Catlin Tucker
I love that. I love that and also just that recognition. I think sometimes in education, I feel like what you just said the first time you do something, it’s not going to be perfect. It’s not all going to coalesce the way we want it to. And so we need opportunities to practice. And again, maybe it’s just the speed at which we feel forced to move through curriculum and content or whatever. But so rarely it’s like kids get one shot and then there’s this high stakes grade attached to it, and it’s like everybody’s moving on. And then so many kids internalize that of like, oh, I guess I’m not good at this, or I guess I can’t do that. And it’s like, most of us wouldn’t have done a great job the first time out the gates on anything we’re learning that’s new.
Jay McTighe
Exactly. And without scrimmages and feedback, especially for important performances like writing, like actually conducting a real scientific investigation, rather than a paint-by-numbers lab or preparing an argument or doing true research, etc. you need the practice in doing the whole thing, not just feedback on the individual skills.
Catlin Tucker
No, 100%. I remember when I started pulling because you know in English they have to do a lot of writing to get good at writing. And I started pulling students into my teacher-led station not for instruction but for focused, actionable feedback on something they were trying. They were kind of like practicing. And it was the response from students was like, this is so weird. I’ve never gotten feedback like this on my writing. While I’m like, doing it, I’ve only ever gotten like comments at the end. And so I feel like a lot like the meaning making moment. So it’s so critical in classrooms, teachers often just feel like I don’t have time for the feedback. And I’m like, but feedback is how kids feel seen and supported and how we help them to be successful.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. No, you’re absolutely right. I have a quick feedback story that you’ll appreciate as a former high school English teacher. When I met an English teacher who told us the story that she, like you would, did a lot of writing and spent a lot of hours, you know, reviewing and writing comments on kids’ papers. And she would always tell them, you know, if I write anything, if I give you any feedback that you don’t understand, please come see me. So one, young man, I think maybe a sophomore, she said, came to her and said, Ms. So-and-so, there’s something you keep writing on my papers, and I don’t know what you mean. She said, well, what is that, Thomas? You’ve been writing “vague.” She said, “What?” “Show me.” And you know where this is going. The word was “vague.” Yes. Oh, my gosh, that is adorable. But. But it underscored something I heard you talk about on your last podcast, right? Feedback has to be specific, understandable and actionable. Yes. Vague failed the last two qualities.
Catlin Tucker
But like I commend Thomas and being like, I don’t understand this because I think there’s so many kids who. And good job to that teacher for creating that approachability and that welcoming that kind of conversation. But I think students get to just go all year and be like, “vague”, I don’t know what this means. And I’m not asking. I’m just moving on with my my day. But that is hilarious. Oh my gosh.
Jay McTighe
But I do. I have genuine empathy for the real challenge of numbers of students teachers work with and the ability to give personalized, specific, understandable, and actionable feedback, right?
Catlin Tucker
100%.
Jay McTighe
So I know it’s controversial and varying degrees, but I think AI tools can be a huge, support in providing personalized, specific, and timely feedback if the guardrails are properly installed. And I know you’ve been doing a lot with this, so maybe you want to riff on that idea.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, I, I could not agree more. I still, even as wonderful as the AI feedback is because it is scalable, right? Every single kid basically has access to 24/7 feedback if they want it. I just don’t want teachers to use it and then not prioritize at times when possible their feedback, right? Because feedback is also a really wonderful way to collect formative assessment data, like the more you’re looking at kids doing stuff, the more you realize you know who does need the lean-in coaching and who’s doing quite well in a particular area. And like, oh, I’ve got a group of kids who are really struggling with this thing. I’m going to pull them and provide some additional support or instruction or guidance. And so my concern is that we kind of offload all feedback to AI. And then teachers aren’t getting to see what kids are doing when they’re doing it. And they kind of lose the plot a little bit about where individual students are. But I think if we are really intentional about kind of combining teacher feedback, AI feedback and peer feedback, because a lot of teachers are not investing in peer feedback protocols, because you do have to teach them how to do it well, and they might need scaffolding and support to give each other good feedback, but they can do it. And I’d love to see those three things pull together. So that feedback really becomes just kind of the fabric of the work kids are doing in classrooms. And when we utilize AI, there are very simple things that we can do to maximize the impact of feedback. Like there is a really great I think it was a paper, I can’t remember the first name, but Timberland Hadi wrote and they were talking about how to like maximize the impact of feedback. In these three questions you can ask like where am I going? How am I getting there, where to next? And like, can kids in their own words before they ever start using AI, can they articulate what is the goal of the work that I’m doing? Like where am I headed? And then as I interact with AI, what am I learning about my strengths, my areas in need of growth, my current limitations? I need to focus on where I might need some support for my teacher and then where to next. Like how am I taking the feedback I’m getting from AI and using it to improve whatever this thing I’m doing? So for me, it’s like if we’re using AI for feedback, that’s awesome. But what is the metacognitive kind of reflective practice that we’re wrapping around it? So students truly are staying in the driver’s seat when it comes to doing the thinking.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. No, I couldn’t agree more. And I love the sort of the three elements of teacher AI and peer because it maximizes feedback opportunities. Yeah, a little, little thought that popped in my head. If a teacher said, I want to, either I don’t want to trust AI or I, I, I’m not sure I want to use it, but I can’t get to all the kids I have. I would say, well what if you had two smart assistants who understood what you teach, who understood how to get feedback, who got to know your students. Would that help you? I would imagine most teachers that would love to have 2 or 3 people helping me. So you can train AI agents to do those kinds of things with that, with the caveat that you mentioned, importantly, we’re not going to turn it over to AI. It’s going to be an assistant. The teacher is still going to be the overall manager, but we’re also going to equip learners to get better, able to give each other feedback and to self-assess against clear criteria.
Catlin Tucker
Well, and that’s where the rubrics are critical, because I know you and I both are very big advocates of like the rubric should be a roadmap like this shouldn’t be something kids get the end attached with a performance task or whatever they’ve done. It’s something that like when this thing is introduced, they have the rubric. They understand what is the continuum of kind of performance that that is going to be evaluated. Right. And that rubric, if you’re training an AI or like you’re creating, for example, like a SchoolAI Space where the goal isn’t for the AI to do the writing for kids or fix the writing, it’s to like guide them through self-correction. It’s to ask them questions to kind of guide deeper thinking. You can use your own rubric, build it in like so that it is actually guiding the feedback that students are getting. And that rubric can be a wonderful tool for peer feedback, for self assessment, for all these other pieces that are so critical that we’ve been talking about.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. No, absolutely. And I will see your rubric point and raise you one. Yeah. It’s one and you may have seen it in the article I wrote with Tony Frontier. We are strong advocates for using analytic rubrics rather than holistic rubrics.
Catlin Tucker
Yes.
Jay McTighe
Listeners may know the difference, but in summary, a holistic rubric is like four three, two, one with a paragraph or a description under each score point. So a kid would get a number based on their performance. There’s a place for holistic scoring. I mean, think about grading. Grading is a holistic scoring or evaluation. At the end of a semester, we take all of this stuff and we put it into a single grade, score or number. Well, there’s a place for holistic scoring at the end. But along the way, as part of learning to your point, the learner needs specific feedback. Telling me about a three out of four is not feedback. That’s a score. Yep, an analytic rubric breaks down performance into key salient traits and gives feedback on each of those traits independently. Yeah. So you know, as a writing teacher, you might have a student who has a clear thesis statement, well-organized paragraphs, but doesn’t support the assertion or the claim and doesn’t rebut opposing points of view. So they’ve done certain things well in their argumentation essay, but they have some areas of weakness and with our rubric, we can point that out and give them the specific feedback about, here’s how you can improve your argument or your revised version. Specificity, is needed, and analytic rubrics provide specificity as feedback.
Catlin Tucker
I totally agree. And two things like branching off of that one. I think one of the more game changing, because early in my career I was 100% that teacher that was like, you got an 86 out of 100 on this essay, like my first five years of teaching. That doesn’t help anybody understand what was solid about the essay. what needed development.
Jay McTighe
But did I get an 87?
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, exactly. I was just like, okay, I guess that’s fine. It’s a high B or whatever. But the day I started organizing my rubrics by criteria that were standard aligned and then literally like describing at each level what is that criterion look like? And then entering, quite frankly, each of those scores separately in my digital grade book so that parents or families and students could see to your point, doing excellent job crafting claims, but your textual evidence or your the cited evidence isn’t really super strong to support your claims. Well, now we know what we have to work on moving forward, which I think is really important from a clarity perspective. I also, even though those rubrics, they used to be kind of time consuming to put together because you really have to think through what does this look like at each stage of development? Now with AI, oh my gosh,, creating analytic rubrics is like a walk in the park, which is so nice. But one of the things I tell teachers is I say if you’re not allowing students to like, continue working with this piece, right? If they get an assessment score, some summative evaluative assessment score, and they don’t like it, but they don’t have the opportunity to continue working with it, why are we covering these these performance has these essays, these projects with comments, suggestions, corrections. Just circle the language on the rubric that aligns with what you’re seeing that gives students feedback. But all that other time, that autopsy-style feedback, you’re writing on stuff that kids don’t have the opportunity to keep working with, that is not going to move the needle in terms of their, you know, them improving their skills or improving on whatever this thing is like. Let’s put that time and energy into the process, giving them feedback along the way. And that that I’m not quite seeing yet either.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. No. Absolutely. So well said. And what came to mind, as you were describing your process, that not only are you entering into a gradebook or another record. And you’re giving that feedback specifically to students. But you as a teacher are therefore noticing the patterns.
Catlin Tucker
Yes.
Jay McTighe
I’m realizing that most of the kids in this class are strong here and here, but collectively weaker. That’s where I’m going to focus my instructional attention. It helps. It’s the feedback for you as a teacher to know how to prioritize what will be most beneficial going forward.
Catlin Tucker
That’s so true because so often after a formal writing task, which I often did as an English teacher, I would be thinking, okay, here’s a group of kiddos I need to scoop up because they’re still struggling with like, basic claim writing. And here’s a group I need to work with pulling or identifying strong textual evidence. And here’s a group that can do both of those things. Great. But the analysis explanation needs to go deeper. And so I’m actually going to run a rotation. And when I when I group students it’s going to be by that instructional need. And then I’m going to meet that need. But to your point, when I was just like, this is a 72 out of 100 or this is or whatever, it’s like, I don’t really know what any of those patterns or trends are. And so therefore it cannot inform my teaching, which is such a great point.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. So the point you just brought up brings me to one of the last topics that I was hoping to touch on with you, and you have great expertise in this, so let’s do back and forth okay. And that is differentiation, with the recognition that kids typically come into a class or a grade level at very different places in terms of their knowledge, experience, skills, interests, and maybe those differences grow as you go up the grades. And even within a subject, in a narrow topic or skill area, your assessments reveal the kids are in different places that have different needs. That really calls for differentiation. Just like one size fits all. Driving can be dangerous. One size fits all. Teaching is inadequate for many students. We all know the challenge of teachers facing large numbers of very different kids with different needs. Having said that, I still think it’s professionally responsible to try to address as many needs as possible, as feasible and much of your career has been about helping teachers craft practical means of doing that station rotation. Yeah. Your UDL work with, Novak, etc., really is in this space. So why don’t you riff a little bit?
Catlin Tucker
Well, and you know, what’s interesting is I think it actually maps really beautifully into the conversation we’ve been having about different kinds of goals. Because when I talk about differentiation, it’s like, how do we differentiate content, which is like what kids need to know in this class, what content do they need to access, and how can we ensure that they are able to access it? Right. So does that mean we’re providing different entry points into the information? And again, AI is making this so much more doable from a sustainability perspective. You know, even just thinking about something like NotebookLM, if in the past I used to have everybody in my, you know, class read this article to unpack something. Now I can feed that article into NotebookLM. And I can give students the option of do you want to read an article which some of my strong readers probably would prefer? Watch a video. Listen to a podcast explainer, like how? What’s going to remove barriers for you so you can access this content. Or as a teacher, I’m strategically collecting data and I’m saying, wow, kids are in really different levels of readiness in relation to this content. And if I present it the same way for everybody, it’s not going to be accessible. So this might be a moment where to your point, I pull small groups and I make those small teacher moves like being really selective about what problems, what prompts, what texts am I pulling into this instructional session? What you know, what level of questioning might I use as well? And then I think about like the process, you know, how do we differentiate process. And for me, I often think about that as like helping that understanding, like how are we scaffolding and supporting that deeper understanding and what does that look like. And then the final one is like, how do we differentiate products? The things that we’re asking kids to do to kind of share, demonstrate, apply their learning and is are the things like the performance tasks, the things that even the small practice scrimmages along the way. Are they within the students kind of zone of possibility? Right. And are we thinking about whether it’s going to create a barrier that makes it hard for students to even try? And so for me, it’s like trying to make those moves from a teacher perspective more concrete, because so many teachers here differentiation, but then they’re really honest about I’m not sure exactly what this looks like in practice. Like, how do I actually do this? What are the moves that I make in a lesson or a learning pathway to ensure that I am actually differentiating?
Jay McTighe
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And in my experience as a generalist in education, but specific to any particular instructional improvement has four parts: think big. That is recognize the need for differentiation. Yeah. And you might think ideally if I had fewer students, here’s what I would do. But then start small. Pick one thing, maybe one or a few students or one technique to try. Yeah, work smart. In this case, use AI to help generate differentiated lessons or situations or directions. And finally, go for an early win. Pick something that’s going to be high yield, but not terribly hard. I love that. And then you can build on those things. So think big, start small, work smart, go for an early win is a way that you start getting comfortable incorporating new things like DI or UDL into your repertoire.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, 100%. I love that that’s I always say think big, start small. But I love the additions of Work Smarter, go for the early wins because I think that’s how change happens is a series of small wins over time. And then teachers feel they have the competence and capacity for some of this work in a way that if you tackle too much, too quickly, it’s easy to get frustrated and feel like, oh, that didn’t go how I thought it was going to go.
Jay McTighe
Yeah, no. Exactly.
Catlin Tucker
Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for joining me, Jay. I just love these conversations. I feel like my brain is exploding. I’m like having so many ideas about, I think I’m stuck on the three goals and the three roles I’m just going to be like the three objectives and the three roles and really like digging into that myself. So thank you so much for being here.
Jay McTighe
Okay. My pleasure. And by the way, I don’t know if you have show notes for your podcast,
Catlin Tucker
I always put the transcript on the blog so everybody can read through the whole thing, and then I have show notes.
Jay McTighe
I wanted to tell you, you are more than welcome to share any and all of the articles that I shared with you.
Catlin Tucker
Oh, perfect. Yes. Everybody who’s listening, Jay sent me a collection of incredible articles. I will include all of them in the show notes for anybody who wants to do a deeper dive. They are fascinating. All right.
Jay McTighe
Well, it’s again, it’s a pleasure being with you. I love your podcast. Thanks for the opportunity. Wish you well.
Catlin Tucker
I think the thing my brain has totally snagged on from this conversation is, I’m sure all of you could hear as I was chatting with Jay, is this idea of getting really clear about the different types of learning goals or objectives, right? So some of them are around acquisition, some of the goals are around understanding and then some of them being around transfer. And then the direct link to that, the role and subsequently the student’s role when we are supporting kind of progress in relation to each one. So if we are kind of supporting progress toward acquisition, our role as that person providing instruction, that direct instruction, and then when we are supporting that work toward understanding how we shift into this role of a facilitator kind of guiding and supporting, and then when we are having students kind of again, in that working on that goal of transfer, like, can you take the skills and knowledge we’ve been learning and apply it to this new and novel context? That’s where we really become those dynamic coaches giving personalized feedback and even thinking about the through line of if those are the goals and that’s our role. And then how do we differentiate to ensure that all students are making progress toward those goals? It is a fascinating like, I could feel my brain kind of like spinning on all of the ways in which the implications of that, the ways to communicate it for teachers. So I hope that this conversation resonated with you guys. I always love to to pick Jay’s brain. He just is like a fountain of knowledge. And I always feel like I walk away from our conversations learning something new, really kind of starting to grapple with something new myself. And so, just always really appreciate his expertise. And I will include, like I said, all of the links to the articles and papers that he sent my way in advance of this conversation. He’s always so generous, sharing really wonderful resources. So I will link to those in the show notes. I will link to his website, which is has a million wonderful resources for anybody looking to kind of dive into this work. And of course, if you have any questions for me, feel free to reach out. I love your questions, your comments, your feedback. Always happy to receive those so you can find me anywhere you hang out online. Or you can always leave me a question or a comment at my website. CatlinTucker. com and I hope you guys all have a wonderful rest of your week.
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