When I’m not working, one of my favorite things to do is hike. I didn’t always love it. When I was younger, I relied on others to map out the hikes, and I just followed along. I never had a clear sense where we were headed, what I could expect to see along the way, or what kind of terrain lay ahead. I trusted that the person leading the hike would guide me.
My love for hiking began when I started taking responsibility for the entire experience. I felt much more confident when I had a clear vision of the destination, what it would take to get there, and a few clear stopping points mapped out along the way.
I often think about that experience when I reflect on my time as a classroom teacher. Too often, I taught lessons in which students understood the end goal but had little clarity about how they would get there. I likely had some formative assessments baked in, but I perceived those assessments more as tools for me, the facilitator of learning, not necessarily as a mechanism for student self-monitoring.
Much like my experience with hiking, students are more confident and successful when they clearly understand the destination, the path they are taking, and how to monitor their progress along the way. In the research, this idea of constructing a clear learning experience with thoughtfully-aligned objectives, cohesive practice opportunities, and connected formative assessments is known as teacher clarity.
What is teacher clarity?
In his seminal work on effective classroom instruction, Visible Learning, John Hattie conducted a meta-synthesis of educational research to identify high-impact strategies for increasing student achievement. One such strategy, teacher clarity, had a reported effect size of .85, placing it among the highest impact instructional practices identified in the research and associated with learning that exceeds typical yearly growth.
Teacher clarity is defined as a “teacher’s ability to clearly and consistently communicate learning intentions, success criteria, and design instructional processes that make learning visible, intentional, and understandable for students.” It involves intentionally designing lessons and instructional experiences so students have a clear understanding of where they are going and how they are going to get there.
Using AI to strengthen instructional design
With the advent of AI, teachers have new tools at their disposal to help make the instructional design process a bit more manageable. Nine in 10 educators are already reporting that they find generative AI valuable to their work and regularly utilize it to complete administrative tasks that yield time savings between 1-5 hours in the classroom per week. What if we could shift the focus from pesky administrative tasks toward instructional improvement? What if we could utilize AI to help support enhanced teacher clarity?
HMH’s new AI Tools, available on the Ed learning platform, provide teachers with a collection of safe, secure, curriculum-informed tools. Unlike other AI tools, HMH’s AI Tools are directly aligned to and informed by our core instructional resources. So, if you are an HMH Into Reading or Into Math user, our AI Tools are familiar with the intricacies of the program and pedagogy. As such, the outputs are naturally aligned to the learning science-backed programs that you know and trust. Let’s explore how we can use HMH’s new AI Tools to support four dimensions of teacher clarity in the classroom.
Teacher clarity involves intentionally designing lessons and instructional experiences so students have a clear understanding of where they are going and how they are going to get there.
Putting it into practice: HMH’s AI tools and the four dimensions of teacher clarity
Teacher clarity is organized into four dimensions: organization, explanation, examples and guided practice, and assessments. Student learning improves when teachers create coherence across each of these domains.
Organization is all about the process of crafting clear learning goals and aligning standards, activities, assessments, and resources so that the pathway for learning is clear for students. It’s about ensuring cohesion throughout the learning experience.
- HMH AI Tools: Use the Lesson Plan Generator to craft thoughtfully aligned learning objectives and clear success criteria that mirror the progression and sequence of skills found in the program and leverage consistent academic vocabulary.
- Classroom Connection: An Into Reading teacher can craft student-friendly learning intentions and success criteria aligned to a specific lesson in the program. These can be shared with students and families to ensure clarity throughout the lessons and units.
Explanation refers to the clarity with which complex ideas are sequenced, distilled, and presented both by teachers and, ultimately, students. Clear explanations help students make connections between new and known information, prevent the development of misconceptions, and help to demystify difficult new concepts.
- HMH AI Tools: The STEM Explainer can be used to generate clear examples for complex topics and strategies. It employs language used in core instruction to ensure coherence and consistency of vocabulary across the explanations. You can even take it a step further and generate practice questions directly aligned to the language and examples you create!
- Classroom Connection: Teachers can generate clear, concise explanations for complex topic, like forces and motion or tectonic plates, and send them home in a newsletter, attach them to homework assignments, or post them on a classroom blog to increase the home/school learning connection—another of Hattie’s recommendations with a strong effect size.
Examples and Guided Practice include examples and non-examples that teachers choose to illustrate new ideas and teach concepts. It also refers to the coherence between the examples and the guided practice.
- HMH AI Tools: The Math Practice Generator allows teachers to create custom sets of math questions, both multiple-choice and short-answer formats, that are specifically aligned to lesson objectives, learning intentions, and classroom explanations and examples.
- Classroom Connection: Teachers using the Into Math program can select the lesson that they’re working on in class to create additional differentiated practice questions aligned to their success criteria. In addition to problem sets, they can also create stepped-out explanations that can be used to create alignment between classroom explanations and practice opportunities.
Assessment refers to the systematic process of gathering evidence of student learning. This can include markers of success, varied opportunities for students to show what they know, and concrete ways to interpret the results.
- HMH AI Tools: Use the Quiz Generator tool to create customized quizzes to assess student understanding and progress toward learning targets and success criteria. Teachers have the option to create multiple-choice, open-ended, or even extended response items.
- Classroom Connection: Into Literature teachers can generate differentiated quizzes with text-dependent questions at various DOK levels to assess student learning related to core program texts. Teachers can even upload their own source texts—great for primary sources—to generate quizzes and questions to assess student learning.
Creating a clear path for learning
Teacher clarity is a high-leverage strategy for improving student achievement outcomes. According to Dr. John Almardoe, a professor of education at James Madison University, teachers should ensure that students can successfully answer the following questions in each learning experience:
- What am I learning?
- Why am I learning it?
- How will I know when I have learned it?
With the support of AI tools, teachers can create learning experiences that function like a well-marked trail offering students clear goals, purposeful steps, and visible markers to guide them every step of the way.
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HMH AI Tools are designed to teach with you, not for you. Get support in every moment of the teaching cycle, from lesson planning and prep to post-instruction communication.
HMH AI Tools are designed to teach with you, not for you.
