Noble Schools

Teachers support students when taking cognitive risks and ensure that students provide accurate responses. Teachers create tasks that allow for multiple paths to a correct answer. Teachers create accurate and useful exemplars to questions and consistently hold students to that exemplar while adjusting as necessary based on intentional checks for understanding. Teachers emphasize the importance of flexible thinking by coaching students to consistently revise their thoughts and develop metacognitive understanding about their thought processes. Teachers provide quality feedback to students and coach students to provide quality feedback to one another.QR

Teachers engage in culturally responsivesustaining instruction that yields academic success. Teachers actively seek opportunities to learn about oppressive histories, systems, and structures in order to dismantle those systems within their classrooms and instructional practices. Teachers recognize how personal culture, mindsets, biases, and privileges impact the learning environment. Teachers leverage students’ prior experiences and cultural references, as well as activate cognitive frameworks to make learning inclusive, equitable, relevant, and rigorous. Teachers set rigorous learning objectives for all students and consistently build bridges between academic standards and students’ heritages, lived realities, and the issues they care about. Teachers support students to develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge inequities.C

Teachers create long-term, unit, and daily lesson plans that are backwards designed from a rigorous set of standards and assessments, integrating skills into content. teachers create objectives that are aligned to standards, achievable, and logically sequenced. All classroom lessons are objective driven (rather than activity driven) with frequent checks for understanding to assess progress toward larger assessment mastery. In order to inform instructional decisions, teachers collect and analyze data through externally aligned assessments and more frequent classroom assessments (e.g. exit tickets and quizzes), as well as observational and qualitative information.SD

Teachers create the conditions for students to internalize the meaningfulness of their work and the desire to do well. Students care about the class because it piques their curiosity, stretches their thinking, and continuously challenges them. Teachers establish individual engagement in class by building professional and caring relationships with each student and collective engagement by building a larger community of learners. Teachers enable students to recognize how the coursework aligns to students’ current and future goals (i.e. students are able to answer these questions: Why does it matter that I learn this content and master these skills? Right now? For the future?).I

Teachers establish conditions for success so that students are empowered to take ownership of their own learning. Teachers create conditions, including clear and equitable grading systems, where all students understand how to be successful. Teachers provide opportunities for students to reflect on feedback, set personal goals to address growth areas, and establish and execute steps to reach those goals. Teachers create an environment where students recognize and celebrate their own authentic success and the success of other students. E

Teachers create learning events that are aligned to a meaningful objective and are challenging but developmentally appropriate. They enable and require students to speak, write, think, and do with intention. Teachers design questions that embed multiple skills and ask students to explain their thinking. Acting as facilitators, teachers put students at the center of the learning. They ensure that students become independent (as opposed to dependent) learners.CL

Teachers ensure long-term, unit, and daily lesson plans cohesively integrate skills into content to build toward course goals. Teachers create learning events, assessments, and performance tasks that intentionally lead students to achieve short- and long-term goals. Teachers build a sense of urgency around achieving these goals. Teachers utilize structures inside and outside class in order to maximize learning. Teachers can explain their reasoning behind their class structures and learning activities. IT