by Terry heck
I first encountered the 40/40/40 rule years ago when I was leafing through one of those giant (and indispensable) 400-page tomes of Understanding by Design.
The question was simple enough. Of all the academic standards, you are given the task of “covering” (more on this in a minute), what is important for students to understand in the next 40 days, what is important for students to understand in the next 40 months, and what They must understand it. Do you understand the next forty years?
As you can see, this is a powerful way to think about academic content.
Naturally, this leads to a discussion of both the power standards and enduring understandings, curriculum planning, and instructional design tools that teachers use every day.
But it got me thinking. So I drew a quick pattern of concentric circles—something like the image below—and started thinking about the writing process, tone, symbolism, audience, purpose, structure, word parts, grammar, and thousands of other parts of ELA material.
Not (necessarily) energy standards
It was an enlightening process.
First, note that this process is a little different from setting energy standards in your curriculum.
Energy criteria can be chosen by considering these criteria which can serve to “anchor and embed” other content. The idea of “40/40/40” is about being able to scan through a wide range of things and immediately decide what is necessary. If your house catches fire and you only have two minutes to get everything done, what do you take with you?
In some ways, it can be reduced to a depth versus breadth argument. Coverage versus perfection. UbD refers to this as the difference between “nice to know,” “important content,” and “lasting understandings.” These labels can be confusing – permanent vs. 40/40/40 vs. energy standards vs. big ideas vs. fundamental questions.
That’s why I love the simplicity of the 40/40/40 rule.
It occurred to me that it was more about putting the child in the context of the content, rather than just unpacking and arranging the criteria. One of the framing questions UbD asks for creating “big ideas” offers some clarity:
“To what extent is the idea, topic, or process a ‘big idea’ with lasting value outside the classroom?”
The essence of the 40/40/40 rule seems to be to honestly look at the content we prepare for children and put it in the context of their lives. This suggests authenticity, priority, and even the kind of lifelong learning that teachers dare to dream of.
Apply the 40/40/40 rule in your classroom
There’s probably no “one right way” to do this, but here are some tips:
1. Start on your own
Although you’ll need to communicate with team or department members soon, it’s helpful to clarify what you think of the curriculum before the scientist joins you. Additionally, this approach forces you to analyze the criteria more closely, rather than just being polite and nodding a lot.
2. Then mix
After you outline your thinking about the content standards you are teaching, share them online, in a data team meeting or PLC meeting, or with your colleagues one afternoon after school.
3. Keep it simple
Using a simple chart of 3 columns or concentric circles as shown above, begin separating the wheat from the chaff. No need to get complicated with your graphic organizer.
4. Be flexible
You will have a different sense of priority regarding standards compared to your colleagues. These are different personal philosophies about life, teaching, your content area, etc. As long as these differences are not drastic, this is normal.
5. Realize that children are not little adults
Of course, everyone needs to spell correctly, but balancing spelling with eliciting underlying tones or themes (typical content of English Language Arts) is also a matter of realizing that children and adults are fundamentally different. A child is rarely able to scan a range of media, piece together topics, and create new experiences for readers without being able to use verb correctly. It can happen, but here’s the idea of power standards, big ideas, and the 40/40/40 rule: 1 day – 40 days. In 40 months, or even 10 years from now – the students in front of you will be gone – adults in the “real world”.
Not everything they can do—or can’t do—at that time will be because of you no matter how great the lesson, assessment design, use of data, pacing guide, or curriculum map is. But if you can accept that — and start working backwards from the worst-case scenario of “If they don’t learn anything else this year, they’ll learn this and that” — you can work backwards from those priorities.
These are pieces of content that will last for 40 years or more.
In your content area, on your curriculum map, pacing guide, or whatever guidance documents you use, start by filling in that little orange circle first and work backwards from there.
What content is most important? The 40/40/40 rule