Stories from the Field
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Standards-Based Education in Three Easy Years
Test scores in our K-4 building were lower than we wanted, but we seemed to be working as hard as we could. So what could be keeping our students from making the progress we wanted?
As a purely routine action, the first thing that we did was to check to make sure that all teachers had the most recent course of study for each content area. Imagine our shock when we discovered that there were only two teachers in a staff of 30 who actually had the right materials. The vital pre-step to our looking at standards was to make sure that we were all working on the same ones.
The first step came when we had conversation about what the standards meant to the teachers and what they would look like in instruction. In some areas there was little consensus, so the “testing grades” teachers took the leadership in explaining how the standards were aligned with the state tests. This was a revelation to many teachers, so by grade level, there was much discussion and collaboration while planning so that the teachers understood the standards better and were teaching the same things. We used many staff meetings, common planning time, appropriate professional development time, and any other time we could garner in order to accomplish this over the course of the first year.
So now the teachers understood the standards, but what about the students? We had often discussed how the students needed to know what we expected them to learn so that they would know where they were headed. Our second step was to concentrate on putting the standards into child-friendly language. Again the teachers at the grade levels worked together and came up with both the language and the vehicles to share the standards with the children. Some grade levels made small posters to keep up in their rooms as they worked on specific standards in the content areas while others put “Student Objectives” on written assignments. Many included an overview of the next week’s learning standards in weekly newsletters. This was the focus for the second year.
The final step certainly was to include the parents in this process, which happened during the third year. Most of the weekly newsletters carried child- and parent-friendly overviews of the upcoming learning experiences. Bulletin boards displaying student work carried standards notations. All parent meetings included a section on the standards as the official plan for what the students were to learn at a grade level. Learning standards language was embedded in the student-led conferences that occurred at the majority of the grade levels.
Did all of this have any effect on student achievement? Standards work was not the only improvement strategy that we were committed to during this time, but as this 3-year effort was concluding, our school did reach Excellent status one year, Effective status the next (missing Excellent barely by less than one percentage point in math), and back to Excellent the third. It seems that it helps a lot to know what you are supposed to be teaching!
