A frustrated student struggles to answer questions on the state-mandated test that she must pass to graduate from high school. After the test, she leaves the room muttering angrily, “Why didn't my teacher teach me this stuff?”
A teacher is disappointed with his students' test scores, many of which are below “proficiency.” “I spent the first half of the year getting them caught up,” he says defensively. “If they had had a better foundation last year, I could have covered much more.”
A school's department chairs voice their frustration about accountability's impact on scheduling. “When their necks are on the line,” the chairs say, “is it any wonder that teachers compete to teach the honors students?”
These vignettes represent common reactions to the increased levels of accountability that students and teachers face today. Understandably, many educators feel that the demands are unreasonable, the resources are inadequate, and the standards stifle creativity and innovation.
Although they have legitimate concerns, those who complain about accountability miss the main point: Our mission is student success. To succeed, students need both a rich learning experience and solid preparation to meet the required standards. A flexible and highly differentiated instructional program is the only viable approach to meeting the goal of success for all students.
As a director of instruction for a small city's school district and as three university faculty members who work extensively in the field, we employ three practical, commonsense strategies to help schools and districts navigate the turbulent waters of high standards. Teachers design pacing guides as frameworks for instructional planning (strategy 1) and formative assessments that reveal what students have learned (strategy 2). Then, at regularly scheduled times during the school year, teachers come together in staffing meetings (strategy 3) to discuss their students' progress, analyze formative assessment data, generate ideas to assist struggling students, and gain support from one another and from administrators.
Strategy 1: Pacing Guides
A pacing guide is a standardized format for long-range planning that groups learning objectives into units, allocates time to each unit, and sequences units on a calendar. A pacing guide provides a plan for teaching the relevant curriculum before administering the state-mandated assessments. Figure 1 illustrates a typical pacing guide.
Figure 1. Sample Pacing Guide
Subject/Grade Level: Science/5th Grade Authors: I. Newton, A. Einstein, G. Galileo Page # 1
Subject/Grade Level: Science/5th Grade Authors: I. Newton, A. Einstein, G. Galileo Page # 1
A Blueprint for Increasing Student Achievement - table
Time Frame of Unit | Titles/Content/Essential Questions | Objectives to Be Included | Implementation Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug. 28–Oct. 14 | Living Systems Parts of cells Classifying How are living things classified? What is a cell? | Use a microscope to make observations of cells. Describe the essential parts of plant and animal cells. Compare and contrast plant and animal cells. Group organisms into categories (five kingdoms of living things, vascular and nonvascular plants, vertebrate and invertebrate animals). Compare and contrast the five kingdoms of organisms. | Reserve projecting microscope. Add pictures to classification key this year. |
| Oct. 15–Nov. 6 | Structure of Matter What is matter? How does matter change states? | Understand the definition of matter. Determine how heat affects the states of matter. Construct models of atoms, molecules, elements, and compounds. Compare and contrast mixtures and solutions, elements and compounds, and atoms and molecules. | Include unit vocabulary in weekly word study activities. |
Excerpted from Rettig, McCullough, Santos & Watson, 2003 p. 12. Used with permission.
Before developing the pacing guides, a school must determine the actual instructional time available to teach required content. In one district, the principal calculated instructional time by subtracting time devoted to assemblies, pep rallies, mandated testing, and other interruptions. She discovered that teachers had only 135 days available for instruction (we hope this is a worst-case scenario). Regardless, once teachers knew the number of available days, they could apportion the units to those days.
The process for creating a pacing guide is as important as determining the content. All teachers who instruct a particular subject must participate. For example, all 3rd grade teachers who teach social studies write the 3rd grade social studies pacing guide. At the high school level, all mathematics teachers who teach a particular course (for example, Algebra I) participate in writing that pacing guide. Teachers of students with special needs collaborate with grade-level or subject groups to coordinate efforts and differentiate the curriculum.
The goal is not only to create the documents but also to help teachers learn the curriculum and formulate a plan for its instruction. The pacing guide is a vehicle that structures this learning. Teachers discuss their opinions about sequencing, unit emphasis and length, integration, and review strategies. Through collaboration, they generally create a pacing guide that is more carefully thought out than any individual teacher's effort.
Specialty, exploratory, and elective teachers must create pacing guides for their courses as well. To focus only on core content is to devalue anything but the basics, a message we do not wish to reinforce. Once their drafts are complete, core teachers review pacing guides for sequential courses in adjacent grade levels to achieve a smoothly articulated curriculum. In addition, they read specialty, exploratory, and elective course pacing guides to search for ways to provide mutual support. Specialty teachers review core guides and, wherever possible, provide needed reinforcement and practice for key concepts.
We recommend that creating pacing guides be a schoolwide effort during a summer workshop or series of faculty meetings. In this context, a group of teachers can often draft a pacing guide for one course or subject in less than an hour.
Strategy 2: Formative Assessment
The lifeblood of school improvement is student achievement data. Unfortunately, the results of annual state-mandated tests often contain too little detail and are administered too infrequently to be useful in efforts to raise achievement. Therefore, educators need a sound program of ongoing formative assessment.
Good teachers continually assess student progress using a variety of techniques, some as informal as routine class questioning or listening to students read. This ongoing flow of information enables teachers to respond to students immediately with corrective feedback. Other more formal assessment tools include unit tests, performance tasks, and projects; regardless of format, the chosen tools must provide regular information about what students have learned.
In designing formative assessment tools, teachers should pay close attention to alignment. Does the assessment match the learning goals on the pacing guide and the standards being assessed? If so, then the assessment should have some predictive quality, at least enough to reveal which students need additional instruction and in which areas. Teachers make plans for addressing these student needs in staffing meetings.
The power of formative assessment increases when teachers of the same content area design and administer common assessments. As teams of teachers analyze the results of common assessments, the progress of students becomes a schoolwide concern—the process becomes more systematic and less variable. When teachers review data from shared assessments, they talk with one another about how their students are doing. This analytical thinking about student performance helps teachers stay focused on teaching well and meeting student needs, even in an environment of mandated accountability.
Strategy 3: Staffing Meetings
The creation of pacing guides and the collection of formative assessment data become nothing more than busywork if a formalized process for periodically reviewing students' progress and updating the guides is not in place. We recommend holding staffing meetings at least three times a year to monitor progress on instruction as described in the pacing guide. In these meetings, teachers review formative assessment data; revise pacing guides as needed; identify problem learning areas for the group as a whole, for small groups, or for individual students; and plan appropriate interventions and differentiation of curriculum. Pacing guides are living documents, and staffing meetings provide opportunities to continually revise and refine them.
In elementary and middle schools, teachers meet by grade level. Specialty, elective, and exploratory teachers, as well as teachers of students with special needs, participate in all staffing meetings that deal with the students with whom they work. Special education teachers collaborate with general educators in developing differentiated materials to help students with special needs meet the mandated standards. In middle school and high school, teams or departments conduct staffing meetings. Figure 2 shows a sample agenda for the staffing meeting of a high school mathematics department. An administrator, department chair, or team leader chairs the meeting, ensuring that someone records and distributes minutes and follows up on recommendations. During the final staffing meeting of the year, teams review available state assessment results and formulate plans for improvement.
Figure 2. Math Department Staffing Agenda
Figure 2. Math Department Staffing Agenda
Date: Nov. 15, 2003
Attending: Math teachers Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Einstein, Kepler, and Newton; special education teacher Charles; ESL teacher Jones; guidance counselor Freud; assistant principal Lopez; and secretary Paige.
1. Follow up on suggestions from last meeting.
Find tutors for Asimov's five struggling Algebra I students (Freud).
Get software in lab working (Lopez).
After reviewing quarterly assessment, regroup third-block Geometry classes for one week of intervention and enrichment (Einstein and Kepler).
Redo AP Calculus pacing guide to accommodate students who are falling behind (Newton).
2. Review formative assessment data.
3. Review instructional pacing.
Algebra I
Algebra II
Geometry
Math Analysis
College Algebra and Trigonometry
AP Calculus
4. Revise pacing guides.
5. Identify individual and small-group needs for instructional intervention or enrichment.
Source: Rettig, McCullough, Santos, & Watson, 2003, p. 64. Used with permission.
Over time, staffing meetings become increasingly efficient and manageable; as teachers master this process, it becomes embedded in the school culture. Staffing meetings then evolve to include other collaborative efforts, such as brainstorming creative instructional ideas, forming lesson study groups, and designing materials.
The periodic review of students' progress by the collaborative team is often a forgotten step in schoolwide reform. In one district, we explained the process during a summer administrative retreat. The next summer, we returned to review their progress and add a fourth step, the design of instructional interventions and differentiated curriculum. When we asked the principals in the group if they had designed pacing guides in their schools, nearly all said yes. When we asked whether they had held staffing meetings, we saw only blank stares. As we reviewed the concept and structure of the staffing meeting with the group, many of the principals realized that the staffing meeting was the missing link in their school improvement process.
Positive Pressure and Meaningful Support
The strategies that we have outlined are simple and straightforward on the surface. Yet, as we have worked with teachers on these strategies, we have come to understand just how complex and sophisticated they are. The typical isolation from colleagues, limited planning time, and the demands of teaching make it difficult for teachers to plan and monitor instruction collaboratively.
For this reason, the leadership and involvement of the principal is crucial. He or she sets the tone for the task by emphasizing its importance and placing the work within the context of the overall school improvement process. Principals move the work ahead by providing both positive pressure and meaningful support. Positive pressure comes in the form of deadlines, feedback, and an expectation of accountability. Meaningful support includes providing technical assistance, clerical help, time, and other resources.
Principals can exhibit instructional leadership by introducing the process, participating in and monitoring the writing of pacing guides, coordinating a production timetable, hiring technical support persons such as district-level subject-area specialists, and allocating clerical support so that teachers' time is not spent typing documents. The principal may delegate certain leadership duties to grade-level leaders (elementary level) and department chairs (secondary level), but he or she must be the prime mover of this project. Guiding this process is instructional leadership at its best.
As a central office administrator, one of us compiled a CD-ROM for each elementary grade level, K-5. The CD contained a pacing guide template and electronic copies of curriculum guides for the four core subjects. By copying and pasting the objectives, essential skills, and content outlines from the curriculum into the template, teachers saved hours of copying and typing. In the previous year, our instructional services staff had spent several weeks typing and formatting pacing guides for teachers. By providing the template, we saved both teachers and our staff hours of work.
We all know that the culture of teaching tends to be isolated and entrepreneurial; sometimes teachers would just rather do it themselves. Working together to create pacing guides, share student achievement results, and give and accept feedback about instruction is, as one teacher put it, “uncomfortable, like looking in someone else's purse.” Still, such collaborative efforts make student achievement a schoolwide mission, one that teachers can actually accomplish.
One School's Story
In one school in particular, the combination of positive pressure and technical support resulted in clear student achievement gains. After the school had posted three years of poor student performance on the state's high school social studies test, the principal issued a call to action to the social studies department. District administrators were convinced that students were capable of higher achievement and that the teachers were not only competent, but also highly skilled at their jobs. After examining the teachers' course outlines, observing their classrooms, and analyzing the state test results, administrators concluded that the lack of alignment between curriculum and instruction was the problem. The principal then mandated that all departments develop pacing guides that correlated with the content on the state test. He also offered support and assistance in doing this work.
District-level instructional staff met with the social studies teachers regularly for a semester. During this time, the advisors presented a format and process for developing pacing guides. They provided materials that detailed content from the state curriculum and offered help, especially to new teachers, in interpreting this material. In follow-up meetings with small groups of teachers who all taught the same course, they reviewed the pacing guides at various stages of development. Finally, they provided clerical assistance for typing and formatting the guides.
A few of the teachers did the work simply to comply with the principal's mandate. Others, as they began to see their pacing guide take shape, began to talk about how it influenced their instructional decisions. One teacher decided not to depend as much on his out-of-date textbook, which only roughly paralleled the state curriculum. As the year came to an end, teachers described the process as a valuable one, but many remained unconvinced that they had needed to be so diligent in formatting their curriculum on paper.
That summer, the school underwent a construction project, which necessitated moving furniture out of classrooms to other areas of the school. When teachers returned in August, the department chair called the district office, upset. The file cabinet containing all the pacing guides was missing! The teachers were rushing to get their rooms organized and plan for the first weeks of school, and they had no time to waste. They needed those pacing guides, not only for themselves, but also for the two new teachers who had joined the department and had no idea of where to begin.
The story has a happy ending. Because the district office had assisted with typing the pacing guides, back-up copies were available on a file server. The teachers in this department, even those who had reservations, benefited from using the pacing guide process. Because the work was of high quality, the guides became a valuable resource, one that they did not want to be without as they started the school year. Finally, students' performance on the state end-of-course tests improved dramatically. At the end of the first year of using pacing guides, pass rates on state social studies tests improved from 57 percent to 77 percent.
Accountability suggests competition, isolation, and “every man for himself,” thus prompting tension for teachers and students. But to meet the challenges of accountability and high standards, schools must be places where accountability is shared and embraced by colleagues who understand and support one another's work. In the process, colleagues must also share information, opinions, and expertise.
Our three strategies are not rocket science, but they do provide a blueprint and a structure for moving toward shared accountability and increased student achievement.
