In the September 2001 issue of EL on "Making Standards Work," we asked you to tell us how standards have affected your life. Have they made teaching better or worse? Without exception, your responses explained how standards have made your professional lives better—for various reasons. Your thoughtful responses show how educators do make standards work. Here are just a few examples.
Help Students Take Control of Learning
After several years of delivering the same kind of instruction, I began to ask myself some hard questions about what I wanted my students to learn. Standards helped me find an answer.
Last September, I introduced my freshman class to the new English standards and the 9th grade curriculum. Then, I challenged students to put the standards and curriculum together by creating individual English standards portfolios. Students could demonstrate proficiency in an English standard by submitting evidence—work that had earned a minimum grade of 80 percent—from any academic class. For each piece of evidence, the student filled out a cover sheet explaining which of the seven English benchmarks had been achieved in the assignment.
By developing portfolios, students became more aware of their learning objectives. I was better able to design my instruction to provide ample opportunities for students to meet the standards.
The portfolio project has been a tremendous success for all of us. In May, I was pleased to present five of my students at an education conference where they shared their work with other Rhode Island educators. Standards are now a permanent part of my instruction.
—Donna M. Sweet, English Teacher, Westerly High School, Westerly, Rhode Island
Improve Instruction
Standards have improved the quality of instruction. As a teacher and principal, I make certain that all school activities have an educational purpose and that every minute of our time with students enhances their learning. From reading instruction to lunchtime conversations to choices for after-school activities, we design instruction and interactions to strengthen students' skills. Standards also allow teachers to provide consistent reporting for parents and specific information on how parents can help their children. Students have a clear picture of expectations and intended outcomes, and students who move frequently, transferring in and out of schools, find similar expectations in every school in our district.
—Kathy Yahr, Principal/Teacher, Twin Hills School, Togiak, Alaska
Build Interdisciplinary Teams
As teachers at our middle school began to develop interdisciplinary teaching teams, we used standards and benchmarks to create a curriculum map.
We wrote our benchmarks on different kinds of colored paper to distinguish subject areas and teachers and then added key words to indicate what we needed to cover to reach each benchmark. After reading the benchmarks aloud, we placed them into piles according to those standards that we believed teachers could work on together. We then determined in what order we needed to cover the curriculum to develop the most inter-disciplinary opportunities. As we taped the benchmarks on the map to show what we needed to do and when, we realized that this process was much simpler than we originally had imagined.
A few pairs of teachers realized that they covered nearly identical material and decided to work together. Our interdisciplinary unit planning is now much easier. We can see the connections between our disciplines and impart those insights to our students.
—Valerie Jergens, Earth Science Teacher, Humboldt Junior High, Humboldt, Iowa
Validate Effective Teaching
Like many others, I have always worked hard to keep my expectations high. Although it took several years of modifying strategies to meet students' needs, I persevered in challenging and inspiring them to read more difficult texts. And then a tremendous event occurred: The Illinois State Board of Education and the Chicago Public Schools adopted a strict standards-based policy that included academic, not social, promotion. I thought this new policy would further strengthen my literature approach. I was wrong—at first.
Some parents, administrators, and students started to regard my literature program, which relies heavily on such classics as The Odyssey and Romeo and Juliet, as an impediment to promotion and to gaining the basic skills necessary for success on standardized tests. I decided to demonstrate that not only were the goals of the standards and curriculum statements solidly embedded in a study of the classics but also that these challenging texts offered meaningful experiences whose worth far exceeded the exam expectations. Thorough explanations and many animated conversations served as daily infomercials. Today, the test scores speak for themselves. Eighth grade student performance on standardized reading tests at my school continues to increase. State and local standards are powerful measures that continue to validate and support some of my most effective teaching practices.
—Edward Podsiadlik, 8th Grade Reading Teacher, George Washington Elementary School, Chicago, Illinois
Stimulate Professional Dialogue
New Jersey's core curriculum content standards provided the impetus for us to examine the content and instructional practices that we had been using for years. My elementary science program colleagues and I began by thoroughly familiarizing ourselves with the standards and then charting our existing curriculum objectives. We connected each of our local objectives to the cumulative progress indicators defined in the state's standards. As we revised our local curriculum, we devised new units and eliminated needless repetition. Our students have performed extremely well on state assessments, but, more important, the process stimulated fruitful dialogue among professionals.
—Abby B. Bergman, Principal, Ralph S. Maugham School, Tenafly, New Jersey
