The Cure for Standards

1)  High Expectations

Teachers, and at times entire school districts, can get caught up in the thesis that certain children can’t achieve at high levels. They spend endless hours excusing, tracking and correlating the percent of low-birth weight babies, percent of children born to single moms, percent of children from families who receive government assistance, and percent of children with disabilities. Armed with printouts, statistics and newspaper clippings, they will lament that, “We are not strong enough to raise poor, ethnic minority or disabled students to a higher level due to forces outside the school tugging them downward.” And then these teachers start settling for “good enough” work. The result is schools that don’t expect very much from themselves or their students – and in turn don’t get much from either group.

2) Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing

How much time do you have to teach? After you subtract conference days, snow days and “someone smelled gas days” you and your students are eventually left with about 150 days to teach and learn. Assuming you spend an hour a day on reading practice that equals about 17 eight-hour days per year.

Think how little you learned on your job the first 17 days. The notion that the traditional school year offers you and all your students “plenty of time” to become proficient on 40 standards per subject is simply not true.

3) Balance Assessment: Big Tests and Little Tests

While big test tell us what students don’t know, a pretest can tell us why they don’t know it and what to do about it. Big tests prove learning while pretests improve learning.

Pretests should be an integral part of the instructional design process. When incorporated into classroom practice, they can provide specific, personalized, and timely information about student misconceptions, student interests, and teacher misassumptions. Think of pretests as “entry tickets”.

4) Engagement

Alfie Kohn, in his book, The Schools Our Children Deserve, wrote, “The most immediate and pressing issue for students and teachers is not low achievement, but student disengagement.”

I don’t know about you but I have never met a child hooked on phonics. 

How do you engage students? Consider using engaging scenarios, or hooks to start a lesson. Rather than starting a lesson with “Today we are going to learn how to determine the area of a rectangle”, hold up a contract signed by the current pop icon. You pretend with the class that she is coming to give a concert, but her contract demands that the stage be one hundred square feet with security rope around three sides. Your class spends the rest of the morning working in small groups designing stages and figuring how much rope they will need.

5) Teaching is a Team Sport

When historians get around to listing the most astonishing discoveries about student achievement, here’s a finding that won’t make their list: When teachers get together to talk in concrete, precise language about instruction and student work, their teaching dramatically improves and student achievement rises.

Sadly, what might make our historian’s list of astonishing discoveries is that we knew it was all about teaching and collaboration, but rarely collaborated in our schools.

The irony isn’t troubling; it’s frightening! We value teaching our students to work together, to learn from one another, but we don’t model this behavior for them. We sing the praises of two heads being better than one, while we ignore the expertise of our colleagues and field experts. We expect teachers to hone their skills while incarcerated in a cafeteria for 8-hours of mandatory, district-wide professional development. Aside from such events, it is the norm for teachers to work in isolation like independent contractors, sharing only the refrigerator and the parking lot.