This will happen with your students. It may not happen as fast as it did with mine. But stay tuned into their conversations as you begin to practice standards-based learning and be ready to catch your jaw when it drops. The most important change you will see is the way in which your students begin to accept responsibility for their own learning. There will also be some additional benefits. Homework completion may increase. Enthusiasm about the content may increase. Apathy may decrease. And you will find yourself creating many more lifelong learners than you have been.
I realize how difficult it is to believe until you see it happen. But be open to it, and, most importantly, give standards-based learning a legitimate try. Don’t try it for two weeks, or two months. Give it a couple of school years. And really try it. Don’t leave something (like student goal setting) out. Do it all. Do it at your own pace, but do it all. Then, be objective about what you see and what you don’t see.
There is even more good news. While standards-based learning is better for students, in fact, once teachers make it through the transition stage to full implementation, standards-based learning is better for teachers. It provides time to go deeper, clarity about the content, and evidence that they are reaching more students.
A Necessary Paradigm Shift
Standards-based learning will require some fundamental paradigm shifts, but these shifts won’t mean teaching in a completely different and unfamiliar way. When standards-based learning is happening in the classroom, the content taught won’t change very much. Even the teaching strategies that teachers use won’t change much. But how teachers think about what and how they teach will change profoundly.
Perhaps the biggest paradigm shift for the teacher in the classroom is moving away from the notion that there is a substantial amount of content to work through in a school year and toward the notion that there is a set of standards, including factual knowledge and sets of skills, that he or she must develop in students. The content is there as the vehicle to develop those standards. The sequence of dealing with the content will likely be very similar to what has been traditionally taught, but its purpose will be different.
While curriculum and instruction will be very similar, the one area that will change a great deal will be assessments. Now, instead of assessing specific content in, say, a unit test, the unit test will assess certain standards by asking students to use the content they’ve learned to show their growth on the standards. This is a subtle but powerful difference.
Essential to standards-based learning is the use of the standards to identify, for teachers, students, and parents, what the students must know and be able to do by the end of the learning. This places what happens in the students’ heads at the center of everything pedagogical in the classroom. Teachers are looking to change the students’ knowledge and abilities through their actions. This represents a change from traditional teaching. Traditionally, teachers design instruction to present content to students that they expect them to learn. In standards-based learning, they design instruction to promote student learning of the standards through the content. The good news is that standards-based learning, in placing the student’s learning at the center of what happens in the classroom, is a much more effective method for accomplishing the teacher’s new educational task—helping every student learn.
One major focus of standards-based learning is to achieve an integrated model of learning. Because the standards will sit at the center of everything teachers do in the classroom, identifying and clarifying those standards properly will integrate everything teachers do. Therefore, standards-based learning is a highly effective method of connecting curriculum, instruction, assessment, and feedback.
A result of this alignment for teachers who have taught in a traditional setting for a very long time is that, once the transition to standards-based is made, a clarity emerges that often wasn’t there before. Importantly, that clarity will emerge for students as well. For perhaps the first time in their experience of school, they will see the relevance of everything teachers ask them to do, and they will be much more likely to participate in the learning because they are motivated to watch their own progress.
A Word About Terminology
In this book, we use the term standards-based learning rather than standards-based grading because the program involves so much more than assigning students grades. One important aspect of standards-based learning is that with standards as the focus of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and feedback, the grades students receive are meaningful to them in terms of their own learning.
Two terms that this book uses interchangeably throughout, though our primary usage will focus on the latter, are standards referenced and standards based. This occurs because the process for figuring grades in each concept is essentially the same. However, there is a difference between the terms, as can be seen in a review of literature on these two topics.
Standards referenced means that teachers report student progress in reference to the priority standards for a specific grade level or course (Marzano, 2010). Grant Wiggins (1993, 1996) and Robert J. Marzano (2010) describe standards-referenced grading as a system in which teachers give students feedback about their proficiency on a set of defined standards and schools report students’ levels of performance on the grade-level standards, but students advance at the end of the course or year based on passing performance and other factors, only some of which may involve proficiency on the standards. Marzano (2010) observed, “The vast majority of schools and districts that claim to have standards-based systems in fact have standards-referenced systems” (pp. 18–19). In a system of standards-referenced grading and reporting, students might move upward in grade or content level without demonstrating proficiency in all the standards for that particular course or grade level.
Standards-based grading is a system of assessing and reporting that describes student progress in relation to standards. In a standards-based system, a student can demonstrate mastery of a set of standards and move immediately to a more challenging set of standards. This means that if a third-grade student masters the entire set of third-grade mathematics standards in two months, that student immediately begins to work on fourth-grade mathematics standards. The same principle applies to all grade levels and subject areas: as soon as a student demonstrates competency with all the standards for a specific level and subject area, he or she immediately begins working on the next level of standards for that subject area. At the same time, a student who does not achieve proficiency on the standards continues to work on those standards until he or she reaches proficiency. Thus, standards-based grading is the process teachers also use for competency-based or proficiency-based learning and reporting.
For the purpose of our work and this book, we will use the term standards-based learning to represent the practices and processes we explain. However, we will refer to standards-referenced reporting when appropriate during our discussion of traditional methods of grading and delivering report cards.
How to Use This Book
While it is true that there are resources for administrators and school leaders involved with the change to standards-based learning, we want to provide a resource for the K–12 classroom teacher who has to make standards-based learning work in his or her classroom. While we present the theory behind standards-based learning, this book’s purpose is to provide practical guidance for the classroom teacher. We base the information we present in these pages on our years of training classroom teachers around the world in their transition to this new concept of teaching.
Our approach is sequential, and we present each stage of adopting and implementing standards-based learning. In each chapter,