Standards

The readings for this week delineated a holistic picture of the standards and assessment for American education.

First, I was astounded by “a sea of standards” in this nation – 200 separate standards with 3,093 benchmarks (McREL, 1998) – way too many standards became a growing problem facing American educators. Apparently, there are two primary options for educators to meet the requirements of the various standards documents— increase the amount of instructional time or decrease the number of standards that must be addressed.

Speaking of decreasing the number, a key to narrowing the focus of standards and thereby adding value to them is to develop power standards that feature endurance, leverage, and readiness for the next level of learning. These three criteria enable power standards to give students skills or knowledge that have broad applicability and remains with them long, and help them get ready for the next learning level. Moreover, as perfect curriculum coverage never happens, power standards help educators to choose coverage by default or by design wisely. In order to establish power standards, the leaders must make time for teachers to collaborate within and among grade levels to identify these standards, and create a framework that includes the most important standards along with clear definitions which encourage and value teacher creativity.

When standards are established, the performance task and assessment should be developed in the following process— Reflect about the students and the standard, consider the purposes of the assessment, brainstorm the performance tasks that might be used then make a preliminary evaluation of the result, develop a scenario for the performance task and the assessment-driven instruction, evaluate the first draft of the performance task and revise accordingly, develop criteria and rubrics for evaluating student performance, systematize all these decisions using a standard format, and finally, have the materials evaluated by other professionals and other students.

I also noticed that one important requirement for educators to accomplish the evaluating task is a thorough understanding of the three key terms—Criteria, standard, and rubric. Based on this understanding, educators develop criteria and rubrics that facilitate quality student performance and valid evaluation process.

Readings:

Marzano, R. J., & Kendal, J. S. (1998). Awash in a sea of standards. McREL.

Reeves, D. R. (2002). The leader's guide to standards. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Back to whole

Eisner, E. (2005). Back to whole. Educational Leadership, 63 (1), 14-18.

Progressive educators gave us a vision of the whole child. Where has that vision gone, now that we need it most?

1. The dominating values currently guiding the reform efforts focus heavily on boosting test scores and standardizing outcomes - a means-ends model. Measurement technology increasingly defines what students will be required to learn.

2. Limitations: means are not always follow goals - goals can also follow means; our preoccupation with standards freezes our conception of what we want to accomplish in our schools. Technical orientation vs organic or humanistic

3. Reasons driving technically rational approaches

• Historical. The industrial revolution invented a way of thinking about productivity (using systematic control to achieve high levels of predictability)
• Making comparative analysis possible. The competitive culture

4. Children respond to educational situations not only intellectually, but also emotionally and socially. School improvement is both a technical problem and a cultural problem.

Care for the whole child

• Recognize the distinctive talents that individual children possess and create an environment that actualizes those potentialities
• Take into consideration the various ways in which students respond to what teachers plan
• Provide a more complete picture of the developing child (not everything that matters is measurable, not everything that is measurable matters)
• Prioritize the social and emotional life of the child

Aims of education

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

--Jean Piaget

Links
Eisner, E. W. (2002). What can eduction learn from the arts about the practice of education? The encyclopedia of informal education.