One for All, and All for One! (Part 2)

Teachers and administrators often admit that they do not know their standards intimately. Why? Many share it is because they assume the purchased programs they use for classroom instruction accurately address what the standards expect in and across grade levels. In other words, if the program indicates that a particular standard is addressed in a unit or lesson (or series of units or lessons), the assumption is that the standard is addressed in its entirety, which is not necessarily the case!

The result of an extensive study concluded that students need to be in school 22 years to be able to learn all the required educational standards (Marzano & Kendall, 1998). Given grades K-12 account for 13 years of schooling, nine years need to be left out! Therefore, to assume a program has not left out some standards learning requirements is not realistic. My concern regarding this determination is what did they choose to leave out and why–and is what’s left out the best choice for our students?

Marzano and Kendall suggest, “a school or district can rank order standards in terms of the cumulative perception of their importance,” which is what I specialize in doing with schools and districts using a process I developed called Bullseye Prioritizing Standards. To do so, as I mentioned in Part 1, I first have teachers go through a standard-literacy awareness process focused on how standards are structured
regarding form and function. For example, when a standard uses the term “or” it does not mean the same as “either or”; rather, it is conveying that not all the options in the standard are expected to take place simultaneously, but by the end of the academic year(s), all the options should have been included in the learning process.

Next, to begin to determine degrees of importance, teachers need to do so by looking at the standards in a broken-apart visual format to aid in clearly seeing nuances often missed when looking at a full standard. Here is an example of what I mean using an ELA Common Core State Standard (CCSS) for Grade 5: Reading Literature, Key Ideas and Details - RL.5.2. Looking at the image below, you will see the full standard in yellow highlight. Since I want teachers to maintain a systemic (across grade levels) perspective when focusing on a specific grade level, I use two fonts in the full standard text. The boldface text indicates learning that is new to the grade level, while italic text indicates the learning requirement appears in a previous grade or grades:

When RL.5.2 is broken apart it becomes seven standard statements, which allows teachers to prioritize importance in a strategic manner when considering all the ELA CCSS for this grade level. For Grade 5, there are 89 full standards, but when broken apart there are 401 standard statements!

Which brings me back to my initial point regarding what is being left out, why, and by whom? If a school or district wants to fully embrace an “all for one, and one for all” mindset, teachers need to be empowered to tackle ranking the order of importance for their collective broken apart standards within and across grade levels.
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After conducting a Grades PreK-5 Bullseye Prioritizing Process with an elementary school based on their student population, the teachers compared their prioritized standard statements in mathematics to the math program they were using and were quite surprised at the disconnect between what they ranked high importance per grade level versus what the program considered important. This did not lead to scrapping the program; rather, it empowered the teachers to own the program instead of the program owning them! They worked collaboratively to ensure they had adequate materials and resources to instruct and assess their high-priority learning requirements for each grade level. (Side note: the school’s test scores in mathematics rose substantially over the following two years, which the principal shared with me that she believed was due to her teachers going through the prioritizing process!)

Regardless of the standards your school or district use, it is in your students’ best interest to have your teachers prioritize broken apart standards systemically to determine those of high priority, and equally important, come to agreement on what will be left out.

In Part 3, I will explain the process I use to have teachers collegially prioritize their standard statements’ importance.

To contact Janet Hale, please use this link.

Marzano, R. J. & Kendall, J. S. (1998). Awash in a Sea of Standards, MCREL.