Racing Toward Standard Clarity
Imagine training for a big race for six months. You have worked hard and gotten your time for a mile down to 6 minutes. You are feeling great about your big day! When you show up to the race there is an announcement that the race has changed from a 5K to a half marathon. You had prepared to run a 5k and now the race is more about endurance than speed. You run the race and eventually finish but not as successfully as you had hoped. If you had known the proper distance ahead of time and were more clear on the exact details of the race and course, you would have planned your training much differently. In order to be successful at any goal one must have a clear understanding of what success looks like so you can plan and train accordingly.
Now imagine (or think back to) being a beginning teacher. You receive a list of academic standards (hopefully) that you need to make sure all students are successful on by the end of the year. When available, you utilize textbooks and gather as many resources as you can from colleagues and online to help you cover all of the standards given to you. At the end of the year your students take a MAP or EOC test and you are extremely frustrated. You have covered the content found on the assessment, but the way in which the questions were designed and the depth of what was expected of students was different than how you had taught the content. Even though you had worked extremely hard, the students did not succeed because you were not clear on the level of proficiency for the standard. Just like the race, you had trained for something quite different.
Education is one of the hardest professions. It is a field where incoming educators are misinformed about clear job tasks and duties needed to be performed. What other profession is someone onboarded with the possibility that they don’t have a clear guide of what they should be doing on the job (curriculum)? In addition, if they are given the standards, they are left to guess and interpret them on their own and oftentimes they rely on a textbook or other resources to guide them on what the standard means. It is this disconnect in standard clarity that is causing a majority of the achievement problems in education.
In order to address this gap, teachers must not anchor themselves in resources for definitions of their standards, but on state resources that help to guide the understanding of what proficiency for each core content standard. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has many of these great resources readily available to help teachers with this understanding. Each core content has Item Specifications, MO LEAP Blocks and MAP/EOC released items that teachers can utilize in order to anchor themselves in what proficiency of standards means in Missouri. Utilizing PLC time with teachers to dive into these documents and clear up standard misconceptions is pivotal.
Teacher learning precedes student learning and school leaders must be leading teachers on a journey to truly understand the clear goals of achievement in their classes. Resources are not a curriculum, our state standards are Missouri’s guaranteed and viable curriculum. Teachers need to be clear on what Missouri standard proficiency looks like and backward design their instruction accordingly.
Missouri teachers are in a race of endurance each and every day. Most already have incredible stamina and skills to get students to where they need to be academically, but as leaders need to ensure they have a clear goal of what they are training students to perform. Standard clarity will bring teacher confidence, which will lead to many more students winning the race of high achievement.
Published May 2023 Missouri Principal Magazine
