(Vol. 1, No. 2 - Spring 1997)

Building Standards-Based Schools

by Anne C. Lewis

Ever hear the story of Zumbak the Tailor?

Zumbak's reputation was so great that people assumed he could do no wrong. When a man took his suit back to Zumbak complaining of a poor fit, Zumbak retorted that the man had terrible posture. "Lean forward," he said. "Hold your arm like this. Drop your shoulder like so." Soon Zumbak had the man so contorted he could hardly move -- but the suit fit perfectly.

When the man got on the bus to go home, a passenger exclaimed, "Oh, what a beautiful suit; it must have been made by Zumbak the Tailor!" The poor man nodded, "Why, yes, how did you know?" And the passenger replied: "Only a tailor as gifted as Zumbak could fit a man so crippled as you!"

As schools in Long Beach begin the effort to integrate academic standards into the curriculum, many teachers find themselves playing the part of Zumbak the Tailor.

Teachers have many tried-and-true lesson plans and units. Like Zumbak, they don't want to start over. It's tempting to make the lessons fit the district's new standards, however much stretching and contorting is required.

When Sharon Kemmer, a sixth-grade history teacher at Rogers Middle School, first began to work with the LBUSD standards, she admits that "I was accustomed to preparing my lessons first and then pulling out the chart to see which standards they covered."

Kemmer -- a skillful and experienced teacher who has taught in elementary and high school, as well as "in the middle" -- knew she was already covering much of the content represented in the new social studies standards. But when her school began to encourage teachers to think harder about what it meant to build instruction around standards, Kemmer did what a good teacher should do: she challenged herself to look first at the standards her students must meet and then at her lesson design. And she learned a few things.

In the past, for example, one of her geography lessons asked students to draw a continent with all its physical features. While that activity met some standards, it didn't stretch her students far enough. By looking at the standards first, she altered and extended her lesson. Once the students completed their drawings, they exchanged them and began to populate the continents. In fact, they were working on another geography standard -- learning why people settle in certain places.

"The standards helped me see that population patterns should be part of what we're learning in 6th grade," she says.

What Sharon Kemmer discovered about standards and curriculum planning illustrates one of many lessons teachers in the Long Beach middle schools are learning as they explore what it means to have "standards-based" schools.

It's hard work and the progress is un-even from middle school to middle school. But slowly, with a lot of district support, many of the characteristics of standard-based schools are emerging in Long Beach Unified.

What a standards-based school looks like

In a standards-based school, the standards are posted on classroom walls. Students can explain how their studies relate to specific content standards, and describe what they need to do to meet a standard. Sit in on a team or department meeting and you are likely to hear teachers comparing student work to the standards and discussing what more they need to do to help students struggling to come up to the standards.

These are the visible signs of a middle school committed to standards-based reform. The less-visible signs are just as important. Teachers who are working to build a standards-based school may not realize there is a label for what they are doing, but those who study school change would say their schools are evolving into "professional communities."

How is this new idea of school different from the "good old days?" Picture the school environment that has existed too long for teachers. They work in isolation, rarely having the time to talk to each other about substantive things, such as what content students should know. They teach out of habit -- with favorite units or textbooks -- and don't see why they should examine their practice with their colleagues.

Students often cover essentially the same material over and over again because there is no clarity to the curriculum. Most professional development occurs outside of school -- at workshops or "seat time" in college courses usually directed at getting another degree. The coursework probably relates only minimally to what teachers in a particular school should know about teaching their students.

By contrast, Long Beach middle schools that have embraced standards-based reforms are places where teachers are working together to create a coherent curriculum. They share and analyze student work across grade levels and often across subject matters. Whatever time they can carve out of busy schedules focuses on how to reshape their instruction around the standards.

"Schools are now in conversations about what needs to change," says assistant superintendent Chris Dominguez. "Last year, they didn't even realize that their assignments weren't really teaching to the standards. They were doing business-as-usual. Now, they've made that transition. Now they're asking: what does a standards-based lesson look like?"

Making standards a school priority

When Linda Moore, principal of Rogers Middle School, met with teachers earlier this school year to review program quality, she constantly challenged them to think about standards.

"How are you going to turn a failing student into an 'A' student?" she asked. "How are you getting across to students where the bar is -- that is, how good is good enough?"

Moore tailored her conversation to teachers' specific tasks. She suggested that physical education teachers tie standards for writing to student interests, such as ethics in sports or salaries for sports heroes. Frequently, as teachers described a lesson, she asked: "What would you do next time to tie this assignment more to the standards?" When a group of teachers had trouble linking standards to their lessons, she told them candidly, "As you know, I can't stand it unless what you do fits with the standards."

At Rogers, the staff made a group decision to put whatever energy and resources they could muster into becoming a standards- based school. They met last summer by departments to match the curriculum to the district's content standards. This year, every teacher chose a good, middling, and failing student to follow closely. As part of the school's program quality review, teachers discussed examples of the students' work at department and schoolwide meetings.

The Rogers teachers also began to talk about what quality of work is "good enough." The district is still developing specific guidelines for acceptable student performance, but Linda Moore says it was important for teachers at Rogers to move ahead on their own.

"Philosophically," says Moore, "we believe we have been doing content standards, but we haven't been as focused on how good is good enough. Kids need to know our expectations for their performance."

Sampling student work helps teachers focus

Although studying student work to find out more about the quality of instruction isn't a new idea, in the past it's mostly been done informally by a single teacher as she graded papers or examined the products of a particular project or activity.

Last year, teachers at Marshall Middle School began discussing student work in groups. But new principal Penny O'Toole says that while the initial efforts produced good discussions and some "nice ideas," more needed to be done to link the examples of student work to standards. "The whole point is not to collect student work but to decide if a lesson meets the standards," she says.

To push the effort forward, history teacher John McVay redesigned the form used to describe student work. The new form helped teachers match textbook content and history units to the content standards. Department chairs asked teachers to provide monthly examples of standards-based lessons and used them as the basis for department-level discussions. "It's a chance for us to say we really focused on this standard this time," McVay explains. "The content standards help teachers sort out when and where to teach certain things. Before we had them, coverage was very anecdotal."

Shifting to standards takes time

Transforming a school faculty into a "community of learners" is not done with the flip of a switch, says Cynthia Terry, principal at Hamilton Middle School. "Teachers are still intimidated by standards and by sharing their own work with each other," she says. "They are very hesitant about coming out of their classrooms."

As a new principal, Terry felt that she first had to help improve the school's communications system, which was spread out among teams, grades, and departments. Her initial goal was to create time for "sustained conversations" in these different pockets of the school. Once those conversations become meaningful, she says, then it's time to move to the "roll-up-your-sleeves" stage when standards become everyone's task.

Terry is depending upon her department heads to now move the staff toward student learning issues. "My dream," she says, "is to walk into a department meeting and hear a really substantive discussion around student work. But we need to take baby steps to get there."

Teacher study groups help pick up the pace

Several middle schools have set up study groups to analyze student work in core subjects like math and science and relate the work to content standards. At regular, after-school meetings teachers look at student papers, share information they've culled from education research, and develop questions they want to "inquire" about.

The inquiry group at Rogers, for example, wanted to know if a special effort to spot students with problems early on was helping them meet content standards. Washington Middle School wanted to know if its restructured reading classes were helping students struggling with language problems.

Both of these schools used small "action research grants" to help teachers pursue these questions. The Washington inquiry group meets weekly; part of its action research includes giving and analyzing reading tests with the district's content standards for reading as a backdrop.

Thinking beyond a single school

Long Beach Unified educators have spent several years getting the pieces of standards- based reform in place. Now, says assistant superintendent for research Lynn Winters, "We need everybody to get explicit about what standards-based reform is."

One sign of progress: Some teachers are looking beyond the boundaries of their schools as they "get explicit." Inspired by their sharing at this year's Carpe Diem seminar for middle school educators, eighth-grade history teachers from across the district are getting together to discuss
standards.

Because students in Long Beach move from school to school with distressing regularity, it's particularly important for schools to align what they teach. The history teachers want to develop a common, culminating standards-based project for all 8th graders. Every teacher would know that -- no matter where a student finished middle school -- they would have to demonstrate their grasp of the district's history standards for grades 6-8.

"If we all had at least one unifying factor," says Ann Robertson, a history teacher at Hill Middle School, "it might be easier for students to move from one school to another and still know if they were meeting standards."

This kind of systemwide thinking sets Long Beach Unified apart from most large urban school systems. It's still not the norm, and the number of teachers taking part is still relatively small, but dozens of conversations like this one are going on across the district. It appears that teachers are beginning to see themselves as members of professional teams. As one teacher put it: "We're coming out of our classrooms and speaking to one another about how our school ought to be."

"Today, everybody is talking about student work and standards, which is a major shift," says Kristi Kahl, superintendent Carl Cohn's assistant for middle school reform. "When I began teaching seven years ago, nobody ever talked about these things. Now,we are really beginning to think differently about how we do our jobs. That makes me believe change is really possible."

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What issues do schools face as they grapple with standards?