(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Winter 1996/1997)

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Are academic standards
the roadmap to better teaching?


For weeks Peg Darcy and her sixth-grade students have built their stash of empty Pringles potato chip cans, carefully dumping out the oily crumbs and stacking the pipe-shaped boxes in a corner of Darcy's second-floor classroom at Kammerer Middle School.

In a small box, Darcy has collected bits and pieces of highly reflective stained glass -- a rainbow of leftovers from her personal hobby. Other boxes contained drinking straws, sliced into thin rounds, and tiny multi-colored buttons. Sheets of contact paper and clear plastic are heaped nearby.

Art class? A good guess, but no. As the numbers, tables and geometric shapes that cover her classroom walls suggest, Peg Darcy is a mathematics teacher -- an award-winning teacher, in fact.

Darcy's sixth-graders are about to apply their newly won knowledge of geometric shapes in a hands-on activity that will transform the familiar red-and-white tubes with the funny little mustachioed man on the side into fully functional kalaidoscopes.

After they carefully carve a symmetric triangle into the bottom of the cans and insert a three-sided cardboard tube, Darcy's students fill them with bits of glass, straw and buttons, and cap them off with translucent plastic. As they peer into the colorful, swishing kalaidoscopes, they describe and record what they see.

In the last step of this project -- the culmination of Darcy's geometry unit -- students are asked to write in their math journals, using the geometric terms they've learned about: cylinders, angles, triangular prisms, lines of symmetry, and the like.

On one level, making kalaidoscopes is fun, like many hands-on projects teachers use to hold the attention of often-restless middle school students. But unlike many such activities, the project underway in Peg Darcy's classroom grows out of a clearly defined set of academic standards which Darcy relies on every day to guide her mathematics instruction. The students' journal entries are one way Darcy assesses how well the students are meeting the particular standards she's teaching.

A road less traveled

Darcy's practice of using a comprehensive set of standards as a roadmap to guide instruction and make sure students reach an agreed-upon destination is far from common in Louisville's (or America's) public schools. Many teachers, perhaps most, still rely on a textbook or a simple list of topics to decide what they will teach. And they often teach what they know best or enjoy most themselves.

This traditional approach to teaching leaves a lot to chance. If schools and teachers aren't clear about what they want students to know and be able to do (that's what the standards represent), how will they know when they've been successful?

The question is particularly pressing for teachers in Kentucky. The state's high-stakes KIRIS assessment program is built around the expectation that students will learn a challenging body of knowledge and skills described in a set of standards the state has shared with every school.

In Jefferson County, the state's standards are supplemented by the district's own curriculum guide, creating some confusion and uncertainty among teachers, who are not always sure how everything fits together (see this story). Darcy has by-passed some of that confusion by relying on a widely respected set of national standards established by her professional organization, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Kentucky drew heavily on the NCTM standards in devising its own.

Every year of experience, Darcy says, leads her deeper into the standards and increases her ability to root her day-to-day teaching securely in their fertile soil.

Even without the pressure of KERA, she would use the standards because "they are full of rich stuff that strikes a balance between concepts and skills." They also provide some sense of security. She knows exactly what she is asking her students to learn.

Next door: Horseracing and weird weather

In an adjoining classroom at Kammerer Middle School, another member of the sixth-grade team, Marcia Lile, is conducting a lesson based on national geography standards, which she says "overlap completely" Kentucky's expectations.

Using the theme of "place," Lile guides her students through a brainstorming session on ways to describe Kentucky. "We have weird weather," says one student. "It's mostly rural," says another. Students identify other Kentucky hallmarks: horseracing, the Ohio River, tobacco, coal, basketball, Kentucky Fried Chicken. By the end of class, students have divided their des-criptions of Kentucky into two categories -- "stuff that was here when we first got here," and "stuff that we added" -- or natural and cultural.

For the next few weeks, Lile and her students will continue to pursue the idea of "place," focusing on how physical characteristics affect environment. In a culminating activity, the sixth graders will create a series of maps and narratives, describing a hypothetical island with its landforms, bodies of water, climate, and vegetation.

A big shift in teacher thinking

Marcia Lile and Peg Darcy work hard at standards-based teaching. They know the standards in their subject areas so well that they can help students build knowledge through a variety of activities and experiences, without much reliance on textbooks. The standards give focus, purpose, and direction to their teaching.

Lile and Darcy realize they are part of a small minority. "I think the most significant barrier to standards-based reform is that teachers don't understand why it is important," Lile says. "They rarely talk about it in depth."

How did Lile and Darby come to be so "standards-based" in their teaching? They took the time to be involved in professional groups; sought out development opportunities for themselves; and made a commitment to changing their instruction to be standards-based.

"I learned that I had to make a big shift in thinking, from what I'm going to do to what are my kids going to do," says Lile.

This requirement of a "big shift" in thinking may be the greatest barrier to making standards-based instruction the norm in Jefferson County's middle schools.

"I hear staff development people tell teachers that they are already doing a lot of what needs to be done to teach from standards," Lile says. "They tell teachers they won't have to change much. But standards are going to change what you do significantly. You are asking teachers to look at everything they do and decide whether it's really significant. That is not a small thing."

Is interest in standards growing?

Is interest in standards-based teaching growing in Jefferson County? District officials have tried to spark some enthusiasm. In August, nearly 1,000 teachers invested a year's worth of required professional development time participating in a middle school conference that focused in part on standards.

But it's clear that -- so far, at least -- the belief that standards are the best way to pull JCPS middle schools out of the achievement doldrums has not been widely embraced. The school district offers teachers plenty of opportunities to link teaching to standards, Darcy notes, but "it is disappointing when you see the same few people turning up for workshops."

Federal grants have made it possible for Darcy to attend regional, state, and national meetings for math teachers, but Lile has to dig into her own pockets for professional meetings in the social studies area. She is willing to do this occasionally, she says, because being part of standards-based reform "means that we have to invest significant time in just learning the standards language. We must make a conscious decision to do so."

Once that happens, other pieces fall into place, Lile adds. Teachers begin to connect with others in Jefferson County and nationally who support the changes they are making. Most importantly, "better things" begin to happen for their students.

Time and policy are not on their side

Darcy and Lile are among a few "pockets" of teachers at Kammerer Middle School whom principal Betty Graham believes understand standards-based reform. But their understanding grows out of a high degree of personal commitment that's not likely to be duplicated by every teacher. Somehow schools must find ways for teachers to change without requiring so much personal sacrifice.

Darcy and Lile agree that more time needs to be carved out of the school schedule for professional work on standards. Yet both have responsibilities as department chairs and members of site-based decisionmaking committees. And many other teachers are similarly pressed.

Teachers meet to talk about curriculum only once or twice a month, Graham says. When some Kammerer teachers tried to arrange just two hours a week for professional time together, they ran into an insoluable problem of school bus schedules.

Restrictions on the use of substitutes limit the teachers' chances even to observe in each others' classrooms -- much less visit other schools. And the district's recent decision to more than double the stipend paid to teachers for attending professional meetings makes school-based workshops terribly pricey.

Then there's the matter of who teaches what. Most Louisville middle school teachers are not certified to teach in a particular subject area, but can teach any subject in the elementary and middle grades. Hard-pressed principals often shuffle teachers from one subject to another as they juggle schedules and try to manage frequent staff turnover.

In standards-based teaching, a deep understanding of subject matter is important -- so important that some school districts are offering middle school teachers graduate coursework in their subject specialties. But the JCPS penchant for moving teachers from one subject to another "makes it difficult for a teacher to focus on a content area," Darcy explains.

Energy for change must come
from schools themselves

Can standards-based reform improve the performance of Louisville's middle schools? Many people think so. But what needs to happen next?

In response to the latest KIRIS results, the district has assigned more than a dozen teaching specialists to devote full time to helping teachers and schools with standards-based reform. But, as one central office administrator concedes, "most of the attention is on quick changes that might improve test scores in the short term."

Many believe the real energy for change must originate in the schools themselves. Under Kentucky's process of school-site decisionmaking, the district's role is limited to "support, facilitation, and finesse," says Brad Matthews, director of curriculum and assessment for the school system. "Schools have to have the conversations around standards."

Rather than rely on the traditional outside experts to tell them how to change, many teachers say what they need is more study and sharing of best practices among themselves.

"It's silly and demeaning to go hear someone get up and lecture about what we know already," says Barbara Burkhardt, an experienced math teacher at Highland. "What we need is time to do it and discuss it and keep working on it."

Jan Calvert, principal of Williams Middle School where flat test scores have pushed the school into KERA's "declining" category, thinks teachers need better models of standards-based teaching. "I don't think most teachers really grasp how different this is," says Calvert, who is teaching a class about standards and reform at the University of Louisville.

"We don't know what it looks like in the classroom. We've been given something to do, we've been given documents and books, but when it comes to actually doing it, we haven't had the examples out there that show us how to do it."

At Kammerer, principal Betty Graham believes the shock of being labeled a school "in decline" will spur action. She wants teachers to start using student work samples as a way to get into a deeper discussion about the connection between KIRIS and standards. "We've talked about it, but most teachers haven't yet internalized standards in their daily teaching."

Cheryl DeMarsh, director of the district's Clark-supported middle school reform efforts, agrees that the KIRIS results have sparked a renewed interest in standards-based reform. "They are the wake-up call we needed to move forward," she says.
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Read a related story: "Two schools on the edge of success"