(Vol. 3, No. 1 - Spring 1999)

Margaret Lawrence:
Standards-Based Teaching
"Opens Up Possibilities"

Two years ago, a districtwide search for a standards-based teacher led to Margaret Lawrence's sixth-grade classroom at Meyzeek Middle School. There district leaders found an educator enthusiastically embracing a new approach to learning.

by John Norton

A worn sheet taped to the surface of Margaret Lawrence's desk is headlined: "Eleven Ways to Be a Great Teacher." Several items on the list are highlighted in bright yellow, including this one: "Wait patiently, expectantly and intensely for your work to have an effect -- for your students to succeed."

A second-career educator finishing up her sixth year, Lawrence was one of the first JCPS middle grades teachers to embrace standards-based teaching. Two years ago, when JCPS district leaders went looking for a teacher who could help principals understand what a standards-based classroom might look like, they invited Lawrence to demonstrate her teaching methods. Several middle school principals still recall, as one says, that "it was the day I finally understood where we were trying to go with standards."

Midway through this school year, Lawrence invited a Changing Schools reporter to spend a day in her sixth grade language arts classroom at Meyzeek Middle School. The lesson for the day was "characterization," or "Six Main Ways of Revealing Character in a Short Story." The students were reading The Jungle Book and Lawrence played off that assignment as she took her kids through an in-depth exploration of character development.

"Lots of times I get 'the character was nice, old, or tall," she told them. That's not all we can do to reveal character. We can't read people's minds, so we have to show our readers what our characters are thinking and feeling." She described a variety of techiques, from straight factual information, to revelations that come from dialogue, actions, or descriptions of appearance, to comments by other characters in the story. For each example, she pointed to passages in The Jungle Book. Then the students wrote in their journals, describing an important character in their own lives. After they finished, students shared what they'd written and Lawrence helped them identify various writing techniques they'd employed -- and how to improve them.

"These are the best descriptions you guys have written in awhile," she said. "And I think it's because you've used the six ways."

The 100-minute block class continued as Lawrence and her students analyzed the story structure of The Jungle Book, read together, polished a draft of a report, and practiced for a spelling test the next day. "I can't imagine teaching well without these double-class periods," she told a visitor. "It opens up so many possibilities."

"Opening up possibilities" is a hallmark of Margaret Lawrence's approach to her profession. At the end of the day, she sat down with Changing Schools to discuss her teaching methods and her transition to a standards-based classroom.

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You've developed kid-friendly versions of the district's performance standards and scoring guides. Why?

The problem with performance standards is explaining them to kids. When you are first teaching it, you need a cartoon version. If you are going to expect a kid to reach a certain standard, you have to be able to explain it in kid language, so to speak. They don't know what it means "to demonstrate proficiency in interpreting informational reading effectively by applying a variety of techniques and strategies." They go "What ?"

So I think that's the big challenge. Part of the way I do that is to keep the standards in front of them all the time. Every time I give them a worksheet or rubric, it will have the performance standard on it in language they can comprehend and begin to understand. Otherwise, it remains an abstraction to them. And at middle school particularly, they have a lot of trouble if it's not concrete. It's real hard for them to hit that target.

Tell us how you have changed your teaching as a result of the performance standards.

I have only been teaching for five years. The way I used to plan lessons was pretty much based on what I, as a literate person, thought was important for kids to learn. We had a curriculum [outline] in the district, but it was not very closely followed and was loosely interpreted by teachers.

So I would sit down at the beginning of the year and I would review the textbooks that we had. I would choose some novels that I thought kids would relate to, that dealt with themes that would engage them. As I went along, I would make activities to go along with the lessons. The teaching was sometimes effective, but what happens when you do it that way is you leave out a lot of really important things.

For example, in the area of reading, we really need to be teaching more than literary reading. That's what I and a lot of language arts teachers would teach all the time if we had our choice. But we also have to teach informational reading, which is being able to locate the main idea and supporting details. When we grow up and go to work, that's the kind of reading we have to do all the time, but that is something I probably would not have taught on my own initiative if the standards had not forced me to look at all of my teaching responsibilities.

What I do now is a lot more intentional. I have the standards in front of me and I say,"Ok, I've got to teach informational reading. What do I have in my room to get the kids up to these standards? What tools and techniques must I develop?"

So you can't just teach your passion? You have to prepare them for all the reports and manuals and non-fiction materials they'll encounter later in life?

That's right. And even in middle school. Once they get into fourth grade, kids are expected to be able to read a textbook. Most content area teachers don't sit down with kids and say "this is how you read a textbook." But a lot of kids don't know how. They know how to read or listen to a story pretty much. But when they get into the upper grades, and they've got all these textbooks and all this academic writing, they really don't have the strategies for reading that and understanding it -- getting the main ideas from it. You have to teach them to do that, they don't just know it. And that's part of our job as language arts teachers.

Now, here at Meyzeek, and at some other middle schools in our district, we've really begun to focus more on teaching kids to read and write in different content areas -- and we are expecting all of our teachers to take some responsibility for that. And you have to do it that way, because the language arts teachers can't do it all.

So you began five years ago following your instincts, bringing your intellect into the work, saying this is how I can get this across. But while you were somewhat successful, it was kind of hit or miss.

Yes. A kid who had me probably learned a whole lot of great stuff but not everything they needed to learn. And we want everybody to come out of the sixth grade knowing the same things. Being able to achieve the same thing. That's what standards are really all about.

What you are doing differently now than you were then?

It's kind of a process I have gone through. It started last year really. That was when the big push for standards began. First with the content standards, which told us very broadly what we should be teaching. I had index cards of all the content standards, and I had things that I made up that I would hang around the room. And I would lay my cards all out and look at them and say -- 'Hey, I can combine speaking and listening here with this content standard." It was almost like a card game.

And I started identifying to the kids that this is what we are going to be focused on now. Then we began to use the peformance standards, which have been kind of confusing to the kids. I explain it to them this way. The performance standard tells what you have to do to prove to me you know the content standard. They pretty much get that. Every day I have the peformance standard we are working toward up on the wall. As long we are on that standard, I'll refer back to it regularly and discuss it in more depth. If the performance standard has to do with the literary writing of a short story, does that mean all I have to do is write a short story? No. The story has to be focused on a purpose, it has to convey meaning, express feelings, have a voice. We explore all of these elements.

Today we were talking about "voice" in short stories and I could see that the students still didn't quite understand what "voice" is. I hadn't explained it well enough. So we kept exploring and eventually a student asked: "Is it like the personality of the writer?" and that gave us the insight we needed to really understand the concept. The standards identify each of these elements -- like "genre" or "transition" or "audience" -- and once students understand them they become part of our daily conversation and we are able to have higher and higher levels of discussion.

Is all of your teaching and assessment aimed toward meeting the performance standards?

Ultimately, yes. With performance standards, you know what kids must be able to do. You know exactly what you are looking for and you don't let other things interfere with what you are assessing. You're assessing that perfomance or that product, period. I do build in other things. My students get points for just participating in the process of writing and turning in their drafts and things like that, because I don't believe that the only thing we should assess is the final product. I think kids are a lot more than a final product. And there are some students who -- they can go through everything you tell them to do, and try as hard as they can, and they are not going to quite meet the performance standard. So what are we going to do -- just fail them all? So you build in some safeguards. At least that's what I have chosen to do.

But standards give you the roadmap. Take, for example, the idea of audience awareness. The standards help me keep focused on the fact that there are a bunch of skills I have to teach kids so they can grasp this concept. I'll have to teach them what audience is, what possible audiences are, why you write to an audience. And each one of those is broken down into a whole set of skills, like "correctness" -- that's spelling, punctuation, capitalization. Each one of those broader categories narrows into a set of skills. And our JCPS performance standards list many of the supporting skills that we need to be teaching as we move forward.

As you talk and work with teachers, you must hear both the enthusiasm and lack of enthusiasm for standards. What are some of the negative things you hear, and why do you think you're hearing them? What might people be missing?

Many people still see the standards approach as one more thing that we have to do in addition to everything else we have to do. There's a feeling of being overwhelmed. Many don't see yet that it's really not an addition, it's just a way to reorganize what you already should be doing. We should all be knowing exactly what the goal is and how we are going to get the kids there. And that's really all that performance standards help us do, I think.

I think I was a good teacher before, but this has made me a lot better teacher and helped keep me so much more focused. Just the other day I had this revelation. As writing teachers we are always getting the question: "How long does it have to be?" Now I finally have an answer to that. "Look at the performance standard. Is there anything on there about length? No. It doesn't matter how long it is so long as it has all the required elements." So it helps the kids answer the question: "Exactly what am I supposed to be doing?" They know when they are finished with something. And one of the problems with kids this age with short story writing is that they will just never end it. It goes all over the place and it's just torture (laughs) to try to read them sometimes.

What about assessment? Standards help you make sure you cover everything, and they help kids be clearer about what they're expected to do. But how do you determine the quality of the work?

This process should be leveling out how we assess, too. But there is always going to be subjectivity. Kids are not created equal. I expect all my students to achieve at the same level. That means that they are all supposed to get to that standard. That's my expectation. Realistically I know they are not all going to reach the highest levels, but I know that I can get them closer than they were.

These performance standards spiral through middle school. So even though they may not be really proficient in idea development by the end of sixth grade, that's something we can say to the seventh grade teacher. "You know, they've got focus and audience down but they really need help in idea development." Or "Boy, this kid's got a great mind, but correctness -- he can't write a complete sentence." The standards give you something specific to talk about with other teachers. "He's at standard here, he's not at standard there." I hope eventually we are going to go to standards-based report cards because they can tell us so much more about where students really are in their learning.

How do you sell parents who are used to "A's" and "B's" on report cards?

It's a challenge. I know in the Advance program here at Meyzeek, parents want to see an "A." They may not know what it really says about a student's learning levels, but they want to see that "A." It's really important to them because in this day and age, it's what's on your transcript -- your GPA -- that gets you into college.

But performance standards can really help us avoid giving kids A's who really don't do excellent work. In many teachers' classes, it is possible to have students who are achieving A's just because they come to class and turn in their work -- but it's not necessarily excellent work. Standards present us with a more absolute measure of proficient performance. And they also allow us to identify progress, even when students are not making "A's" or "B's." You can point to strengths and weaknesses in a much more defined way.

How are you sharing what you are learning about standards-based teaching with other teachers?

I'm in a cadre of teachers who are trying to come up with a variety of planning tools to help teachers actually put down in writing systematically what you need to do to develop standards-based lessons. Starting with the broad standard and sort of narrowing, narrowing, narrowing down. We have gone through a lot of different templates. It's a planning tool, not an absolute roadmap. Sometimes, like today in my 2nd period class, things kind of take a life of their own and the kids take you to some exciting place you weren't expecting to visit. That's the fun of teaching.

But having a planning tool keeps important parts of your teaching in front of you -- like making sure you are always telling the kids what they're expected to learn and what quality work is. I think it's important to tell the kids, as well as yourself, ok, this is where you are going to go, this is how I'm going to see whether you have gotten there. That's what rubrics and scoring guides [tools teachers and students use to define quality] help us do.

One of the things that has to happen for performance-based teaching to work, it seems, is for the teacher to become adept at classroom assessment.

That's always been something I don't like. I like it better now because I know more what I'm doing. When you don't have any definite criteria, you tend to compare one paper against another, instead of against the criteria. So it has made it a lot easier. It's been real time-consuming, because I do so much more planning up front rather than all along. And sometimes you have to backtrack. I just had an experience where I created a rubric that I thought was fine, and when I actually used it, I thought -- oh, this is terrible. So that one will get pitched. That's one way I sort of assess myself. And you just have to go back to the drawing board. On the other hand, sometimes you'll think, "This is perfect, this is great. I can use this for the rest of my teaching career. It's the perfect rubric."

Have you changed your ideas about what classroom assessment should really be?

Oh yes. I used to think of assessment as something very ambiguous. You almost had to guard the child's self-esteem. And you still do but you are truly grading against a known standard.

Assessment is more than giving a test, or even giving a grade. Take for example my "memoir" assignment. The kids started with some free writing to generate ideas and turned that in. Then they did a first draft, and then a revised draft which I edited. Each time it comes back to them they get a clean copy that I have marked to show where I think they are weak. If I don't really see any evidence of something I expect to see in a memoir, then we can conference about it and they can fix it. So they have at least two or three attempts, with feedback They also do peer-conferencing to get feedback from a student. I do lessons on how to give feedback and what to say. They get points for turning in an effort at each stage. But they don't get their final grade on the memoir until they have had two or three chances. So I feel like I give them opportunities to revise and get better. So it's assess, assess, assess, and then finally there is that grade.

This is helpful to the student because the student is getting something more than just summary feedback.

Most kids don't read feedback -- that's been my experience -- unless they know there is a good reason to do it. With this type of a system, most kids will look at it and if they see something circled, they'll ask, "What's wrong with this?"

So there are built-in second and third changes, not just because you're merciful, but because it's good teaching strategy.

Yes, because we are trying to get them to a farily high level and, obviously, if they could do it the first time then they wouldn't need to be in school.

This has been a good process for me as well. But it can be discouraging because you can clearly see what you have not been successful in teaching. If you are marking the same problems for every single kid, then obviously you have not done a good enough job teaching. It's not likely that you did nothing wrong but not one single student learned it. There are always going to be kids, I don't care what you do, that are not going to pay any attention. But by measuring all the papers against clear criteria, it's a way to look at the big picture, to say, "I think they all pretty much understand idea development. But they don't understand voice. I thought I had taught that, but obviously I have not done it well enough." So that lets me know I need to do some specific, directed lessons on voice.

This is one thing our principal is really big on. A lot of times you think, "I have done all I can. I've been successful, I've taught them this information and they just didn't get it, they didn't pay attention." But if that happens with this new performance standard model, then you are back to the drawing board. You have to face the fact that you didn't teach it. You may have worked really hard, but it didn't get taught so your job is not over. You don't necessarily have to go back and say "OK, everybody, we're rewriting the memoir." But you know that when you move on to something else you are going to have to hammer in on them on whichever criteria they are weak on.

You are continually collecting feedback on your students' performance and you keep feeding what you learn back into your own thinking and teaching. If you don't do that I think you are wasting a lot of valuable time and information. I always pay real close attention to scoring my kids' rubrics, and I'm noticing if more than a few are showing a real lack of success in a particular area.

Do teachers reach a point where they have to accept that everyone is not going to learn everything well?

Yes. I don't go home and lose sleep if one student isn't getting something. It would drive you crazy. But I think most teachers want their students to be successful. If there is a problem, I look to myself first to make sure I'm doing all I can. I go back and say -- is there another way I can teach this, or do I just need to spend more time on it? Sometimes you have to admit that you don't know what else to do.

Why aren't more teachers using this continuous assessment process in their classrooms?

Probably burnout. It's very, very time consuming. I think in Kentucky there's been a lot of pressure on teachers. I didn't really have to rethink my philosophy, like a lot of teachers did. I think some just had the attitude that "this is the way I have always done it, this is the way I'm going to do it. It works for me, end of story."

If teachers try it and really stick with it, and have some success with it, then I think many of them will come to see it's worth the hard work. And in some situations you just have to take small steps. There is a population of students that it's very hard to jump in with this because their very basic skills are so lacking. You have to spend so much time going back and redoing their basic skills.

But I think some teachers lose sight of the fact that that's a means to get them up here. It's easy to say, "Oh, they can't do anything, they can't do anything." So what I have found is that if I insist that they can do it, then they can. They can do a lot better than they show me. And this goes for all my classes -- high and not so high. I think a lot of low-achieving students are so used to having their hand held and the teacher just saying, "Oh, that's ok. You don't have to do it" that they don't know how to think. We have to teach them to think.

Is there a difference in having a performance-based, standards-based classroom and a standards-based school, in terms of what can be accomplished?

I think whenever you have something schoolwide, it's more effective. When you have everybody on board and you speak the same language. At Meyzeek we've had a lot of professioal development, and I think the vast majority of teachers here are on board and ready to go with this. For example, we have seen a lot of content area teachers taking the time to incorporate more writing activities.

The district's idea of developing some teacher leaders in each school has been a positive. I think teachers tend to be more responsive when their colleagues are the ones suggesting changes. We have a tendency to think, "Well, if it's so great, why don't you get in a classroom and do it?" I think a lot of teachers get tired of theorists and others who come in and say, "do it this way." So I think teachers teaching other teachers is the best way to go.

Every teacher has something of value to give. I know that some teachers come to me and say -- will you look at my syllabus and see if it's standards-based? And there are a lot of teachers that I go to who have been teaching for years that may not be up on standards but they can tell me about classroom management, or they have solved some other problem that's bafflling me.

On your desk you have a sheet titled "Eleven Ways to Be a Great Teacher."

Yes. The one that I try to remember is to think about the kid you detest the most, and then think: that could be my child. I have to make a full commitment to that child. Another one is "don't assume that what you see today is what this kid is going to be able to do tommorow." That's the one great thing about teaching. Every day is a clean slate. I try not to hold a grudge against a kid, or label kids. I come into this classrom every day thinking: "This is going to be a good day."


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To see illustrated examples of Lawrence's standards, rubrics, and performance tasks -- and a sample of student work -- download the latest issue of Changing Schools in Louisville .