Turning Points: A Decade Later

By Gayle A. Davis and Anthony Jackson
[Excerpted from Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century. Reprinted with permission from Middle Ground, October 2000, National Middle School Association. Davis and Jackson are the book's authors.]

We are grateful to NMSA for permission to post this excerpt. We encourage our visitors who are not members to join NMSA and receive Middle Ground, the Middle School Journal, and other valuable middle grades resources.


ALSO SEE: "Backward Design: putting Standards into the Curriculum" (sidebar)


In 1989, Carnegie Corporation of New York released a groundbreaking report about improving the education of young adolescents. Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century provided a comprehensive approach to educating adolescents that resonated deeply with practitioners. As experience with the effect of these recommended reforms grew, and as research into middle grades education continued and strengthened, it became clear to us that the progress made since the publication of the original Turning Points warranted further examination and analysis. We believed that such an effort would produce a new understanding of what works and what doesn't, based on actual experience rather than on theory or anecdote. The result of our efforts, Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century, will be published this fall by Teachers College Press as a project of Carnegie Corporation.

Turning Points 2000 substantially fleshes out the ideas in the original report. The book builds on the notion, implicit in the original Turning Points, that various aspects of middle grades education, such as curriculum, instruction, teacher preparation and professional development, can be thought of as design elements of a system in which changes in one element influence the others. And each element in the system affects the goal of ensuring success for every student. The rest of this article draws on excerpts from the chapter highlighting curriculum and assessment, the first of seven key elements in the design system described in Turning Points 2000.

Using Curriculum and Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning

To prepare all students to think critically, lead healthful lives, and behave ethically and as responsible citizens, the original Turning Points recommended that middle level schools teach a core of common knowledge. Since the report's 1989 publication, educators have learned a great deal about how to do this. All of what has been learned affirms an essential truth about education: Improvement in student performance across all groups requires a relentless focus on the heart of schooling, that is, on teaching and learning.

We have moved away from the term "core of common knowledge" because it implies a prescribed, fixed universe of knowledge, a concept inappropriate for the information age. It also ignores the skills and habits of mind (see below for examples) that students should also acquire, the changing concerns of young adolescents, and the growing understanding of how students learn best. We now recommend teaching a curriculum grounded in rigorous, public academic standards relevant to the concerns of adolescents and based on how students learn best. A standards-based curriculum provides the opportunity for every young adolescent to learn to use his or her mind well - to think creatively; to solve complex, meaningful problems; and to develop the base of factual knowledge and skills needed for these higher order capacities.

Content or academic standards, which spell out what students should know and be able to do, form the basis for the curriculum we recommend. Academic standards provide the link between excellence and equity by setting consistently high, public expectations for every student. As a reflection of the school's broader goal of enabling young adolescents to reach their full intellectual potential, the effort to support every student, including special education and English language learners, in meeting or exceeding high academic standards should drive all other aspects of school improvement.

A discussion of teaching and learning based on standards must address three aspects of day-to-day life in a classroom: curriculum, assessment, and instruction. Backward design - an approach that weaves together curriculum, assessment, and instruction in developing rigorous units of study - begins with identifying the relevant standards and developing the curriculum based on them (see sidebar for more details). Educators then decide what assessment methods will best allow students to demonstrate what they have learned, and finally, they determine how to prepare students, through diverse instructional methods, to do well on the assessments.

One common complaint is that the sheer number of standards some states and school districts require makes it impossible for a school to attend to every one of them. Taken together, such mandated standards in the disciplines, or even within a single discipline, may require more time for teaching, learning, and assessment than any school could ever hope to provide. Teachers' and administrators' concerns about "covering" everything that the standards apparently demand often tie directly to their concern (or fear) about being held accountable for "a little bit about everything." Coverage means touching on many topics or facts in a shallow fashion (to wit, the American textbook). On a test covering a myriad of topics, students are hard-pressed to recall facts presented in isolation, devoid of meaning or connection, and teachers are held accountable for the inevitably highly variable performance.

To direct teaching and learning toward understanding will require uncovering the absolutely essential concepts and ideas embedded in lengthy standards and developing a curriculum that reflects these essential concepts, both subject-specific and generic, thus revealing connections within and across content areas. With concepts as the framework for learning, the topics and facts can be hooked into a structure, within which those seemingly disconnected scraps become part of a coherent whole. Concepts frame the big ideas a curriculum will address.

A second common complaint is that many standards are not focused on the big ideas within or across subject areas. Even a poorly designed standard, such as one based on a list of facts, can be transformed into a useful guideline if teachers incorporate those discrete facts into a system that addresses the essential concepts, the big ideas that such standards do not explicitly state. For example, a standard might indicate that students should know the dates for the major battles of the American Civil War. Learning to this "standard" is a memorization task, not an exercise in conceptual understanding. However, if the Civil War were studied as part of analyzing the concept patterns, a connection could be made to a generalization about patterns - for example, that patterns allow for predictions. With that concept and generalization in mind, the list of dates no longer stands in isolation, but becomes part of a larger understanding that the dates tie into a pattern of engagement determined by such factors as weather, road conditions, supply lines, and military tactics. This pattern allows for predicting not just approximate dates of battles in the Civil War but, with modifications, patterns of military engagement generally, providing students with an opportunity to understand contemporary conflicts such as the crisis in Kosovo.

Developing Curriculum Based on Standards

Reviewing what standards are assessed at the state level is only a beginning point in developing middle grades curriculum, which should be grounded in three strategies. First, the entire curriculum - including what is addressed, how it is addressed, and in what sequence - should be organized around important concepts and questions. Second, the curriculum should reflect the concerns of young adolescents. And third, the work should be oriented toward the assessments, the tasks that students will undertake to demonstrate their knowledge and skills.

Young adolescents are ready to seek out patterns, to make connections, to try to figure out the world around them and their place in it as part of their journey toward adulthood. With the big ideas guiding their learning in school, they can see how historical precedents could affect their own futures, how mathematics can help them make sense of the seemingly random, and how literature provides insight into the state of humanity.

Like concepts, essential questions can be generic, cross-disciplinary, or subject-specific:

Examples of Essential Questions

-- Can novels reveal inner life without falsifying it?
-- Do statistics lie?
-- "War is diplomacy by other means." Is this true? Is it immoral if we believe it?
-- Are some aspects of language and culture not understandable by people from other
cultures?
-- Is terrorism wrong? Do revolutionaries differ from terrorists? Or from criminals? Were our country's founders terrorists?
-- Is gravity a fact or a theory?
-- Do mathematical models conceal as much as they reveal?
-- In what ways are animals human? In what ways are humans animals?
-- Is biology destiny?
-- What natural disasters are most likely to occur in your area, and how should the community prepare?
-- What would happen if all bacteria and fungi were eliminated from earth?
-- Is there life in outer space?
-- If the sale of tobacco in the United States were banned, what types of replacement crops could be used to maintain the economy?
-- Does the United States or the United Nations have the right or the responsibility to interfere in the internal affairs of foreign countries?
[Note: This list was adapted from Educative Assessment: Designing Assessment to Inform and Improve Student Performance (Jossey-Bass, 1998) and Learning in Overdrive: Designing Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment for Standards (North American Press, 1995).]

The integrated approach to curriculum development requires each teacher on a team to rank the standards and the resulting key concepts and essential questions within his or her own discipline, selectively abandoning content and skills from the traditional, often packed, curriculum. The teachers then bring their discipline-based priorities to a team effort to discover overlaps in the concepts, questions, skills, and habits of mind that underlie their disciplines.

Teachers must consider a mix of assessment methods - from quizzes to simulations - that allow for ongoing and cumulative feedback, otherwise known as formative and summative assessment. In putting together a variety of assessment methods for the curriculum, teachers typically have little trouble incorporating the traditional methods, such as tests. However, authentic assessment methods represent new territory for many educators, worthy of a closer look.

The standards, concepts, and essential questions within the curriculum should be the first sources for ideas about authentic assessment. Teachers and students can brainstorm together, then refine and adapt their ideas to fit the standards. Examples of authentic assessment methods include simulations, formal debates, exhibitions, position papers, scientific experiments, individual and group research projects, and portfolios. Whatever the form, to be successful on a performance task in a unit of study based on critical concepts and essential questions, students must learn the substantive content and applicable skills necessary to do well.

Multiple Forms of Assessment at Camels Hump Middle School

About 12 years ago, Susie Girardin thought it would be neat to do a unit on flight with her fifth-graders at Camels Hump Middle School in Richmond, Vermont. She poured her considerable verve into making the unit exciting for her students. They heard from a visiting stunt pilot, made wind socks, and studied wings at a bird museum. Yet looking back, Girardin doubts they carried any enduring knowledge about flight with them into adulthood. If she ran into her former students today, she says, the only thing they probably would remember is that the wind socks resembled giant condoms fluttering outside the school.

Part of the problem, says Girardin, is that the unit wasn't tied to any standards. Lacking a specific purpose for teaching what she taught, she didn't have deliberate goals for what students should know or be able to do as a result of the unit. It was just so much "activity land," she says, a contrivance that's rampant among well-meaning teachers. Moreover, because she didn't use multiple forms of assessment throughout the unit in order to give kids different ways to show their learning, she didn't know what they really got out of it.

Today Girardin ties all of the teaching in her multiage fifth- and sixth-grade classroom to standards. And she infuses her practice with a wide variety of assessment methods, allowing plenty of opportunity for students with diverse learning needs and styles to demonstrate that they have met the multilayered expectations embodied in those standards. Girardin and her teammate of 10 years, Kerry Young, teach in a double-sized room that includes some children who come to school hungry and others who have their own horses.

Girardin and Young have not abandoned traditional assessments, such as multiple-choice quizzes, which capture student mastery of discrete facts. But they have made what are known as "authentic," "alternative," or "performance" assessments a prominent part of their teaching. These methods - which include journals, skits and plays, videos, surveys, posters, newspapers, labeled models, timelines, and debates - give Girardin detailed information about her students' learning, she says.

"I have 53 students, and they all learn and show their knowledge in a multitude of ways," Girardin remarks. "I can't just trust my instincts. I need proof." Using a variety of assessment methods makes teachers reflective, she contends. When kids don't do well, instead of blaming the students or themselves, Girardin says teachers can look at the assessment and ask themselves questions such as, "Was the concept important enough that I need to go back?" "Was it the assessment tool itself, and they know the information, but I didn't ask for it right?"

Her students often help select and design the assessment tools by which they are evaluated. Sometimes Girardin and her students review sample rubrics she has collected. Students discuss what is expected of them and put the rubrics in their own words. Girardin also shows students benchmarks, giving them a firsthand look at what constitutes excellent work, as well as adequate and inadequate efforts.

Whereas traditional assessment methods demand that students select a response from offerings presented by their teacher, authentic methods require students to construct a response based on their independent work. The latter can be hard at first on students who excel at absorbing and spitting back out the main points in a textbook chapter, Girardin says. With alternative assessments, they have to make meaning out of their new knowledge. And, paralleling the demands of the grown-up world, they have to put their new skills into action.

Her students have presented town officials with suggestions for solving municipal problems. One student who had served as class president attended a town meeting as part of an independent research project on governance. His culminating assessment was writing a booklet geared to future student officeholders on the decision-making powers of the class president.

Girardin admits that when she first embraced standards-based teaching and new assessment methods she thought textbooks and tests were to be avoided entirely. "But like all things I've learned since hitting my 40s, you don't throw the babies out with the bath water. You really need to have a good healthy assortment," says Girardin, adding that for some of the information they need to learn - like multiplication tables - tests and traditional homework assignments make the most sense.

However, she says, to base the whole assessment of a child on quizzes and worksheets just checks for one kind of understanding. "It doesn't tell me as an assessor what that kid can do. It doesn't tell me how that child assimilates information or deduces information."

Conclusion

Our discussions of teaching and learning are critical to everything that follows in Turning Points 2000. For example, the organizational structures we describe - teaming, flexible scheduling, democratic governance - should all be established in response to a curriculum that is substantive, significant, and relevant to the concerns of young adolescents.

While we hold no illusions that implementing Turning Points 2000's recommendations will ever be easy, we strongly believe that the approach to educating adolescents described in the book has real power. We further believe that as educators become increasingly successful in realizing that power, they will have an enormous opportunity to prove the fallacy of one of this country's most pernicious myths: that all children really cannot learn.
Thus we see the work of middle grades educators implementing Turning Points reforms as much more than "school reform." It is nothing less than a heroic attempt to realize the American ideal that all men (and women) are truly created equal and that every one of us has an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, for which an excellent education is essential.

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Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century is a project of Carnegie Corporation of New York, is published by Teachers College Press and co-published and distributed with The National Association of Secondary School Principals and National Middle School Association (NMSA). To order, call 800-528-NMSA. The cost is $20 for NMSA members (ISBN: 0-8077-3996-0).

Gayle A. Davis is a faculty research associate at the University of Maryland's College of Education and former national director of the Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative (MGSSPI), the Carnegie-funded program of grants designed to stimulate statewide changes in the policy and practice of middle grades education. Anthony W. Jackson, former program officer at Carnegie Corporation and primary author of the original report, is now a director of the Disney Learning Partnership.

Backward Design: Putting Standards Into the Curriculum

[This article appeared as a sidebar in the October 2000 Middle Ground]

Five years ago, Salem, Massachusetts, merged its two middle schools into one. Today, despite having more than 100 teachers and 1,100 students - half of them poor and a third of them Dominican immigrants whose first language is Spanish - Collins Middle School is a thriving learning community.

Teacher collaboration makes possible Collins' school-wide emphasis on a purposeful form of curriculum planning often called backward design. Employing this method, teachers start by studying standards and then setting goals for students based on those standards. They then conceive of projects that will give students opportunities to demonstrate that they have gained the requisite understandings and skills. Then teachers choose instructional activities that support their overall intent.

As Collins teachers create curriculum, revisiting and fine-tuning their plans every year, they always begin by asking the question: What is it we want students to know and be able to do? The standards teachers consult to answer that question are the seven Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks: Arts, English/Language Arts, Health, Mathematics, Science and Technology, Social Studies, and World Languages.

For each framework, the Salem school district has a team that includes teachers from kindergarten through the 12th grade, parents, community leaders, and experts, such as staff from local museums. They decide which part of each framework will be done at each grade level. With the information from the district framework teams in hand, Collins teachers meet as grade-level subject-area teams and hammer out what units they'll do.

Nancy Pelletier, a seventh grade science/math teacher at Collins, and her team chose three units for the year: the characteristics of life, which included cell biology, classification, and one-celled organisms; the human body; and biomes.

The team made sure that these units addressed the state standards. For example, the science framework says that children should be able to describe the idea that in complex multicellular organisms, cells have specialized functions, communicate with each other, and are mutually dependent. Two of the seventh grade units - the characteristics of life and the human body - help students achieve mastery of that standard.

As they develop units, Collins teachers often use the Atlas template, a tool developed by the Cambridge-based Education Development Center, to guide schools in developing curriculum. The Atlas template requires teams to fill in blanks describing the theme of each unit, the questions that will drive their exploration, and the essential understandings - the most important concepts, generalizations, and issues - they want students to grasp.

The science teachers also delineated the skills students would practice and develop during the unit and the habits of mind that would be stressed throughout. They divided the skills into those needed for science, reading and writing, research and technology, and critical thinking. And they said that students would learn to ask questions that could be answered by experiments, measure accurately, make predictions, write lab reports, find reference materials, develop graphs, and
recognize cause and effect.

Then, the science teachers planned how they would address and assess understandings and skills. They decided on key products, called benchmark performances, which students would develop. They had to think about what kinds of practice and instruction students would need as they develop their products and what kind of feedback would help students understand the criteria for high-quality work.

After the team signed off on the units and the major understandings and skills, Pelletier paired off with another science teacher to work out the nitty-gritty of how her unit would proceed. Teachers at Collins often pair off this way, Pelletier says. "The work is so involved, it's difficult to do it alone," she adds. "Kids could write questions about micro- and macro-organisms til the end of time, but we needed to focus them on developing questions they could investigate and research. They had to come up with a plan for an experiment and show me it would work."

Pelletier made a rubric for all the components of her unit, which included quizzes, tests, speeches, and writing journals, as well as the final exhibition. The criteria she established for the final exhibition meant that students would be assessed on how well they understood and used the scientific method, cited research, and drew on a variety of resources.

Pelletier introduced the students to the scientific method and took them to a local pond, where they collected protists and fungi. She worked with small groups of students, pushing them to hone their questions in ways that would lead them to the essential understandings she knew they had to get out of the unit.

The kids also discussed what made a good question, and critiqued each other's ideas. One student wanted to ask, What is athlete's foot, and why do people get it? The student was going to scrape fungus between kids' toes, Linda Darisse, the math/science curriculum coordinator, says. "The kids decided that was the grossest thing they ever heard. 'Redesign your experiment,' they said.'" The student decided to do a survey instead.

The three-fold storyboards students presented at the unit's finale had to show the scientific process. They had to include their original hypothesis and how it changed, data, illustrations, a conclusion, and a description of new questions raised by their experiment. "They were masterpieces," Pelletier says, calling the unit "the most rewarding thing" she's ever done. "It wasn't just about curriculum. We're teaching them how to be independent learners."

Darisse points out that Pelletier's unit worked well both for the kids who in other schools might be tracked into gifted and talented programs and for those who might be tracked into so-called remedial programs. "If you individualize, everyone works at their own level," says Darisse. (The classes at Collins are heterogeneously grouped, though the district has alternative placements outside Collins for children whose behavior problems make them disruptive in the classroom.) "Some of the exhibits were sophisticated and others were plain and ordinary, but all the students learned about scientific methods."

"This kind of curriculum planning is as much circular as it is backward because you keep going back," says Darisse. Laura Chesson, director of math and science programs at the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston, coaches the Collins faculty and attends the school's curriculum meetings. On a regular basis, Collins teachers reflect on whether they've met their goals. Chesson explains, "You plan the curriculum, teach it, assess the students, and then look at the student work and review the assessment to see if you need to make changes to your curriculum and instruction in order to help your students better meet standards."

-- Gayle A. Davis and Anthony W. Jackson

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