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Standards-Based Learning

The Purpose of a Standards-Based Learning System is to maximize the academic achievement and personal growth of each student by focusing on prioritized standards that ensure students develop skills necessary to live a life of infinite possibilities.

The students in a Standards-Based Learning System enhance their agency when they:

  • Articulate/explain the purpose of their learning
  • Identify what they are learning
  • Know what success looks like
  • Prioritize strategy and effort to demonstrate evidence of acquired knowledge and skills
  • Respond to feedback, self-assess their work, and reflect on their strategy and effort to inform or affirm next steps for learning
  • Engage in, and be responsive to, opportunities to learn

The teachers in a Standards-Based Learning System accelerate learning for each student and enhance their agency when they:

  • Establish a shared purpose for learning
  • Align learning targets & success criteria to the priority standard
  • Communicate the scale for success criteria
  • Develop tasks to gather evidence aligned to learning targets & success criteria
  • Provide feedback to students to inform or affirm next steps for learning
  • Plan engaging lessons aligned to priority standards that are differentiated & responsive to student learning needs

The administrators and specialists in a Standards-Based Learning System accelerate teacher engagement when they:

  • Engage teachers in operationalizing the standards-based learning system
  • Empower teachers to design high-quality instruction and assessment rooted in priority standards
  • Articulate building-wide goals that advance the implementation of standards-based learning
  • Design and facilitate professional learning opportunities to build teacher capacity
  • Establish and support a culture of high expectations and rigorous opportunities to learn for each student

Common Language Used in Standards-Based Learning

    • The most important, transferable standards in each discipline (Frontier, pg. 42)
    • Standards that have been identified as the most essential to a particular content area, grade level, or course (pg. 16 - Heflebower, A School Leader’s Guide to Standards-Based Grading)
    • Those standards on which teachers focus instruction, assessment, and feedback  (pg. 14 Heflebower, Leading Standards-Based Learning: An Implementation Guide for Schools and Districts)

    • Describes what evidence of understanding looks like;
    • aligned systemwide to a limited number of prioritized standards along a shared scale that describes what it means to understand (Frontier pg. 35)
    • The parameters that establish what success looks like for the learning targets (Fisher & Fry; The Success Criteria Playbook)

    • Statements describing what students should know and be able to do- the knowledge and skills required for students to achieve a standard (Vagle; Design in 5)
    • Learning Targets are aligned to success criteria and include specific academic content (Frontier)

    • Overarching, broadly transferable questions that get at the heart of the content
    • Common and determined per unit