Digging into standards

The current issue of Elementary Ed's Newsletter, a publication of ACSA's Elementary Education Council has a brief article by Michael Bossi of the Pleasanton Unified School District. He describes a process of analyzing each key standard and developing performance expectations for those standards:

A school staff CAN answer all these questions by committing itself to establish performance standards for each of the essential/key/power standards. The professional dialogue, collaboration, and sharing of practice and knowledge that will emerge from the quest to establish performance standards and common assessments WILL bring the staff to new heights and learning for students to new levels of achievement.

We will be using a similar process during our buy back days in June and August (Ideed one or two grade levels will begin looking at the standards this spring!). We will not only define the expectations of students for each standard, but we will also select materials and resources that will best address the specific standards.