Dr. Allen Webb Western Michigan University 2011

 Raise the academic level for all students.  Prepare students for the intellectual challenges of college and the 21 st Century workplace.  Have students read and write more than they have in the past!  Focus on complex ideas, high level thinking, multiple points of view, historical context.  Raise expectations. Higher quality work, more homework, publishable writing.  Mastery of 21 st Century tools.

 Narrowing the focus of your teaching to simplistic skills. Skills should be addressed in the context of meaningful and high level work.  Teaching the same thing to all students. You can not raise expectations for all students unless you challenge each student at his or her own level.  Focusing on form, not content.  Reducing the amount of reading or writing asked of students.  Failing to bring new materials and perspectives to the curriculum, including meaningful integration of technology.  Creating a curriculum that is fixed – curriculum should evolve and improve every year.  Making learning individual rather than collaborative.

 Can create a curriculum that has no relevance to students. A high level curriculum has a high level of meaning and value to students and the world.  Disregarding student prior knowledge reduces achievement and wastes instructional time.  Language Arts skills are not sequential. You do not have to have a command of sentences before you write paragraphs, etc.  Language Arts skills are recursive, students must go back to them again and again.  Writing skills are best learned in context of student’s own writing.  Reading is best learned when students are highly engaged.

 Is highly meaningful, intellectually challenging, interdisciplinary, and excellent preparation for college, workplace, and participatory citizenship.  Fosters in-depth, academic curriculum that develops critical thinking over the semester -- texts talk to each other, rather than separated “pearls on a string.”  Facilitates differentiation of instruction relevant to diverse ability levels.  Fosters close reading and integration of a great diversity of literary and informational texts.  Addresses real-world issues, leads to meaningful writing, purposeful publication, and school-community connection.  Draws on passion of teacher &students – crucial to motivation.  Ties to foundational questions of rights and democracy.

Implementing standards is not the same as standardization. If you are asked to teach in ways that lower academic expectations, you are not raising standards.