Teaching What Matters Most

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Teaching What Matters Most

• Standards and Strategies for Raising Student
  Achievement

Strong, Silver, Perini, 2001
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Responsibility for Teaching What Matters Most to
a Diverse Student Population

• Achieved through 3 simple, deep changes in
  practice of schooling
• Responsible standards
• Responsible strategies
• Responsible assessment practices.

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Driving Question
Is there a set of standards that would lead to a
measurable improvement on a variety of state
tests, while still permitting schools and
teachers the creativity they need to meet the
needs of all their students?

• Three Important Criteria
• Meet varying standards in all 50 states
• Elicit popular support (understandable and
  attractive)
• Be manageable (schools need to feel like they
  could help the majority of students meet the
  standards).

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Four Standards

• Rigor
• Thought
• Diversity
• Authenticity

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Rigor
All students need to be able to read and
understand powerful and challenging texts and the
ideas that animate them.
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Thought
All students need to acquire the disciplines of
learning They need to be able to collect and
organize information, to speak and write
effectively, to master the arts of inquiry and
problem solving, and to be able to reflect on and
learn from their own activity as learners.
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Diversity
All students need to understand their own
strengths and weaknesses, their unique styles,
intelligences, and cultural heritages, and be
able to use that knowledge to understand and work
with people different from themselves.
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Authenticity
All students need to be able to apply what they
learn to settings beyond the school doors,
especially those settings governed by the goals
of citizenship and future careers.
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• Responsible Strategies-- Research-based and
  transferable.
• Responsible Assessment Practices--Evaluative,
  Reflective, Supported

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RIGOR is NOT

• A special program or curriculum for select
  students
• About severity or hardship
• About higher-order thinking
• Neither a conservative nor a liberal agenda that
  privileges the ideas of one civilization over
  another
• A measure of the QUANTITY of content to be
  covered.

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RIGOR is the goal of helping students develop the
capacity to understand content that is complex,
ambiguous, provocative, and personally or
emotionally challenging.
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Characteristics of Rigor

• Curriculum Goal
• Requires that students regularly work with
  difficult texts and ideas.
• Different ways content can become rigorous
  (complex provocative ambiguous personally or
  emotionally challenging).

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Why Does Rigor Matter?

1. Rigorous reading and content demand attention.
2. Rigorous reading and content help us to handle
   uncertainty.
3. Rigorous content increases flexibility in
   thinking.
4. Rigor develops perseverance, intellectual
   modesty, and tolerance.
5. Rigor creates self-confidence.

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Chapter TwoWhat does this mean to you?
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How does your classroom measure up?
Chapter Three