Leading Standards-Based Learning by Heflebower Tammy;Hoegh Jan K.;Warrick Philip B.;

Author:Heflebower, Tammy;Hoegh, Jan K.;Warrick, Philip B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Marzano Resources
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Send Scouts to Learn From Other Schools and Districts

While the guiding team coordinates and leads the implementation of SBL, another critical group investigates and experiences standards-based learning and grading concepts and work firsthand ahead of other staff. We refer to this group as your scouts. Scouts are teachers who are willing to be in the advance group that will explore the challenges ahead and investigate what is to come. Scouts need to be carefully selected to represent various teacher groups in a school, including teachers who are ready for the change and those who are still on the fence. Some scouts can be part of the guiding team, but more often they are educators outside the guiding team who are respected early adopters. The size of the school and district will determine the number of scouts needed. In small schools we have seen as few as two teachers work in advance as scouts while larger schools have identified ten to fifteen teachers as scouts. Scouts can be individual teachers in different grade levels or content areas who are already tinkering with SBL practices on their own and were discovered to be doing so through the surveys of current grading practices conducted in phase 1. Scouts may also consist of an entire collaborative team or content-area department that collaborates well and successfully engage with new ideas. In fact, leaders may build more capacity in the initial stages by recruiting existing teacher teams as scout teams so the members can support one another through the early experimentation phases. Selecting the scouts might also involve the use of a simple application process that offers the opportunity to an entire staff. The key to selecting the scouts is to identify the people who will invest themselves in truly exploring ahead and learning about the concept. It is critical that the district or school empower and support the scouts. In other words, give them the resources they need to learn, understand, and actually implement different aspects of SBL in their own classrooms so they can begin to become embedded experts in the process.

At this point in the implementation process, we recommend that scouts visit schools that are practicing SBL to see and hear the system in action firsthand. As standards-based practices continue to become more common, it is easier to find example schools to visit, and with the ease of virtual communication, scouts can connect with schools in nearly any area to learn about their processes. Districts often describe their standards-based systems on their websites, making online searches a viable way to find example schools. There are also numerous standards-based grading blogs that can help school leaders identify possible model sites for their scout teachers.

In our experiences, some schools have their scouts visit two or three different schools and others perform a single visit. The key is to give the scouts enough opportunity to construct their own mental models of what SBL might look like in their own practice and eventually in the school as a whole.

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