A student is sitting down to eat a “meal” of information that has been prepared for them. One teacher offers them a homemade meal as a chef would, with different ingredients pulled together to create the meal. Another teacher produces a quick ready-made meal that has been provided for them (think Hamburger Helper). The student is offered both meals—which will they eat? 

In the English language arts Common Core standards, there are standards about speaking and listening as well as presentations. As teachers around me have unpacked the standards over the past few years, the concept of listening cited specifically as a standalone standard has been questioned. Teachers have claimed, “I expect students to listen every single day, so I'm covering that standard every single day of the year.”

Your child comes home from school and on their paper is a single number: 9. Should you punish or reward them? Call the teacher? Call a tutor? 

The answer is pretty obvious: we don’t know. A single number doesn’t really make any sense without having some context. Was it 9 out of 10 or 9 out of 100? Was it a score for points or a score from a rubric? We need more information to know what the number actually means.

The next questions for the teacher and the student are “How does this impact grading?” and “What do the numbers even mean when it comes to the grade?” Again, a number with no context doesn’t mean much. But in order to create meaning from this number, we need to start with what the number actually means once it is turned into a grade. 

Teaching students how to research is more difficult than it has ever been. Common Core standards emphasize research skills, which help to support complex and critical thinking for our students. It’s a good thing to teach, but can be a very hard thing to learn. There are many reasons for this challenge, as well as why it’s getting harder all the time for our kids.

In most schools, we have plenty of data. It is usually assumed that more data means better outcomes for students. This very well could be true, but I believe most schools are DRIP (Data Rich, Information Poor) schools. We have the data, but what does any of it mean? Using data helps us to guide both learning and instruction, but it has to have context. Teachers must know how to reference the data and how to form context around it.

Collecting the data is the easy part. Assessments abound all around us, and we layer benchmarks on top of formatives on top of summatives on top of progress monitoring—not to mention classroom assessments. It takes a great deal of time and resources to administer all of this, but unless these numbers turn into action, it becomes a giant waste. 

As most adults know, creating a budget is an important step to having financial stability. It can feel like a downer at times, but it is the responsible thing to do.