How do you know your Student is Learning Through Standards-Based Instruction?

Check out one teacher's way to guide students' understanding of standards-based learning through conferencing.

Your student is learning when...

  • they can incorporate and demonstrate their learning through authentic tasks.

  • they can monitor their own progress and set future learning goals using timely feedback from their teachers.

  • they can show a gradual progression of skills based on a rubric created by the teacher, school, or district.

(Benson & Lantz, 2012; Heflebower et al., 2019)

Reflect

Your student is working on a fifth-grade reading standard. The standard reads: “NCRL.5.1 Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.”

When we look deeply into this standard you will discover your student needs to learn a few things, such as:

  • quoting correctly from a text to support my explanation of what a text explicitly says.

  • quoting correctly from a text to support my inference about the text.

(Public Schools of North Carolina, 2018)

Questions to ask your child's teacher

  • What do you use to assess student learning?

  • What opportunities do you provide during instruction to practice mastery of the standard?

  • How do you inform students about their performance?

  • Do you use multiple sources of assessment data to determine standard mastery? What do you use?

Next, you will explore the difference in standards-based and traditional learning.

The learning cycle featured in this project is based on the STAR Legacy Cycle developed by the IRIS Center (2013; http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu), and based on the work of Dr. John Branford and colleagues (National Research Council, 2000).