Standards+and+Benchmarks+Leadership+Training

  Monday, 8/3/09 __** Definition of Terms **__ > performance assessments, and scoring guides?**
 * **Standards and Benchmarks:**
 * Standards: A standard is like the source of a river. The goal of education is to swim upstream and arrive at the source.
 * GENERAL STATEMENTS ABOUT WHAT STUDENTS SHOULD KNOW AND BE ABLE TO DO
 * Embody skills and knowledge
 * Benchmarks: Benchmarks are developmentally appropriate markers that lead to the Standard. Benchmarks are idenitifiable milestones on the journey upstream.
 * SPECIFIC...
 * **Performance Assessments:**
 * Tasks that require knowledge and action. When swimming upstream these might be memorable moments.
 * SHOULD BE OPEN
 * FORMATIVE AND SUMMATIVE
 * **What is the relationship between standards,
 * Scoring guides provide the necessary scaffolding and support to complete the performance assessment.

<span style="font-size: 12pt; color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;"> **__<span style="font-size: 12pt; color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Rationale for Standards Based Approach/ What it Improves __** > drive curriculum?**
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">**What is the purpose of utilizing assessment to
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Assessments are at the center because the reflect the Standard and also suggest appropriate lessons and teaching blocks.
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">HOW DO STANDARDS IMPROVE EDUCATION?
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">They align the entire school community putting everyone on the same page as we try to achieve excellence in teaching the standard. (vs. Sage on a Stage)...

<span style="font-size: 12pt; color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;"> <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;"> <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">**__The Difference Between Big Ideas and Essential Questions:__** __Assessment__
 * __Unwrapping Standards__**
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Figure out what students need to know and do. Look at nouns in Standard (for "to know") and verbs (for "to do").
 * <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">How we deconstruct the meaning of any given standard or benchmark.
 * <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">We also need to unwrap the specifics of the content...
 * <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">NB: We looked at Bloom's Taxonomy after we made our "to know, to do, content"
 * <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">**__Reflections on Unwrapping__**
 * <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">ML: Unwrapping is challenging because it involves looking at a //specific// benchmark or series of benchmarks, a //specific// standard, a //specific// text, and requires parsing or breakind down these various entities into component parts. How do you know when you're done unwrapping? How do you avoid falling into patterns in the unwrapping process that might narrow your view of a given standard or benchmark?
 * <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Idea of Standards and Benchmarks as //bichtav// and unwrapping as //b'al peh.//
 * <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">There is a fair amount of overlap in standards and benchmarks-- there are certain things that are constant in all TaNaKH study.
 * <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Gesher metaphor...
 * <span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Remember: unwrapping is part of teachers owning the process...
 * __Big Ideas and Essential Questions__**
 * **Essential Questions should be open questions that lead to high level thinking.**
 * succint but demand alot
 * should spark more questions from students
 * enable us to uncover real richness of a topic
 * **Keep in mind that there are a diversity of learners...**
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Big Ideas: Developed by the teaching team to focus the students. Should be broad and applicable outside the classsroom. Universal truths that we want to impart to the students.
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Essential Questions: Used to engage students in dialogue and critical thinking and to explore different dimensions of the big ideas, also to facilitate new big ideas from the students. Teaching students how to communicate...
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Big ideas are given, essential questions are posed.
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">Big ideas are statements, essential questions are questions.
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">appeal to different learners, are useful to different learners.
 * <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;">There is a dialectic process here: we unwrap to broaden, then big ideas focus us, then essential questions re-open the conversation...
 * Differences between formative and summative.
 * What types of evidence do I need to see that students are understanding big ideas and benchmarks? //Thinking like an assessor.//


 * __Scoring Guides__**
 * Why are they useful for students?
 * Help all students succeed.
 * Don't be too general or too specific.
 * __Reflections on Scoring Guides__**
 * Scoring guides clarify expectations for teachers, students and parents by delineating the various tasks a student needs to perform in order to meet the expectations of the teacher and satisfy the requirement. They assist teachers in figuring out what/how to teach. They help parents to navigate the sometimes vague world of assessment and to help hold their child accountable for meeting course reqs.
 * Scoring guides help teachers differentiate instruction because they compel teachers to reflect on the types of tasks that they are asking students to perform. Are the tasks balanced? Do they touch on multiple intelligences? Are they developmentally appropriate? Scoring guides also provide clarification to students in need.


 * __Broad Reminders__**
 * This is a YEAR OF LEARNING. We are learning a Standards Based Approach for TaNaKH that focuses on engaging students in the learning process.
 * We're going to emphasize faculty collaboration and sustained learning to improve instruction and student learning.
 * There are no experts, no one has all the answers.
 * MAKE MEETINGS PRODUCTIVE. HAVE AN AGENDA!!
 * __Action Plan

Quotes on Biblical Criticism__**

The monotheistic revolution of biblical Israel was a continuing and disquieting one. It left little margin for neat and confident views about God, the created world, history, and man as political animal or moral agent, for it repeatedly had to make sense of the intersection of incompatibles – the relative and the absolute, human imperfection and divine perfection, the brawling chaos of historical experience and God’s promise to fulfill a design in history. The biblical outlook is informed, I think, by a sense of stubborn contradiction, of a profound and ineradicable untidiness in the nature of things, and it is toward the expression of such a sense of moral and historical reality that the composite artistry of the Bible is directed. Robert Alter, //The Art of Biblical Narrative// (Basic Books, 1981), p. 154. <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> Biblical literature grew from an ongoing dialogue that was full of tension between different societal thinkers. Many stories in the Bible interpret other Biblical stories, which preceded them, in order to make them kosher and make them appropriate to their time and spiritual world…. Yair Zakovitch, Distancing for the sake of closeness (1995) (my translation)
 * Readers who are not afraid of the collapse of unity, readers who are able to deal with a diversity of views and opinions, will listen not just to the roar of the main streams in Biblical thought, but also to the murmuring of the brooks that quietly gurgle, to the voice of deviant traditions, like the one that states that the Israelites worshiped false gods until they conquered Canaan (Joshua 24:14)…. **
 * Distancing from the Bible, therefore, makes it possible to feel closer to it, as one distinguishes the stones of the mosaic which make up the whole picture. A sensitivity to the Bible’s ideational richness, dialogue and struggle, proves how much we are of the same flesh [//basar mib’saram//] as the Biblical writers, how much we are like them as we think, hesitate, hold one opinion and then a different one. We, like the Biblical writers, have beliefs and timeless truths, and they often clash with time-based needs. Just as the Biblical writers found imaginative ways to compromise between the ideal and the reality, so too do we. **