Guiding Principles of the Modern Red SchoolHouse Design:
Research-Based Solutions for 21^st Century Schools (continued)
By Sally B. Kilgore, Ph.D.

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Standards and Instruction

Research in a variety of disciplines makes one thing very clear:

Improving student achievement begins by looking at what is taught.

Improving student achievement begins by looking at what is taught from the point of view of the student. Does learning progress in a coherent manner? Does it provide students with the opportunity to master challenging academic content? On the other hand, are students taught the same thing, year after year? Sociologists find that equality of opportunity in education begins with what students have an opportunity to learn (Gamoran & Weinstein, 1998; Gamoran, 1996; Bryk, Lee, & Holland, 1993; Bishop, 1988; Garet & Delaney, 1988; Sebring, 1987; Dreeben & Gamoran, 1986; Schmidt, 1983; Coleman, Hoffer, & Kilgore, 1982; Barr, 1974). The use of academic standards should ensure that what students are taught constitutes a coherent opportunity to master challenging academic content.

For students from disadvantaged backgrounds, this issue is especially important. That is, disadvantaged students are more dependent on schools for their academic learning than are children from more socially advantaged backgrounds¹. For that reason alone, MRSH developers knew that schools must begin any improvement effort by addressing the fundamental issue: What should be taught? In the early 1990s, partnering schools relied upon academic standards developed by MRSH. In the past five years, challenging academic standards have been established in nearly all states. The MRSH team now begins its partnership with schools by exploring these central questions of alignment: Does the content of the school’s instruction match the content of the state standards? Are there gaps or redundancies? How does student work show mastery of these standards?

What is taught must form a coherent whole and constitute increasingly sophisticated mastery of skills and subject matter

What is taught must form a coherent whole and constitute increasing sophisticated mastery of skills and subject matter.

(Newmann, et al., 2001). David T. Gordon, writing about the research from the Consortium on Chicago School Research (2002), says that researchers discovered that lessons on the parallelogram in 1998 were being taught essentially the same in the 2^nd, 5^th, 8^th, and 10^th grade classes—offering a 2^nd grade lesson. Moreover, Cliff Adelman (1999), studying a nationally representative sample of high school transcripts from the 1980s, found students skipping around in their course enrollments in mathematics. He even found students enrolled in remedial mathematics and calculus in the same semester. To form a coherent whole, what is taught must be sequenced to ensure that students have the necessary prior knowledge and encounter the challenge of increasingly sophisticated new concepts.

Once alignment with standards is evaluated, one can address the “how” of teaching. For if teachers are teaching, but students are not learning, then how one teaches is obviously an issue. At the secondary level, how students are taught is often a bigger barrier to learning than what is taught.

Debates about pedagogy—the how of teaching—haunt most educators. Educators, as well as the public, often have strong convictions about how students should be taught. As a consequence, many discussions of pedagogy often become exchanges with high volume, but poor reception. Too much static in the transmission makes it hard for folks to hear one another.

The debates on pedagogy revolve around three enduring issues that I discuss in some depth below:

• What do we expect students to be able to do with what they learn?
  
  
• How should students be motivated to learn?
  
  
• What is the role of a teacher in the learning process?
  
  

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Link to References

¹ Given that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have less opportunities to learn outside of school-with computer games, attending summer camps, vacationing in historical places-what is taught at school is even more important to them than the average child (Heyns, 1978).