A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

Teacher Power: SETTING NATIONAL STANDARDS

"As a teacher, I am glad we have come to a point where we listen to each other," said Mary Bicouvaris, a high school history teacher who served on a national advisory board largely responsible for the current push toward nationally set curriculum standards. A teacher for 29 years, she taught, from day one, without a compass, always wondering "Am I teaching right? Am I saying the right thing?" She would pretend a group of scholars was sitting at the back of the room, listening to her teach. Now, she is actually working with scholars to develop standards for the history curriculum, and never again will new teachers lack a yardstick for achievement, she predicted.

Like the process in federally funded activities in all major subject disciplines, those developing history standards will rely on classroom teachers to flesh out the performances expected--how good is good enough. The content standards are outcomes, explained Gloria Sesso, a high school history teacher from New York. It will be up to teachers to set the expectations about mastery and select the strategies for how to help all students achieve the mastery levels. Get involved, she advised, especially on demanding that assessments be as rich as the standards.

Teachers also are setting the expectations in the New Standards Project, a foundation-funded effort that includes states or districts representing almost half of the K-12 students in the country. Starting with performance standards in literacy and math, the New Standards Project has involved hundreds of teachers in developing scoring rubrics. Experts watched teachers during the scoring process, according to a sixth-grade teacher from Vermont, "and concluded that teachers are very reliable scorers. They have the same standards."

***last updated 5/18/94 (pkickbush)***
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1993 Goals 2000 Teacher Forum Participants

Teacher Power: MODELING FOR EACH OTHER