Building a Culture of High Standards in the Middle Grades

Teachers can also make it safe to be smart by adopting alternatives to tracking and ability grouping. Teachers who do this know that
no matter what they say about persistence, students will not put forth the effort necessary to do good work as long as schools sort them according to perceived ability. Heterogeneous grouping is essential if students are to learn multiple modes of creating good work. Heterogeneous grouping and the norms, routines, and relationships that make the most of student diversity allow students to grapple with the complexities of divergent thinking and expand their own definition of being smart.

A focus on student work

Putting student work at the center of learning is a key step in building a culture of high standards. In schools that make it safe for all students to be smart, student work itself, not lists of discrete facts to be mastered or cutoff scores on standardized tests, is the standard of accomplishment. In fact, teachers who focus daily on helping students produce better work that meets higher standards of quality understand that test scores have little connection to the quality of student work. Middle school teachers around the country are increasingly adopting a set of routines that result in students' producing work that meets standards. These teachers know student work of high quality requires assignments that

orient students toward the learning for understanding anticipated by the standards of the professional associations. They also know that students will strive to create work of high quality when they know that real world audiences will actually use their work. Teacher Ron Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts, sees the effort when his students prepare

testimony to submit to the United States Congress that is based on the students' study of international child labor conditions. In Kathy Greeley's class in Cambridge, Massachusetts, students write and illustrate books that will be used by the school's younger students. In Shutesbury, Ron Berger's students may prepare a study of the town's water quality for their community's planning board. Helping students do high-quality work in relation to challenging assignments means reorganizing classrooms for maximum learning. In these classrooms:

Middle schools increasingly adopt these practices as a way to let student work, not test scores, reflect the value they place on high standards. Reform organizations like the Coalition of Essential Schools, Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, and the ATLAS project* aid in this movement by offering technical assistance and networking links to like-minded schools that share a commitment to learning in depth, even when that means "covering" fewer topics in the curriculum.

Caring relationships

School cultures that make it safe to be smart create a climate of respect and caring, where racism and sexism do not violate a student's integrity and sense of self. If a focus on student work reflects what Theodore Sizer calls "caring rigor," then it is in respectful personal relationships that students find the rigorous caring that will motivate them to do their best work, persist through difficulties, and revise work to meet standards. Establishing a motivational climate based on these relationships is a second step toward building a culture for high standards.

A number of structures that make consistent and caring relationships are familiar to

well-developed middle schools. They include:

But smallness is not the only condition necessary for developing caring relationships that make it safe to be smart. If students are to take risks and value effort, they need to know that they will be given second chances and extra help to improve their work to meet standards. Schools that foster a culture of high standards, then, also make it possible for students to receive extra help early and often. Students receive assistance when they need it, rather than at the end of the year when their failure is certain.

A collegial professional culture

Teachers who believe that all students can do work that meets high standards and who put into practice routines and relationships grounded in that belief go a long way toward creating a culture in which it is safe to be smart. But those beliefs do not emerge by magic. They require a common understanding of what high quality teaching and learning look like.

Regular sustained opportunities to discuss the work students do in light of teaching goals and curriculum is essential to developing a schoolwide, shared definition of high standards that teachers can then communicate to students. Such discussions can reveal how different learning opportunities and expectations vary from classroom to classroom. As teachers use student work to

stimulate conversations about assignments, classroom interactions, and expectations for individual students, discussions begin to unearth controversy and reveal differences
in perspectives among adults in a school.
As Kathe Jervis and Joe McDonald of the Coalition of Essential Schools point out, it is at this point that teacher discussions become "countercultural," capable of shaking up entrenched assumptions about what students can learn and do.
If schools are to realize the promises of the standards movement, they need a vision for standards-based reform powerful enough to a school culture that values student work of high quality and establishes routines that make it possible for all students to produce such work. They need a motivational climate based on caring relationships that communicate the possibilities of doing high quality work to all students. Grounded in new habits, relationships, and beliefs about what it means to be smart, a culture of high standards is within reach of all middle schools. In its absence, all the rhetoric of high standards will mean little for the learning of our young adolescent students.