While most teachers are diligent in addressing all the standards required by their state and school district, there are so many that a few inevitably fall through the cracks. As education researcher Bob Marzano once observed, if we taught every single standard mandated for students, they’d be in school all year and wouldn’t graduate until they were 22.

This year, the challenge is even greater. In addition to the standards teachers must address in the grades they teach, many of their students, especially their middle schoolers, are returning to school with more unfinished learning than they would have in a regular year. Simply put, many students aren’t ready for what they are expected to learn this year because they’re missing the skills they need to build upon from last year. Here’s how my district, Schuyler Community Schools, is working to ensure students are up to speed while still addressing the new content they need to learn this year.

Focusing on the ‘Must-have’ Standards

We began prioritizing our standards years ago. While we certainly don’t encourage teachers to skip any standards, we know that students simply do not have the time to attain deep mastery of every standard. We need targets for what we’re asking students to learn by the end of each year.

We look at a range of factors as we’re prioritizing standards, including:

• What kind of leverage does a standard have in future learning?
• What kind of breadth and depth does the standard have?
• Will it be assessed?

The idea is not to throw out the standards with less depth or that students won’t be assessed on. We still expect our teachers to touch on each standard, but at the end of the year, our priority standards are the must-haves, the standards that we not only expect teachers to teach, but that students must understand and master to continue their learning progression.

This work is ongoing. In Nebraska, we began using the ACT as a state assessment, so we’re now looking at how we need to reprioritize our standards to account for what’s assessed by the ACT. Students take the ACT in 11th grade, but they don’t learn everything it assesses in their junior year, so we’ve gone all the way back to our standards from kindergarten to ensure we’re prioritizing the standards that align with those later skills.

How EdTech Can Help Identify Learning Gaps

Last year, Renaissance, released a free resource, Focus Skills, that does similar work to our standards prioritization. Built on learning progressions for each US state, Focus Skills reflect the reading and math standards that are prerequisites for future learning. They’ve also added Trip Steps, which are math skills that are much more difficult than other standards at the same grade level.

Using these tools, we can ensure that teachers are spending the most time on skills that are absolutely necessary for future learning and difficult for students to understand. Or, in a year like this one, in which students have many gaps in their learning, we can help teachers identify the skills from the previous year that are most critical for students’ current grade, as well as which ones they are most likely to need a little refresher on—whether they missed the skill because of the pandemic or not.

Pairing Assessment Data with Standard Priorities to Target Instruction

Once our teachers have a clear understanding of what skills are absolutely essential for future learning, what skills from last year are key to understanding this year’s material, and what skills students may be struggling with simply because they are more challenging, they can look through benchmark assessments from the beginning of the school year to see where students may have missed some instruction. We can’t just stop this year’s grade-level instruction to throw in everything from last year, so we’ve been trying to find ways to adjust our scope and scaffold in the pieces of this year’s material that build upon what they may have missed last year.

One way we’re doing this is with daily bell ringers. This year, those bell ringers have become an opportunity to refamiliarize students with concepts from the previous grade that are relevant to the day’s lesson. It’s not a solution to a class full of students who missed a critical concept, but it is useful in a class of students who are familiar with a key skill, but who didn’t get to learn it as deeply the first time around as they might have in a more typical year.

To address the more concerning bits of learning that students were unable to finish last year, we’ve had to tweak our schedule a bit. For example, our middle school administrator team adjusted the schedule to include a 30-minute intervention time opposite student lunch times. Students are assigned according to their needs based on their Star Assessment scores, which are compared to our state benchmarks. Students who are performing below standards level get intensive intervention, those who meet standards level get on-level interventions, and those who are performing at the secure level get enrichment activities. Schools are reassessing students once a month to determine if they are ready to move to new groups.

Of course, our teachers are also doing similar work to address unfinished learning with small groups in their classrooms, just as they would in a normal year.

Even if this year hasn’t been entirely normal, our approach to standards has been the same, if a little more rigorous: Assess students to meet them where they are, intervene as appropriate, and spend more time on the skills that are truly essential for their future learning.

About the author

Dave Gibbons, Ed.D., is the curriculum director at Schuyler Community Schools. He can be reached at dave.gibbons@schuylercommunityschools.org.