Any teacher will confirm that standards exert a powerful and controversial influence on today's classrooms (O'Neil & Tell, 1999; Sizer, 1999; Tomlinson, 1999a). Developed by national, state, and local curriculum- writing groups and by subject area experts, standards aim to articulate the knowledge, skills, and understanding all students should gain in a particular subject, with more specific benchmarks of achievement by grade level. Standards express what schools value and, therefore, determine what teachers teach and assess. To best serve our students, we need to understand the strengths and limitations of standards as they are currently designed so that we may interpret and apply them effectively and contribute to their improvement.
First, the strengths. If properly constructed, standards can help us realize the dream of learning for all (Schmoker & Marzano, 1999). Well-designed standards focus primarily on "learning how to learn," calling for students to gain knowledge, skills, and understanding. They leave room for teachers to shape goals and to individualize the means for attaining them. In other words, good standards represent the community's beliefs about the knowledge, skills, and understanding that all students should develop, but they allow that how and to what degree students develop and demonstrate that learning can be as varied and creative as are the teachers and students themselves.
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Forum: Discussion about standards in diverse classrooms in the UDL and Standards Community. |
However, many educators are concerned about the current design and application of standards (see Dempster, 1993; Rosenholtz, 1991; Schmoker & Marzano, 1999; Wolk, 1998). Howard Gardner and the Project Zero group, in their work on teaching for understanding, warn that standards that specify particular knowledge and skills can actually lead teachers to decrease their focus on true understanding (Gardner, 1999). In such classrooms, students might acquire an impressive amount of factual knowledge, but not understand the meaning and importance of what they have studied (Blythe & Associates, 1998). The kind of understanding standards usually fail to capture is articulated by David Perkins (1998) as "the ability to think and act flexibly with what one knows . . . more like learning to improvise jazz or hold a good conversation or rock climb than learning the multiplication table. . . ." (p. 43). Critics also point out that some standards prescribe too narrowly and specifically what students should learn. Such overly specified standards can lead to a host of problems: "one-size-fits-all" approaches, cookie-cutter curricula, "teaching to the test," and an increased need to cover large amounts of material instead of delving deeply into concepts.
We believe the key to reconciling standards with student diversity is a careful examination of the standards themselves-first to determine the true purpose of a particular standard, and then to separate that purpose from the methods for attaining it. If the goal statement reflects its true purpose, it can work for an entire class made up of diverse learners. The means, or approaches, can then be individualized.
Partly because teachers have functioned for so many years with inflexible curriculum materials and methods, we tend to think narrowly about learner goals and the available pathways for their attainment. When goals are too tightly tied to methods, the logical result is that some students encounter barriers that prevent them from working toward these goals and others are not offered an appropriate level of challenge (Rose & Meyer, 2000).
Consider an analogy. Imagine a woodworking instructor is setting goals and performance criteria for a class of 30 students. One of the first goals he sets is "Students will master cutting wood with a handsaw." The performance criterion is for all students to use a handsaw to cut along a straight line drawn on a board. What is the likelihood that every one of the instructor's students will be able to achieve this goal?
The odds aren't very good. The wording of the goal confounds its objective with the means for attaining it, and the single performance criterion guarantees that while some students will be under-challenged, others will be over-challenged and have almost no chance of success. It's clear this goal could not be attained by a student like Sophia, who would have difficulty seeing a line drawn on a board, or by a student like Jamal, who lacks the physical ability to use a handsaw or to cut along a straight line. The goal would also be problematic for any student who fears being injured with sharp tools. Further, because students differ in coordination, strength, and physical ability, the single performance will be too high for some and too low for others.
If the woodworking instructor had only a handsaw and pencil (the woodshop equivalent of traditional, inflexible instructional media and materials), he might find it very difficult to shift set and reinterpret the goal so that all of his students could make progress. However, if he had a range of modern tools to work with (the equivalent of UDL's flexible media), he could broaden the goal from "master cutting wood with a handsaw" to "cutting wood" or "learning basic carpentry,"-two outcomes that better represent his true purpose. All students could work toward these broader goals, using whatever tools suit them best, and all could strive toward levels of competency that represent individual progress.
Like the woodworking instructor, teachers who have access to only a few tools and methods for teaching and assessing learners' progress naturally tend to define goals that are closely tied to methods. Consider this goal, set by Patrick's teacher, Mr. Hernandez, as part of a class research project: "Students will collect information from a variety of books as part of their research." In a traditional classroom, with only traditional fixed media available, Mr. Hernandez might logically conclude that Patrick couldn't work toward the same goal as his classmates because of his slow reading and tendency to be easily discouraged.
What if, in addition to books, the resources available to Mr. Hernandez's students included digital text with reading support, a variety of image-rich sources, videos, and scaffolds to help Patrick stay focused and organize his information? In this classroom, it would be clearer that the goal's true purpose-learning to collect and synthesize information-does not depend upon the use of printed text. Mr. Hernandez might restate the goal more generally: "Students will collect information from a variety of sources." This rewording separates the goal from the methods for attaining it, broadening the options for the entire class. Patrick, instead of having to lower his sights because of difficulty accessing a particular medium, could rely on scaffolds and supports to achieve the same goal as his peers.
UDL offers educators practical guidance for reconciling common standards with diverse needs. Remembering that our overarching intent is for each student to learn, we can use the UDL framework to