holds a bachelor of arts in elementary education and a master of arts in educational administration, both from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She also earned a specialization in assessment from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Philip B. Warrick, EdD, spent the first twenty-five years of his education career as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, and superintendent and has experience in leading schools in the states of Nebraska and Texas. Dr. Warrick was named 1998 Nebraska Outstanding New Principal of the Year and was the 2005 Nebraska State High School Principal of the Year. He is a past regional president for the Nebraska Council of School Administrators (NCSA) and also served on the NCSA legislative committee. In 2003, he was one of the initial participants to attend the Nebraska Educational Leadership Institute, conducted by the Gallup Corporation at Gallup University in Omaha. In 2008, Dr. Warrick was hired as the campus principal at Round Rock High School in Round Rock, Texas. In 2010, he was invited to be an inaugural participant in the Texas Principals’ Visioning Institute, where he collaborated with other principals from the state of Texas to develop a vision for effective practices in Texas schools.
Dr. Warrick has coauthored A School Leader’s Guide to Standards-Based Grading, Collaborative Teams That Transform Schools, A Handbook for High Reliability Schools, and Leading a High Reliability School. Dr. Warrick joined the Solution Tree–Marzano Research team in 2011 and works as an author and global consultant in the areas of school leadership, curriculum, instruction, assessment, grading, and collaborative teaming. He earned a bachelor of science from Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska, and earned master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Jeff Flygare is a former classroom teacher, English department chair, professional developer, and building-level leader. During his twenty-six-year career teaching high school English, he taught nearly every course in the department. Flygare developed classes in mythology, Shakespeare, philosophy, and comparative religions, and worked with social studies colleagues to create an interdisciplinary class called World Studies, which he team-taught successfully for seventeen years. He taught Advanced Placement (AP) English classes for twenty-one years and served as an AP English literature reader and table leader for Educational Testing Service for many years. He adopted standards-based learning in his classroom and successfully taught students at all levels in a standards-based environment for many years.
Flygare also has a strong theatrical background, working first as an actor and then as a director at a major regional theater company in Colorado. He directed many high school productions, both traditional and Shakespearean, as well. As a Marzano Research associate, Flygare travels around the world to work with educators on topics involving curriculum, instruction, and assessment. He is the author of Close Reading in the Secondary Classroom.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York–Buffalo, a master’s degree in English from the University of Colorado–Denver, and a master’s degree in education with an endorsement in gifted education from the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.
About Marzano Research
Marzano Research is a joint venture between Solution Tree and Dr. Robert J. Marzano. Marzano Research combines Dr. Marzano’s fifty years of educational research with continuous action research in all major areas of schooling in order to provide effective and accessible instructional strategies, leadership strategies, and classroom assessment strategies that are always at the forefront of best practice. By providing such an all-inclusive research-into-practice resource center, Marzano Research provides teachers and principals the tools they need to effect profound and immediate improvement in student achievement.
Foreword
by Robert J. Marzano
For decades, educators have been discussing standards-based assessment and grading. Indeed, as far back as the early 1990s, I and others were writing quite extensively about the impact the standards movement was likely to have on K–12 schooling. In this new book, Heflebower, Hoegh, Warrick, and Flygare revisit some of those topics but add the perspective of how standards should affect both teaching and learning. At the core of their discussions and recommendations are proficiency scales.
While the term proficiency scales is used in many different ways and has many different manifestations, the type of scale used by the authors goes back to my early work in the 1990s and is currently being used in every U.S. state, and a number of countries, to one degree or another. Such proficiency scales have been well vetted regarding their utility with assessment, grading, curriculum, and instruction.
To design this particular type of proficiency scale, educators must identify those topics from state or local standards that are essential for students’ academic success. The authors refer to this process as prioritizing the standards. The content within each of the essential topics derived from prioritized standards is then organized into a progression of knowledge embedded within the proficiency scale, which becomes the guaranteed curriculum within a school or district.
After establishing a firm foundation regarding the nature of and need for proficiency scales, the authors address how the scales can and should be used. First, and perhaps foremost, proficiency scales should be highly visible. Teachers should make students aware of the essential topics that they will address throughout the year and the content in the proficiency scales for each topic. This renders the curriculum completely transparent for students and parents. They know what will be taught throughout year, when it will be taught, and precisely what proficiency looks like for each topic.
Each proficiency scale also governs assessment. In fact, it is ideal if cooperative teams within the professional learning communities (PLC) process generate common pretests and posttests using the proficiency scales. Better yet, teachers in a collaborative team can score students’ pretests and posttests to determine individual student needs and calibrate the manner in which teachers design and score assessments based on proficiency scales.
Teachers should ask students to set goals regarding their learning of the content in specific proficiency scales. A powerful addendum to this process is encouraging students to track their progress over time on specific proficiency scales. In this way, both their current status and their growth can be the subject of celebration.
Classroom instruction and the planning of that instruction should be based on the proficiency scales addressed within a unit. The authors demonstrate that proficiency scales can serve this need regardless of the specific instructional model that a school or district uses. Grading and reporting should also revolve around scores on proficiency scales. The authors illustrate how teachers can translate standards-based student scores into traditional letter grades and percentage scores.
These are only a few of the issues the authors address in A Teacher’s Guide to Standards-Based Learning. Those readers familiar with standards-based education will recognize many topics but will surely find a fresh perspective on each. Those new to standards-based education will receive a clear picture of what it might look at the classroom level and from the perspective of the student.
Introduction
Schools changing instructional and assessment practices to accommodate new standards means many teachers are required to make what they often consider a major transition in their teaching. For many teachers, this transition comes after years of successful teaching in a familiar, comfortable format, with content they know
