Best practice for teaching focuses on scaffolding instruction so our students can reach mastery; why are we ignoring best practice when it comes to our teachers and not scaffolding this shift to SBE?

In March 2010, the Federal Way School Board adopted policy 2000, which charged the superintendent to implement a standards-based instruction, assessment and reporting system at all schools throughout the district. The board determined that standards-based learning, through the establishment of challenging and appropriate learning targets in every course at each grade level, is the best approach to prepare our students with content knowledge mastery and 21st century skills. Moreover, rather than ignoring best practices, we are embracing them through the adoption of standards-based education. Our teachers have been working with standards and revising their practices for the past 10 years. And with the launch of SBE in the fall of 2011, our school district continues to strengthen its role as an innovator in our state.

Because this is an extremely time-intensive activity (including changing course syllabi, writing parent and student explanations of grading procedures, setting up grade books, etc.), is the district providing sufficient paid time that is exclusively to be used for these tasks to implement the board policy before the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year? Has there been an "official" estimate as to how long it will take teachers to prepare for the change, based on the number of preps each teacher teaches?

Power standards are not new to FWPS, and we did not create them. In reality, these are the same standards that teachers have been using for the past two to eight years, depending on when the state revised the specific standards. While it is understandable that teachers will need to align their instruction more closely to the power standards -perhaps through curriculum mapping in August — we hope most teachers are familiar with these as they are the standards they’ve been teaching previously.

Yes, the district has already established the technology infrastructure for the work. We will recalibrate our current professional development structure to provide support for staff implementation needs.

We have already condensed the power standards. For example, fourth grade science currently has more than 47 standards. In the new system, the same course will have only 10 power standards.

Many CTE teachers have received feedback on their power standards. In addition, teachers have received one-on-one support from Marie Verhaar. Any CTE teacher who would like feedback on their power standards should email them to Nancy Hawkins and Marie. CTE teachers had another opportunity to work on their power standards and learning targets on March 18 at Truman.