One Subject at a Time
At Norview High School in Norfolk, Va., teachers used their academic departments to map out higher standards for teaching and learning. The result: Soaring scores.
As teenagers stream out the double doors of Norview High School into a frigid winter afternoon, four history teachers gather in a quiet upstairs classroom. They are not there to discuss their students, but to take a cold-eyed look at their own performance.
They’re evaluating how well they’ve taught a unit on the Industrial Revolution, and the computer printouts they’re holding will guide them. A graph with jagged, multicolored lines shows the students’ average scores on the unit test over the last six years. Additional graphs show how well each teacher’s students scored.
Some of these sessions offer reason for satisfied smiles. But not this day’s numbers. Only 37 percent of the students passed the unit test in 2004, an all-time low, prompting sober reflection among the three U.S. history teachers...
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