Finally, if students are to learn the skill of evaluating their own work, teachers will need the capacity to communicate specific expectations to students and to provide them with explicit and timely feedback. Teachers must become habitual givers and users of feedback. For most teachers, these capacities represent a fundamental shift in the nature of teaching and of schools. Standards for performance are set by individual teachers and differ from classroom to classroom. Teachers plan lessons, review the student work produced, and distinguish with letter grades those who did well and those who did poorly.
Subsequent lessons move on to cover new material in the text or curriculum guide.
In a school committed to high standards for all students, the decision about what to teach next is based on the teacher's knowledge of shared expectations for student performance and her diagnosis of what each student already knows and needs to learn. If the nature of teaching must change to facilitate standards-based reform, so too must the schools in which teachers do their work. It is laughable to suggest that a school community can assure the achievement of agreed-upon standards of performance in organizations where professionals do not have the opportunity and the responsibility to negotiate shared understanding, collaborate on action plans, and analyze the efficacy of their collective efforts. It is naive to think that a school community can effectively target its resources on improved performance without developing norms of rigorous inquiry and the capacity and habit of seeking and using high quality data in instructional and program planning. And it is impossible to imagine that any collection of individual stakeholders can move forward together without ownership and understanding of where they want to go.