Relearning by Design helps educators build schools around the student's needs as a learner. We provide consultations, in-service workshops, professional development seminars and national conferences to improve the ways that educational goals and means are organized and assessed. We also provide a variety of printed materials, publications, videotapes, audiotapes, and software on student assessment and curriculum design. Relearning by Design is headed by Holly Houston and is based in Ewing, New Jersey.

Most importantly, we help educators keep alive the difficult questions at the heart of education:

  • How do we set high standards while also setting fair and reasonable expectations?
  • How do we know that what gets an "A" in our schools is judged to be quality work in the best schools?
  • If 'you are what you assess', why do we so often test only what is easy to test, not what goes to the heart of our aims?
  • Is student boredom inevitable or is it a sign that our curriculum is not authentic and ineffective?
  • If feedback is central to learning, why do schools so rarely survey students, parents, alumni, and our institutional clients as to what does and does not work?
 
A vision statement is one thing; policies that make it real and lead to the changes in bureaucratic traditions are quite another. At Relearning by Design we ask educators to judge the gap between their intent and their effect, and we help them design systems that make it likely that the gap is examined and closed.

Our Approach

Local Excellence Based on Standards, Not Standardization

Relearning by Design believes that curriculum and assessment must be based on rigorous standards. Yet, we also know that schools, teachers, and students are - and should be - different from each other: all school reform is local. Our aim is to enable them to institutionalize high standards without resorting to mere standardization. We help our clients to integrate six types of standards into their curricula and assessments:

Exit Standards and Standards for Lifelong Learning

What should be the result of a student's academic career? Exit standards and standards for lifelong learning include the critical knowledge and know-how that students need for a lifetime of productive citizenship. This includes such things as reasoning and problem-solving skills, the ability to perceive issues and circumstances from diverse viewpoints, and the ability to use different kinds of information to communicate with a variety of audiences. We want to know if students can identify the benefits and consequences of decisions and actions. Do they work with team members from diverse backgrounds to accomplish group goals? Can they plan and execute projects, develop compelling arguments, or draw conclusions from different kinds of data? These are the kinds of competencies we believe assessment systems should measure and improve.

Content Standards

What is worth knowing? What should students know and be able to do in the various subject areas that make up the curriculum? For the past several years the education community has focused on developing content standards. Similarly, Relearning by Design helps schools design their curriculum units and assessment tasks around the essential questions, enduring themes, and big ideas at the heart of the various disciplines. However, while content standards are important in defining the core curriculum, they are not sufficient by themselves to obtain high levels of student achievement. Authentic assessment tasks and accompanying performance standards are also needed.

Work & Assessment Design Standards

What really counts as worthy work? As genuine evidence of mastery? The combination of content and performance standards is not enough to ensure high levels of student achievement. This is because the rigor of assessment tasks and scoring procedures are often insufficient and inconsistent if not carefully designed. To avoid this pitfall, Relearning by Design provides validated criteria for the design and use of curriculum and assessments.

Authentic assessment indicates whether students have truly achieved the meeting of standards in a variety of realistic contexts - such as those found in the adult world of work. Unlike standardized tests, authentic assessment is not an audit of performance. It is designed to improve performance through educative tasks and feedback.

Performance Standards

How good is good enough? This question is answered by performance standards, which indicate how well the content and exit standards must be mastered by students in the execution of an authentic task. Performance standards are determined by using exemplars of excellent student work (known as anchors), along with scoring rubrics. While national subject area associations, state departments of education, and local school districts have emphasized content standards, few organizations other than Relearning by Design have taken the lead in linking them to performance standards.

Teaching Standards

What does all this mean to the teacher as a member of a profession? The complex nature of instruction, learning and assessment does not happen in theory; it happens in practice. It is not sufficient for teachers to know about different practices; they must also know how to implement them. Relearning by Design emphasizes teaching standards that focus on the best practices, methods, and perspectives which result in high levels of student performance. We teach district administrators, school leaders, and classroom faculty how to make schools data-driven, not habit-driven, thereby making them more accountable.

 

 

 

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