What is Standards in Practice (SIP)?
What happens in SIP team meetings?
Where is Standards in Practice Working?
What is Standards in Practice™?
Standards in Practice™ is a standards-based professional development model designed for school personnel and focused on increasing instructional rigor. Rooted in the belief that, if students are to achieve at high levels, the assignments we give them meet those same high levels, Standards in Practice™ engages teachers in the evaluation and ratcheting up of their classroom assignments.
Standards in Practice™ is implemented through professional conversations about the rigor of assignments given to students where teachers help each other with techniques to both strengthen assignments and improve instruction.
Standards in Practice™ also can be tailored for audiences of parents, community, and school boards, to help those involved in education outside the classroom to understand the importance of instructional rigor and how to tell if an assignment meets standards.
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What happens in
Standards in Practice team meetings?
Teachers bring their classroom assignments and student work to the team meeting. Through a six-step process, teachers learn:
whether their assignments are rigorously aligned with standards;
what level of skills and knowledge their students need to demonstrate in order to be proficient; and,
how to improve their assignments and instructional practices so that all students can meet—and exceed these standards.
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Where is Standards in
Practice Working?
SIP is currently working in several states across the country, from Oregon to Maryland.
Data from Cincinnati, OH
Of seven elementary schools in the Cincinnati Public School District honored for exceptional gains in test results, five are SIP schools. An announcement was made in April 2001 based on gains in fourth and sixth grade Ohio Proficiency Tests (OPT). (Governor Taft Honors 7 CPS Schools for Boosting Proficiency Scores, press release 11 April 2001.)
One of the schools, Parham Elementary School, a SIP school, showed spectacular gains in reading and mathematics. In 1998, only 3.2% of Parham sixth-grade students reached the standard in reading, but 25% did so in 2000. In mathematics, no student achieved the standard in 1998, but 14% did so in 2000.
This shows the positive association between student achievement and SIP, as well as the positive relationship for team-based schools. Improvements in test results were more positive for school teams with a complete implementation of SIP and the strongest association between SIP and student achievement occurred at third grade.
Students in schools with neither SIP nor the Team-Based Schools program made the smallest achievement gains.
Standards in Practice™ Program: Evaluation of First-Year Program Results, Cincinnati Public Schools, November 2000
“The SIP model was one of the most effective instructional practices used by many of the teams in K-8 schools that we studied this year. All of the five highly effective teams we studied were using the six-step SIP model; three of these teams had SIP coaches working with them…The least effective teams we observed in the K-8 schools were not using the SIP process successfully.”
Team-Based Schooling in Cincinnati: The Third Year. CPRE, November 2000
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