AVANT ADVANCE: BRINGING THE STANDARDS TO LIFE

Art Fry was so frustrated, he almost said a bad word in church. Every time he opened his hymnal, his bookmarks fluttered to the floor. Then he remembered that one of his colleagues at 3M had recently concocted a strange glue that wasn’t very sticky. He applied some of it to scraps of paper and, lo and behold, his bookmarks stayed in place. When 3M secretaries got ahold of the little papers, they started sticking them on memos, folders, and cubicle walls. Today, 3M sells about 50 billion Post-Its each year. Avant VP for Education and Assessment Kyle Ennis wasn’t in church when his “Aha!” moment came. He was in New Jersey. “Supervisors there were telling me that teachers moonlighting as STAMP raters were doing amazing things in the classroom. They thought we must be giving them methodology workshops or something. In reality, they just went through RaterConnection, our online rater training and certification system and began scoring student responses with detailed criteria.” He remembered how developing and implementing standards-based assessments as a Japanese teacher in the 1990s had transformed his classroom. He had heard others say that OPI Training had changed them as teachers. Perhaps, thought Ennis, the process that creates accurate raters can create great teachers. Read More