Proficiency 101: Linking to Learning That Matters
In Oregon’s capital city, ninth grade teachers turn to student proficiencies as a way to drive coherent and relevant instruction.
SALEM, Oregon— What should students know and be able to do? That question loomed large as two dozen South Salem High School teachers gathered for an eight-hour professional development session the day before Thanksgiving. On a day when most people were thinking about food and family, this group was shaping a menu of student “proficiencies” or broad learning goals to guide both student and teacher work.
“We need to move away from memorization toward more meaningful concepts and connections between what students are studying and the real world,” Assistant Principal Lillian White told the gathering. White and her leadership team had already completed a training, facilitated by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL), that helped them understand and identify proficiencies. Now it was time to bring ninth grade teachers—who are organized into a separate “freshman academy” with 470 students—into the discussion.
Grouped by content areas, the teachers built on the leadership team’s list of what they want their freshman students to know and be able to do, tying them to state and district standards and to the academy theme of “in pursuit of excellence.” They jotted their ideas down on “sticky” notes, which soon filled the conference room wall. The math teachers, for example, wanted students to be able to demonstrate effective problem solving. Language arts instructors’ priorities included systematic vocabulary development, the ability to communicate clearly in writing, and critical listening skills. Some of the “knows” and “dos” cut across content areas: demonstrating effective teamwork; understanding the link between postsecondary careers and education; and setting goals.
Working across disciplines, the teachers then set about organizing the sea of yellow notes, clustering them into categories to form a proficiency map. In the end there were six proficiencies everyone considered key to freshmen’s success: self-understanding and interpersonal relationships; workforce expectations; critical thinking and analysis; math, science, and technology skills; communications and literacy; and organizational/study skills.
Guiding questions
“It’s much easier for teachers to move from concrete elements—like learning notetaking techniques—to more abstract proficiencies, such as having the ability to organize one’s learning,” observes Diana Oxley, a NWREL researcher who has helped high schools around the country fine-tune their own proficiency maps. To develop proficiencies that are high-impact and connected to the knowledge and skills that students will need after high school, Oxley advises school teams to look for proficiencies that:
- Provide a focus to learning activities
- Help students see meaningful connections across all subjects
- Convey a clear, compelling purpose to students, teachers, and parents
- Provide a rigorous learning experience for students at all levels of academic achievement
- Address the areas of highest need for students as defined by data on student achievement
For a proficiency to be dynamic, challenging, and relevant to students, the answer to each of these questions needs to be an emphatic “yes.” The next set of questions that teachers must tackle—usually in inter-disciplinary teams—is: How does our instruction support these proficiencies? How do our students demonstrate their mastery of the proficiencies in meaningful, public ways? And, how do we assess the work, using standards that are consistent with postsecondary and workplace requirements?
“The proficiencies give everyone a focus: They help teachers identify the content that needs the greatest attention and depth,” says Oxley. “Some teachers will have more responsibility for some goals than others, but everyone—regardless of their certification—orients their instruction around them to some degree.”
Collaborative curriculum
Promoting instructional coherence and teacher collaboration poses a particular challenge for high schools, where teachers typically specialize in one content area and the curriculum is made up of many discrete courses. But, Oxley says, “Research indicates that substantive learning occurs when students have opportunities to engage material across multiple contexts and across time. When learning is linked in this way, students are able to extend and deepen existing knowledge and adjust and refine their understandings.” Students are also more likely to retain and transfer the information and be more self-directed and motivated.
Two months after the professional development session, a visit to South Salem High finds the freshman academy faculty working together to integrate their coursework and align it to the proficiencies. Teams made up of a social studies, English, and science teacher meet once a week to plan complementary lessons for the 90 students they share in common. In Kim Miller’s literature class, students watch a teleplay of Romeo and Juliet and debate Juliet’s feelings about marriage. Next door, in Bess Waxenfelter’s room, the World History lesson revolves around family lineage and how intermarriages consolidated power—and DNA—among Europe’s royal families during Elizabethan times. Jon Ballantyne’s biology class offers another perspective on the subject through the study of genetics. At the end of the semester, students will write a five-paragraph essay in English, deliver a speech in World History, and perform a scientific experiment. Through those assignments they’ll show they’ve become proficient in interpersonal relationships, communications and literacy, critical thinking, and science skills.
The three teachers are planning an even more ambitious unit on World War II for the second semester. Kim Miller says identifying student proficiencies has had a direct impact on her practice and that of her colleagues. “[The proficiencies] are in the forefront,” she says, “so as we develop curriculum, we’re tailoring our instruction. We make sure we verbally identify the proficiencies to our students, articulating that this [lesson] has a purpose and relevance. This is a skill we want you to be able to do.”
The right start
Teacher teaming is just one of South Salem’s strategies to reduce the freshman failure rate and help students ease their way into high school. The freshman academy is organized into three small learning communities or houses. Fourteen-year-old Erin says that means she doesn’t get to see all her friends, but she has better relationships with her teachers. “It’s a big transition into high school and [the academy] is a reminder to focus on my classes.” Her friend Sam adds, “You’re stuck the whole year with people you’re going to have to learn to like. It’s teaching us how to socialize on a smaller scale ...and it’s like being sheltered.”
Erin and Sam and their classmates face clear expectations that they’ll be on time and be prepared for classes. Also, they know that their school has a “zero tolerance for zero effort” policy, which is tied to an early intervention program for students at risk of failing. “We just sent out about 50 letters to parents whose students were failing three or more core classes, and we’re going to set up meetings to see if there’s anything we can do in the last four weeks of the semester to help them,” says Assistant Principal White. White herself will lead a four-hour Saturday session where students can get help making up assignments and redoing work that earned low marks.
Since instituting the freshman academy, White says South Salem has cut the freshman failure rate almost in half. There’s also been a dramatic drop in the number of students referred for disciplinary issues. This year there are about a dozen incidents a month when students are sent out of class for insubordinate behavior; previously, the number totaled more than 200 per month.
“The freshman academy is working,” says Greg Whatley, who teaches ninth grade Integrated Physical Science and upper-level chemistry. “It gives a group of people a cohort to work with and a way to develop friendships and esprit d’corps.” Whatley joined the South Salem faculty after a two-decade career as a pharmacist. That real world experience has made him a firm believer in helping students become proficient in critical thinking. “Being a pharmacist I encountered a lot of people who would come into my store and say, ‘I saw this on TV and I want it,’” Whatley comments. “The most important thing I can teach my students is if someone tells you something, you need to ask, ‘Where’s your evidence?’”
Next steps
All the little sticky notes generated in that pre-Thanksgiving meeting have been turned into a professional looking proficiency map. Now it’s time for White and her ninth grade faculty to take the next step—“shopping” the map around to upper-level teachers, parents, students, community members, and even the staff of South Salem’s feeder schools.
No matter how the proficiencies might ultimately change, White sees them as building blocks that will help freshmen construct a firm foundation for the rest of their high school career and beyond. “You learn what you need to learn as a freshman because it relates to what you do as a senior, because it relates to what you do in life,” she says. “So much of what kids believe as freshmen is that ‘what I do now doesn’t really matter, it’s not going to affect me later on.’ Doing proficiency mapping helps kids understand ‘I’ve got this block built, I have this brick in my bag of tricks. As a senior I’ll know this, because of what I’ve learned in freshman academy and it should prepare me for any choices I make after I graduate.’” 
NWREL Offers Guidance on Proficiencies
When South Salem High School launched its proficiency mapping, teachers and school leaders got some expert help from NWREL trainer and coach Katie Luers. As part of the Recreating Secondary Schools program, Luers and her colleagues help large high schools from Maui to Miami transform into more effective smaller learning communities. For more on their work—including workshops and coaching—see www.nwrel.org/edservices/catalog/12
Luers talked to Northwest Education about developing and implementing student proficiencies and instructional coherence.
NW Ed: How does articulating proficiencies benefit schools?
Luers: Schools with more instructional coherence are able to increase student achievement, as long as they have three pieces in place: an instructional framework that helps them come together around what they’re teaching and why they’re teaching it; working conditions for the staff that help them support that framework—like common planning time; and allocation of resources. The proficiencies are part of that instructional framework that helps people align their teaching, their assessment, and their curriculum to what’s really important.
NW Ed: What are some common stumbling blocks to doing that?
Luers: High schools often aren’t really set up to have staff work together across departments very well. It becomes difficult for people to align their curriculum because they may have a pacing guide in science that isn’t aligned with the one in history and it makes it somewhat difficult to work together in an authentic way. That’s not to say that a school can’t come to agreement on what kinds of proficiencies they can work toward in a parallel way. But when we’re thinking about students spending a lot of time to demonstrate mastery of a proficiency, it needs to happen in some kind of inter-disciplinary format.
NW Ed: In South Salem, freshman academy teachers set the proficiencies. Now, do they have to get buy-in from the rest of the school?
Luers: It’s important to make sure that the instructional framework goes from ninth through 12th grades. You can’t have one framework for freshmen and a different one for seniors. It needs to evolve at each grade level. When you think of ninth-graders being excellent communicators and demonstrating their mastery, that may look different from how seniors demonstrate mastery—and, in fact, it needs to look different. That’s where rigor comes in. If you’re saying they’ll do an oral presentation freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years and you haven’t changed the expectations at each level, then you’re not supporting that student’s growth. Also, everybody in the school community—not just the upper-level teachers, but the parents and the students and community members—needs to be on board with the priorities too. They need to agree this is important for students to know and be able to do to be successful out here in the world.
NW Ed: What does NWREL do to support schools in developing proficiencies and program coherence?
Luers: Our approach is to develop leadership capacity around doing this. So, when we work with schools, we typically do some training of trainers. We get a leadership team, go through the training with them, and we help them take on a leadership role. When it’s time to roll out the training to the staff, we support them in doing that and we may do follow-up coaching after that to help them in the implementation phase. Our goal is to have schools able to lead this work themselves because there are so many steps to it—it’s not just do it once and you’re done. It needs to go through a lot of stakeholder groups and a lot of revisions to make sure it really works for your students, for your community.