Leadership • Curriculum • Assessment • Environment and Materials • Glossary

Advisory

Advisory is a program where students in small groups meet with the same teacher once each day. The purpose is to assure that a student has at least one adult they can check in with daily and who is aware of their overall progress in school.  

Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment requires students to perform a task that closely mimics what professionals outside of schools would do. Examples may be having students collect data at local sites and collate it to explain how vegetation is changing, generate a hypothesis based on the data, or building a cabinet in woodworking class.  

BPHS

Best Practice High School in Chicago, IL. BPHS was opened in 1996, with the goal of creating an educational opportunity that would be more authentic, collaborative, and challenging for students.  

Climate

The climate at BPHS is defined by the programs that are "used to build community: detracking, daily advisory, inclusion, engaged classrooms, good relationships with parents, and peer mediation." It seems, at BPHS, that much energy is focused on the climate of the school, through the above mentioned programs and that because of that, the energy is positive and reciprocated by the students. The climate is not so much established by the physical aspects of the school as the non-tangible aspects.  

Curriculum

Traditionally defined as the lessons, activities and texts that teachers and students use, BPHS defines curriculum as "all the educational experiences students have in a course, grade level, or school." The theory is that students are taught much more than mere lessons; they are taught both "implicitly and explicitly...values, attitudes, habits of mind" as well as "facts and skills."  

Detracking

BPHS has eliminated the concept of tracking in their school and when planning their classes, simply "left out" the tracks; meaning they did not plan for "regular classes" with an accelerated class and a special education class. Instead, they focused on preparing teachers to differentiate the curriculum for all students' needs and strive for growth from all students.

Formative Assessment

Formative assessments help students self-monitor, self-evaluate, and set goals for future learning. Reflection is a key component of formative assessments.

Grade Level Teams

At BPHS teachers are sorted into teams according to the grade level taught, because at least twice a semester all students and teachers spend several weeks studying a single topic or theme. Teachers must do all of the logistical planning for the thematic units together, and they usually divide up the topics to be covered or addressed among teacher team members.  

Integration

BPHS firmly believes in integrating subject matter. Though there is great effort involved, teachers believe the advantages (building community and better working relationships, authentic questioning and learning, providing for connections between disciplines, the development of research and technology skills within context) far outweigh the disadvantages (time taken away from higher-level math and science due to the difficulty of integrating those subjects and being in a system where students and schools are evaluated by standardized tests because the units take away prep time for those tests).  

Performance Assessment

Usually another term for authentic assessment.  

Portfolio

A portfolio is a collection of a student's work. It can either be a working portfolio, which contains representative pieces to show the progress of the student, or it can be a showcase portfolio, which contains only final projects and is used to showcase the abilities of the student.  

Reflection

Reflection is a process where people not only record what happened, but tell what it means to them as well as what they have learned from it. It can be thought of as holding a mirror up so that you can see the inner meaning of an event.  

Rubric

A rubric is a set of guidelines for assessing the a work, project, or performance. Each guideline, indicative of a characteristic that is necessary and important in the final product, is divided into several levels that range from incomplete or lacking essential features to complete with all essential features.

Teacher Autonomy

The condition that exists when educators have the right and/or power to self-govern.  

Voice

The idea of having a voice in the learning environment in Rethinking High School really just means having a say in what goes on. The importance of both "teacher voice" and "student voice" is stressed when addressing successful educational leadership practices in the construction of teacher-led schools.  

Last maintained 08/23/2003

Jointly created by D. Fincher, B. Garnett, A. Murphy and A. Dowdell