Student-ready schools.

The influence of early childhood programs on the entire education community cannot be overstated. These programs have highlighted the important role that successful learning experiences at home and experiences in high-quality early childhood programs play in future academic success (Wesley & Buysse, 2003). Yet, many teachers assume that every child has the same or similar experiences prior to beginning school, thus creating a mindset in which students are considered either ready for school or deficient in some critical area of social, emotional, cognitive, or physical development. According to Carol Korn-Bursztyn (2004),

Early childhood education has traditionally privileged the invisible developmental line, the trajectory through time and space that children are assumed to travel. In this vein, optimal development assumes a coherence and continuity between different contexts, especially home and school. Such coherence is viewed as optimal to the well-being of children and especially indispensable to long-term academic achievement. (p. 157)

Many have examined the positive impact that high-quality early childhood programs have on the well-being of a child, as well as the child's ability to fit in and be academically successful in the first years of elementary school (Neuman, 2003; Sharif, Ozuah, & Dinkevich, 2003; Vakil, Freeman, & Swim, 2003). There is little debate about this correlation. While early childhood programs provide valuable experiences that help kids succeed in school, however, schools cannot and should not base their reform efforts on the idea that early childhood programs can homogenize student populations in preparing them for K-12 schools. Our purpose in writing this article is to challenge the framework that bases school reform on a deficit model, which mandates that students be made ready for school. Instead, we would like to propose ways in which schools can be made ready for students and suggest ideas for creating student-ready schools.

Our thinking for this area is grounded in Wendy's work in professional development with a group of high school teachers and Chris's work in science curriculum development in a 5th-grade classroom. Reflecting on the successes and failures of these projects provides insights into why and how teachers and students are excited by the learning process, and into the issues that stifle that excitement.

School Readiness vs. Student Readiness

The success of many early childhood programs in preparing students for school has been incorrectly interpreted and implemented as policy. Instead of focusing on the whole child and the cognitive, social, and emotional development of children, recent policy advocates that preschool and early school programs focus on academic preparation and thus shortchange other aspects of development. The real lesson that ought to be taken from the success of early childhood programs is that children need to be taught based on where they are cognitively, socially, and emotionally when they arrive at school and that their experiences and ideas are uniquely valuable. Children's backgrounds become the foundation for expanding their experiences, instead of dismissed as impoverished and in need of change.

Much of the current focus on improving underperforming schools, specifically in socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities, is framed as an outreach effort to ensure that students come to school "ready for school" (Wesley & Buysse, 2003). Teachers across the United States often report on students' lack of readiness, preparation, and home support as primary causes of poor student performance. In addition, the recent mandates to articulate standards that set high expectations for student performance focus school curricula on external definitions of student success and achievement, with little attention given to students' context, backgrounds, and lives. These standards, as interpreted by the teachers and administrators with whom we have worked, reflect the assumption that all students should start at similar levels of ability and interest and are best served by attaining similar levels and kinds of understandings. These policies ignore the unique abilities, interests, and experiences students bring to the classroom and devalue students whose experiences are outside the norm established by the standards.

In 1991, the Educate America Act defined being "ready for school" in terms of children's: physical and motor development; social and emotional development; approaches toward learning (i.e., creativity, initiative, attitudes toward learning, task mastery); language; cognition; and general knowledge (Kagen, Moore, & Bredekamp, 1995; Love, 2001; Meisels, 1999). The current focus on standards, accountability, and literacy makes a more specific demand for students' academic readiness, including the ability to follow directions, knowledge of the alphabet, and the ability to work independently (Wesley & Buysse, 2003). This switch in focus creates additional challenges for teachers by requiring them to meet more rigidly defined standards for an increasingly diverse body of students. In this context, diversity is considered an obstacle to overcome rather than a resource to embrace.

Teachers

Student-ready teachers need to be curious about students, their lives, their homes, and their ideas. Some of the traditional frameworks for teaching regard students as having naive or poorly developed understandings and identify their prior conceptions as in need of correction. Conversely, student-ready teachers value students as a source of insight into the world, with their own set of valuable experiences that can be used to enrich the learning process. Such a practice does not simply address students' need for high self-esteem, but also recognizes that students' experiences can, as bell hooks (1994) suggests, be positions of power from which to question and revise the canon.

In order to center students' ideas this way, teachers need to create opportunities to get to know their students. They can actively solicit students' ideas and meaningfully connect these ideas to the curriculum. Student-ready teachers devote significant amounts of time in the classroom to identifying students' understandings, ideas, and interests. Thus, assessing students' understandings moves far beyond asking specific questions to determine how well students know teacher-presented information. Instead, this approach investigates how students understand the material and see it as important and relevant to their lives. We are not suggesting that students only learn what is interesting to them, but that our job as teachers is to create learning opportunities that better connect with students' experiences, interests, and readiness as they actually are and not as we wish them to be.

By taking an active interest in who students are and what they bring to the learning community, teachers may help students develop their own voice and ownership in the learning process. The process of teaching is, in part, helping students articulate and share their own experiences. In addition, such a perspective requires that teachers help students see how their voice fits with, and can be included in, the broader discourse of communities. Helping students articulate their own understanding is also about helping students expand their experiences and base of understanding. Therefore, learning in a student-ready school is about personal growth rather than meeting external standards.

Instruction in a student-ready school begins with planning the curriculum and creating the content to be learned with students' goals in mind. Consequently, using this model broadens the definition of success and allows for multiple paths to success. It also allows students and teachers to redirect their learning as part of their education, not as a recourse for academic failure or challenge. The challenge is reframed from students' lack of motivation, achievement, or engagement to students' quest for meaning and understanding from their own questions, curiosities, and values. Ultimately, instruction in a student-ready school works to validate diverse backgrounds and ways of understanding by dismantling a bounded curriculum, prescriptive objectives and learning outcomes, and predictable teacher behaviors.

In a traditional school, assessment practices are predominantly summative and often are used to further stratify, objectify, and track students based on their ability to succeed in school. Conversely, a student-ready school would focus, to a greater extent, on the use of teacher-constructed pre- and formative assessment to build upon what students do know, rather than what they don't. Assessment in such a school is not used to further denigrate the students, teacher, or school, but is instead only one source of information about what students know at any given point in time. In this way, assessment reflects the need to determine how to better guide students in the inquiry process, rather than how to compare them to one another and to the larger national average. It also provides insight into how to structure future lessons and is instrumental in helping teachers plan for their class.

Curriculum in a Student-Ready School

How does a teacher determine what to teach and how to teach? The current movement to base all curriculum decision-making on national and state standards continues to reflect an overly didactic, deductive understanding of the relationship between content knowledge, pedagogical decision-making, and student learning. National standards tend to reflect the complex discourse of each content area community of self-identified "experts." State standards tend to prescribe a more deterministic curriculum framework that can drive state-mandated assessment, overall broad curriculum development, and the distribution of resources from the state to the school level. As administrators' job performances are evaluated on the basis of students' performance on these standardized tests, many administrators are now requiring teachers to base their daily and long-term planning on narrowly defined alignment with the state curriculum framework. This practice leads to overly simplified objectives for student learning and achievement. It also works to the detriment of creating diverse understanding, student-centered learning, and well-integrated cross-disciplinary learning and teaching. According to Teresa, a high school English teacher from Ypsilanti, Michigan,

"I just fill out those lesson plan worksheets for the assistant principal, but I just dummy down my plans so that they get the gist of what I actually do. Nobody actually reads them and I've never gotten any feedback about my plans. So I'm not sure why we are required to do them. But one thing is for sure--in no way do they capture the complexity of what I do on a daily basis in my classroom."

Requiring teachers to strive for narrowly defined and mandated learner outcomes does not capture the ways that reflective practitioners actually work to connect their pedagogical decision-making with the specific needs of their students nor the contexts of their teaching.

From 2001 to 2003, Wendy worked with a group of teachers in a high school. This self-selected group focused on engaging teachers in alternative thinking about their own professional development. The group eventually evolved into a book club that focused on collectively identifying and reading books that address issues they saw emerging in their practice. According to the teachers involved, the primary benefit of their participation was being able to engage in intellectual and nonthreatening discussions about their work with students. They were never told that they had to address any particular areas of their practice, their students' shortcomings, or their curriculum. Instead, teachers based their selection of books and their discussions around rethinking ways to approach such issues as teaching, classroom management, and student diversity.

A student-ready curriculum needs to reflect the complexity of teaching as practiced by effective teachers. A curriculum that reflects students' interests and abilities is driven by students' questions and must be inquiry-based. The teacher is an active member of this community and works to pose authentic, not rhetorical, questions. The teacher continues to guide the investigation and shape the inquiry process based on his or her content knowledge and experience. Students assume an active role in making connections to their own experience. In a student-ready curriculum, the teacher sets broad goals and asks open questions that frame the inquiry, thus providing a structure within which students can investigate their own interests. By establishing broad frameworks for inquiry, the curriculum space is created for students in which to set their own goals--which function as an end in view, as defined by Dewey (1902/1956,1916). A broad framework also allows the opportunity to inquire into the topic in multiple ways and provides opportunities for the teacher to make explicit connections between the discourse of the students and the public discourse of "experts" in the content area.

Denise, a 5th-grade teacher in Plymouth, Michigan, provides her understanding of what a student-ready curriculum looks like:

" ... my whole curriculum and classroom is inquiry based. When asked by the principal to create a garden for the school, I used this as the basis to learn about bulbs, taking care of bulbs, and plants in general. It's not just the content that is inquiry based, but the structure of the class is inquiry driven. Daily, students notice and share issues with classroom and school organization, which I then ask them to find ways to solve. [Deciding] who was going to be responsible for watering the bulbs became a problem. I turned this over to the students who cared about the bulbs and [asked them] how they would look in front of the school. They had to find ways to solve this problem."

During this lesson, students provided insight and direction. Even so, the teacher was an equal member of the community; her direction and insight into the lesson was instrumental in guiding and shaping the lesson so that it reflected the students' ideas and still addressed the broad issues outlined in the standards. In the process of teaching, the teacher shapes the curriculum dynamically to reflect students' interests and understandings. An overly prescriptive curriculum would not allow the teacher to make such essential adaptations.

Faced with decreasing resources and increasing demands on their time, teachers frequently report that they can barely cover the curriculum they are expected to teach. A framework that necessitates "covering curriculum" is highly problematic when working to create student-ready schools. Such a perspective is reflective of a technical view of teaching and a devaluing of teachers' ability to build and sustain instruction that incorporates meaningful learning experiences by using their own understandings and drawing on relationships with their students. It also privileges the experiences of those "experts" who have defined the standards and curriculum for the larger education community, with out the input of the practicing teacher. The teacher needs to be empowered and trusted to make daily and informed pedagogical decisions, but such autonomy is not easily gained when teachers feel compelled to keep pace with external guidelines and benchmarks.

When examining curriculum and trying to make decisions about what to teach, Meg, a 5th-grade teacher in Inkster, Michigan, said in frustration, "Why can't we just tell them what's in an ecosystem?" Meg repeatedly encountered students who did not have the background to complete the prescribed lesson as outlined in the district curriculum. Many of the students had never been outside the city and, when asked, said they had never seen "an ecosystem." Chris was inclined to agree with the students after comparing their experiences to how ecosystems are defined in the state curriculum. In addition, when planning a lesson on circuits, Meg realized that the students hadn't learned about static electricity the year before. Yet, she was expected to teach the content anyway without having the time or resources to address students' understandings. Teaching from a more student-ready perspective requires greater flexibility and planning. Just-in-time teaching (Novak & Patterson, 1998), a method developed for teaching college physics, suggests that teachers need the time to collect and interpret formative assessment and incorporate students' understandings and needs as learners into lessons and planning. Students also need to be provided with more time to reflect on their own learning through metacognitive exercises and discussions, a practice often not found in classrooms driven by externally determined learning goals and objectives.

Creating a Caring Student-Ready Community

It is difficult to imagine a school community that does not regard students as individuals in "the rough," needing to be fixed, corrected, or improved. Such a perspective is deeply ingrained in the fabric of the traditional school's missions and practices. The purpose of school historically has been the reproduction of the social structure and the assimilation of the masses to one version of "the educated" (Kliebard, 1995). This view that the goal of school is predetermined knowledge and concept attainment fails to recognize the importance of creating curriculum that is meaningful and interesting to students and teachers alike, and that is reflective of their lives and experiences.

An administration in a student-ready school envisions the purposes of school from a hopeful perspective of students' abilities, backgrounds, and contributions. Student-ready schools stop seeing students as at-risk and start viewing them as "at-promise" (Swadener & Lubeck, 1995). To effect this change, the administration must encourage teachers to focus on the experiences of their students and listen to teachers' insights when shaping school policy.

Student-ready schools are only possible and sustainable when the school community is based on an inclusive view of the larger community that the school serves. Such schools are also inclusive in their advocacy for all children and use the physical school setting as a place to build bridges between the school and the larger community. They are committed to teaching and learning from an intergenerational framework that values the lives and experiences of every person-from child to adult. Most important, they are deeply focused on facilitating discussion among a representative group from the school community about students' learning experiences and not just their needs, deficits, or challenges.

As teacher educators, we envision our role as challenging a way of thinking about schools and their purpose to better serve the emergent interests of students, and not those anticipated by predetermined standards and benchmarks. Student-ready schools are ever-evolving and emergent places of learning and teaching with a focus on human development to a non-prescribed end. We believe that in beginning to imagine such schools, we are beginning to plan for the schools our children deserve.

References

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Macmillan.

Dewey, J. (1956). The school and society: The child and the curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1902)

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.

Kagan, S. L., Moore, E., & Bredekamp, S. (1995). Reconsidering children's early development and learning: Toward common views and vocabulary. Washington, DC: National Education Goals Panel.

Kliebard, H. M. (1995). The struggle for the American curriculum, 1893-1958 (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Korn-Bursztyn, C. (2004). Run Jane run: Researching early childhood teacher practice frame by frame. In J.

Kincheloe, A. Bursztyn, & S. Steinberg (Eds.), Teaching teachers: Building a quality school of urban education (pp. 157-177). New York: Peter Lang.

Love, J. M. (2001). Instrumentation for state readiness assessment: Issues in measuring children's early development and learning. Paper presented at the Symposium on the State of State Assessments, Atlanta, GA.

Meisels, S.J. (1999). Assessing readiness. In R. C. Pianta & M. J. Cox (Eds.), The transition to kindergarten (pp. 3966). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.

Neuman, S. (2003). From rhetoric to reality: The case for high-quality compensatory pre-kindergarten programs. Phi Delta Kappan, 85(4), 286-291.

Novak, G. M., & Patterson, E. T. (1998, May). Just-in-time teaching: Active learner pedagogy with WWW. Paper presented as the International Conference on Computers and Advanced Technology in Education, Cancun, Mexico.

Sharif, I., Ozuah, P., & Dinkevich, E. (2003). Impact of a brief literacy intervention on urban preschoolers. Early Childhood Education Journal, 30(3), 177-180.

Swadener, B. B., & Lubeck, S. (1995). Children and families "at promise": Deconstructing the discourse of risk. New York: State University of New York Press.

Vakil, S., Freeman, R., & Swim, T. J. (2003). The Reggio Emilia approach and inclusive early childhood programs. Early Childhood Education Journal, 30(3), 187192.

Wesley, P., & Buysse, V. (2003). Making meaning of school readiness in schools and communities. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 18, 351-175.

Christopher J. F. Burke is Assistant Professor, University of Michigan-Dearborn. Wendy M. Burke is Associate Professor, Department of Teacher Education, Eastern Michigan University.