CES School Benchmarks Glossary
| Advisory Advisories create personalized relationships between an adult and a small group of students. While there are many different structures and goals of advisories, the main purpose is always to make sure that students have a consistent sense of connection within the school to bolster their academic achievement and personal growth. |
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| Benchmarking The process by which a school or individual rates his/her practice on a rubric, and then uses those ratings to create a plan for improvement.
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| Budget autonomy The extent to which a school has control over the use of its budget, rather than having that budget controlled by the district or other central administration.
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| Critical Friends Group A CFG is a professional learning community consisting of a small group of educators who come together voluntarily at least once a month for about two hours. Group members are committed to improving their practice through collaborative learning.
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| Dual-certified Teachers who are certified by their state licensing authority to teach in more than one discipline. |
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| Equity The assurance that all students have the support and resources they needs in order to succeed in school and be prepared for post-secondary success. |
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| Honors, AP, and IB Types of advanced classes. AP refers to Advanced Placement classes, in which student can receive college credit for scoring high on an end-of year exam. IB refers to International Baccalaureate, a curriculum for elementary, middle, and high school levels that is used in schools in many countries. |
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| Houses A type of small learning community, houses divide students in a large school into groups of several hundred. Students take some or all courses with their house members and from their house teachers. House arrangements may be year-long or multi-year arrangements. Each house usually has its own discipline plan, social activities and student government. |
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| Individualized learning plans Also referred to as Personal Learning Plans, individualized learning plans are student-specific programs or educational strategies that take into consideration students’ strengths, weaknesses, interests, and goals. The ILP presumes that the needs of individual students are different, and thus, must be differently addressed. |
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| Learning standards A term used to describe standards applied to education content. They often take the form of guidelines by grade or level detailing what students should know and be able to do; learning standards may also describe level learning objectives.
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| Looking at Student or Teacher Work (LASW or LATW) protocols A protocol is a tool to aid conversations in reaching deeper meaning. These protocols are designed to focus on student or teacher work to further equity for students, teachers, and schools.
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| Looping The practice of grouping the same teacher(s) and students for multiple years. |
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| Portfolio Collections of students' work over time. Portfolios often document a student's best work and may include other types of process information, such as drafts of the work, the student's self-assessment of the work, and the teachers, peers, and/or parents' assessment. Portfolios may be used to evaluate students’ abilities and improvement. |
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| Protocols Tools designed to aid conversations in reaching deeper meaning. |
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| Real-world Descriptive term for work that is grounded in knowledge, concepts, and perspectives of academic, professional, or applied technical disciplines. Real-word school work is directed to understanding issues, problems, or questions of significance beyond classrooms and schools. |
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| Rigorous Serious, meaningful, and challenging intellectual work. |
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| Safety language Guidelines developed by a school in order to intentionally create an environment, from personal, historical, and current perspectives, of respect, tolerance, and acceptance to engage in discussions of diversity, culture, and difference. These guidelines help students and staff engage in difficult discussions. Example from Fenway High School. |
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| School Site Council School site councils provide parents, teachers and other school employees with a voice in curriculum and other school site issues. The School Site Council works with a school’s administration to develop, review, evaluate and allocate funds for state-allocated school improvement programs. Council members also act as liaisons and representatives to district-wide committees. |
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| Service-learning Service-learning is a method of teaching, learning and reflecting that combines academic classroom curriculum with meaningful service throughout the community. As a teaching methodology, it falls under the philosophy of experiential education. More specifically, it integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, encourage lifelong civic engagement, and strengthen communities for the common good. |
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| Small Learning Communities A form of school structure that subdivides large school populations into smaller, autonomous [???} groups of students and teachers. The primary purpose of restructuring secondary schools into SLCs is to create a more personalized learning environment to better meet the needs of students. Each community will often share the same teachers and student members from grade to grade. |
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| Valid and reliable These descriptors refer to whether something measured is (1) valid: measuring what it was designed to measure and (2) reliable: that the measure is consistent, that is, a similar score would occur on repeated measurements. |
