This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012. This book overturns the typical conception of standards, empowering educators by providing concrete examples of how top-down models of assessment can be embraced and used in ways that are consistent with critical pedagogies. Although standards, as broad frameworks for setting learning targets, are not necessarily problematic, when they are operationalized as high-stakes assessments, test-based pedagogies emerge and frequently dominate the curriculum, leaving little room for critical pedagogies. In addition, critics maintain that high-stakes assessments perpetuate current class structures by maintaining skill gaps and controlling ideology, particularly beliefs in individualism, meritocracy, and what counts as knowledge. This book offers readers a deepened awareness of how educators can alleviate the effects of standardization, especially for students in poor and working-class communities. As teachers negotiate their roles in this time of increasing regulation and standardization, it is essential to maintain and model a critical stance toward curriculum and instruction. Educators know why this approach is vital: This book illustrates how to make it happen.

This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012. This book overturns the typical conception of standards, empowering educators by providing concrete examples of how top-down models of assessment can be embraced and used in ways that are consistent with critical pedagogies. Although standards, as broad frameworks for setting learning targets, are not necessarily problematic, when they are operationalized as high-stakes assessments, test-based pedagogies emerge and frequently dominate the curriculum, leaving little room for critical pedagogies. In addition, critics maintain that high-stakes assessments perpetuate current class structures by maintaining skill gaps and controlling ideology, particularly beliefs in individualism, meritocracy, and what counts as knowledge. This book offers readers a deepened awareness of how educators can alleviate the effects of standardization, especially for students in poor and working-class communities. As teachers negotiate their roles in this time of increasing regulation and standardization, it is essential to maintain and model a critical stance toward curriculum and instruction. Educators know why this approach is vital: This book illustrates how to make it happen.

This book provides no answer key. If you are looking for "one right answer," go elsewhere. Implicit in the current educational reform movement towards standards and standardization is the belief that the work of teachers is quantifiable; that the hours and days of contact time between teachers and students can be reduced to a number that has meaning; in short, that there is one right answer. Making it Real: Case Stories for Secondary Teachers focuses not on the episodic nature of the standardized test but on those "hours and days of contact time" that represent the essence of what teachers do on a daily basis. Within that context, teachers are called upon to make hundreds of decisions each day - decisions which require knowledge and expertise about planning, learner development, content knowledge, student assessment, and ethical practice - among many others. These decisions are not made easily and cannot be quantified because they take place in the complex world of human nature and human activity; where values and priorities conflict and often clash. The teachers, administrators, and students in Making it Real: Case Stories for Secondary Teachers represent the day-to-day situations, relationships, conflicts, and dilemmas that exist in every school. No "formulas" are presented. No "secrets" are revealed. Rather, the authors provide a template for analysis that encourages readers to place themselves in these real life school settings and consider the causes and consequences of their decisions-for themselves, their students, and society as a whole.