orth American Division is leading a paradigm shift away from textbook driven classrooms and toward standards-based learning. This shift is so much more than looking at report card structures or aligning NAD standards to our classroom lessons. This shift, if done correctly, will change the way we teach our children and track their growth over time.

Evidence of successful standards-based education can be seen in schools throughout the nation that have made the switch as they are now experiencing measurable improvements in academic growth, student attitudes toward learning, and overall school culture.

Many Adventist schools are experiencing this paradigm shift and asking questions such as: Will this work in my small Adventist school? Is this just a fad that will pass? Other Adventist schools have seen the value of the standards-based approach and are asking: How can we implement standards-based methods in our school?  Where do we start?  Effective implementation of a standards-based program first requires a safe, supportive, and collaborative school culture.  A great place to start the work is to get curious about your own school and use data to drive improvements.

The teachers and staff members at Northwest Christian School (NCS) in Puyallup, Washington started their own journey toward mastering standards-based teaching through pursuing Marzano’s High Reliability School (HRS) certification.  In January of 2023, NCS was officially recognized as a certified Marzano Level 1 HRS school.  This achievement, while significant, is only the first step in the school’s institutional goal to become a Marzano Level 3 certified school.

Northwest Christian School is an Adventist school with a total enrollment of 193 students in a PS-8 grade program.  Since embarking on the HRS work in 2021, NCS worked through the 8 essential indicators identified by Marzano’s HRS framework, focusing on safe, supportive, and collaborative school culture.  After a baseline survey study was conducted, NCS was able to rate their effectiveness against the 8 Level 1 indicators rating them as areas of relative strength or areas of growth.  For areas of strength, the school identified the programs, policies, and structures that are already in place and strong.  For areas of growth, the NCS team collaborated, then implemented, strategies to help the school grow and strengthen.

One of the essential structures added by NCS, and certainly the improvement that has made the largest impact, is the integration of school-based Professional Learning Communities.  While collaboration was happening at the school, formal collaboration with specific goals and outcomes was not occurring.  The NCS team adopted the framework offered in DuFour’s book Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. Today the school operates regular PLC meetings with five teams (lower grade, middle grade, upper grade, music, auxiliary staff).  The teams focus their collaborative time on specifically discussing the following four areas of pedagogy: curriculum, instruction, assessment, and student growth tracking.  After just a few short months of doing this, NCS teachers are already experiencing a sense of institutional alignment and sharing a common language for pedagogy that is elevating the discourse of the school.  The PLC teams at NCS produce rich data in the form of written goal setting, student growth tracking, common formative assessment strategies, and more.

As a principal I have loved watching Marzano’s Level 1 HRS competencies take shape at our school.  Focusing on level one work has not produced a perfectly safe, supportive, and collaborative school.  The work has enabled NCS to set specific institutional structures in place, then measure our effectiveness against our own vision and goals, ready to make improvements and adjustments in places where our data indicates attention is needed.  Now that the school is certified HRS Level 1, our work at that level will not stop, but rather serve as a model for continued institutional improvement to annually become more safe, increasingly supportive, and better collaborators.

Craig Mattson

PRINCIPAL