Bethpage Union Free School District in New York is a high-performing district by almost any current accountability measure. Yet administrators and teachers worried that they were not doing enough to prepare their students as critical thinkers for the 21st century. Inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the…

Describes a research project in a third-grade classroom that explored a spontaneous, bottom-up approach to developing and testing performance measures. After establishing project goals for reading and math instruction, the 14 participating teachers worked with University of Colorado researchers to develop summarizing activities, open-ended math…