Campuswide Interventions That Improve Student Achievement

In the last section of the Payne reading, the part that jumped out at me was her idea of creating benchmarks in each subject. These are general guidlines that set up units throughout a semester or a year and allow each department to have common goals to reach at certain times. This breaks up a year into more manageable pieces so thatteachers can evaluate how their students are doing earlier on than by one final test at the end of the year before its too late to do anything. Benchmarks usually show the natural progression of skills and lead to a final accumulative assessment of each section that the class has achieved.
This was another idea that I picked out because of my own experience with it. My high school was very openly structured by these kinds of benchmarks and when I was a tutor and a peer mentor, I was involved in the creation of some of these benchmarks which would usually be labeled by certain novels or literary time periods. This was a really good way to create units that the kids to look foward to as they were given them all on the syllabus at the beginning of the year. I really agree with Payne's explanation of this technique and think it's a really effective way to break up a subject.