Robert Marzano Suggests Three Commitments to Students

From the Marshall Memo #426

In this District Administration article, Alan Dessoff reports on the three critical commitments that author/researcher Robert Marzano believes administrators must make:

• Developing a system of individual student feedback – This means identifying specific learning and behavioral goals for individual students, developing a common scale or rubric for each goal, and assessing each student’s progress toward each goal at least every two weeks. Ideally students know their goals and continuously monitor their own progress.

• Ensuring effective teaching in every classroom – This means evaluating teachers and principals based on “how they make changes in classroom practices directly related to student achievement,” says Marzano. Ideally teachers focus on two or three strategies or skills they want to improve each year and administrators give them thoughtful feedback on how they are doing. This is different from the checklist approach to classroom supervision, which Marzano says is “a game.”

• Building students’ background knowledge – What students know about the world varies widely depending on family background, travel, and other experiences, says Marzano. To level the playing field, he believes schools should identify 30 math, language arts, science, and social studies words or terms for each grade K-8 and systematically teach them. 

“Robert J. Marzano Says It Starts with Students and Teachers in Classrooms” by Alan Dessoff in District Administration, March 2012 (Vol. 48, #3, p. 78-84),