CORNERSTONES FOR STUDENT SUCCESS

Oregon Department of Educaton

The five cornerstones for student success are foundational elements in Oregon education and the Certificates of Initial and Advanced Mastery. The first four cornerstones focus on learning and the optimal conditions that enable learners to succeed. The fifth cornerstone focuses on teaching and the pivotal role teachers play in fostering each student's success.

1. Personalized, Active and Meaningful Learning
2. High Academic Expectations
3. Learning for Understanding and Application
4. Learning Beyond the Classroom
5. Student-Centered, Standards-Based Teaching

Cornerstone Supports

The five cornerstones are supported and reinforced by a student-centered school climate, flexible and innovative structures, ongoing professional development, and broad-based partnerships among school, home, community and the worplace.

1. Personalized, Active and Meaningful Learning

The first cornerstone is about honoring the distinctive qualities of each individual student. Personalized education embraces the whole student and his or her unique academic, personal, and career-related development. It accommodates individual differences in learning rate, level, style, and cultural background. It engages each student's imagination and builds upon individual strengths, interests, and goals. It enables the student to make connections between learning and his or her future aspirations. Personalized education fosters self-direction and self-investment in learning.

2. High Academic Expectations

The second cornerstone expresses Oregon's commitment to helping each and every student achieve rigorous academic standards. While the first cornerstone expresses the importance of honoring each student's individual qualities, the second stands for what all learners hold in common. It is based on the belief that all students can learn, and that all learners must develop core understandings and skills to lead full and meaningful adult lives in our increasingly complex and culturally diverse society.

In standards-based schools, all students--including those with disabilities, with limited or no proficiency in English, and with special academic talents and gifts--receive instruction that builds on what they know and challenges them appropriately and fully. Our high academic expectations embody the fundamental values of excellence, access, and equity.

3. Learning for Understanding and Application

Understanding and application go hand in hand--that's why they're joined together in the third cornerstone. Understanding refers to a deep grasp of essential ideas, distinct from a shallow acquaintance with a broad range of topics. Students achieve understanding by developing and exploring connections between new and familiar ideas and between one idea and another.

Application means putting one's understanding to use, and in the process deepening, expanding, and refining it. Learning for application engages the learner in the active construction of knowledge. Through purposeful application, students solve problems, make decisions, create products, communicate meaning, and do work that has value to themselves as well as to others.

4. Learning Beyond the Classroom

The fourth cornerstone emphasizes the value of extending learning beyond the classroom to the larger world outside school. Student learning opportunities can encompass the immediate community, or --using 21st century technologies--the entire globe. Whether in the community, workplace settings, or school-based activities, learning beyond the classroom allows students to engage in authentic learning experiences that bring greater relevance to classroom studies. This can be a powerful motivator for students and is indispensable in fostering the kind of personalized, rigorous, and applied learning referred to in previous cornerstones.

Learning beyond the classroom can inspire students to think about their futures, and help prepare them for academic success and for life as fully contributing members of society. With the guidance of capable, caring adult mentors, learn about the changing nature of work, how their interests and aims fit with different career paths, and discover what kinds of educational preparation are required to pursue various paths.

Learning can take place anywhere, anytime, especially with the aid of today's technologies. Technology can be integrated throughout the curriculum and can facilitate access to information, open pathways to communication, and enhance students' connections with the adult world. It can help the classroom become a gateway to educational resources in the community, across the nation, and around the globe.

5. Student-Centered, Standards-Based Teaching

Teachers play a singularly important role in fostering each student's learning. The fifth cornerstone emphasizes a core tenet of effective teaching--that instruction is most likely to promote student achievement if it is tailored to individual student needs, interests, and differences, while continually pursuing rigorous standards and guiding each student to perform at his or her highest level.

The fifth cornerstone reminds us that educational standards and statewide assessments are in place to help teachers focus their instruction on core learning goals, not to direct the instructional methods teachers use. In a school where learning is personalized, active, and meaningful, instruction is marked by flexibility, relying on teachers' innovative thinking and professional judgment. As classroom instruction and assessment become increasingly student-centered and community-connected, teachers' approaches and methods become more varied and adaptive to accommodate each student's readiness, interests, and needs, as well as the broader community's resources and values. In this kind of a learning environment, teachers make informed decisions by integrating knowledge of educational standards with a continual stream of data on each student's progress and needs.

Cornerstone Supports

The five cornerstones are supported and reinforced by a student-centered school climate, flexible and innovative structures, ongoing professional development, and broad-based partnerships among school, home, community and the workplace.

Student-centered school climate refers to the quality of the school environment as a place to learn and work. A student-centered climate is one that welcomes and affirms students and gives them a sense of belonging. It is an environment in which students feel confident that their contributions--be they personal, academic, artistic, or athletic--are valued. It is a climate that reinforces norms of mutual respect, responsibility, civility, compassion, fairness, and non-violence. As such, it is just as healthy a climate for staff, parents, and other participants in the life of the school as it is for students.

Flexible and innovative structures refer to adaptive ways in which time, space, people, and curricula are organized to support educational goals. School and classroom schedules, for example, may be organized to allow time for students to meet an advisor or mentor or to learn in a community-based setting, or for teachers to share a common preparation period. Other examples of structures might include the organization of staff into departmental work units or small learning communities, or the grouping of curricula by subject, integrated disciplines, or broad themes. Although there is no single best set of organizational structures, whatever structures a school establishes need to be flexible and fluid enough to respond to individual student needs, progress, and performance.

Ongoing professional development is another link in the chain of supporting conditions. When the cornerstones are a priority, schools schedule time and organize collegial work to foster onging professional development aimed at maximizing student learning. In such an environment, educators pursue multiple opportunities to develop, apply, and refine new understandings and skills. They receive credible feedback on their professional practice, working and learning side-by-side with colleagues. They engage in inquiry and reflection on the differences they are making with and for students. In this context, professional development goes beyond individual training events to include intensive and sustained adult learning programs. Forms of collegial learning, such as action research, study groups, peer coaching and mentoring, and curriculum improvement teams, help to make professional development an integral part of the school's culture.

Broad-based partnerships that promote active communication, collaboration, and coordination among students and parents/guardians, employers, community members, health and social services providers, preschool professionals, and post secondary educational institutions are key to student success. Through partnerships, a network of care is created to help each student navigate successfully from pre-kindergarten through high school and from high school into continuing educaton, work, and adult responsibilities.

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