Intervention – Directive, building-wide support for students focused on specific academic and social emotional skills/needs.  The effectiveness of the intervention is assessed and adapted based on student academic and social emotional skills/needs.

Collaboration – Teams of professionals engaging in collective-inquiry to analyze student data as a means of examining best practices to improve student achievement.

Deconstructed Standard – Grade and course level expectations that have been broken down into precise statements written in kid friendly terms and contain explanation regarding the learning activities and assessments being used to support the standard.  

Common Formative Assessment – Assessments for learning, which are frequent assessments given by a grade level or content team that informs instruction and gives feedback to students.  Common formative assessments have a consistent expectation for scoring (e.g. agreement among team members of the correct answer for a multiple choice question or a rubric for scoring constructed response/performance events).

Common Summative Assessment- Assessment of learning, which is created commonly at the collaborative team, district, state, or national level and provides feedback regarding the level of content a student learned after instruction of the content is complete. This information is also used to evaluate the overall program effectiveness in teaching a particular GLE or power standard in a given content area.

GLE and CLE – Grade level expectations (GLE) exist in grades K-8 and establish the expectations for student learning in each subject area and in each course. Course level expectations (CLE) exist in grades 9-12 and are written by subject area and course content (e.g. Algebra I or American History). The key is to remember the difference between high school and elementary.

Benchmark (assessment) – Generally, used as a term for the grade level expectations (GLE) exam given at the beginning, middle, and end of the year to students grades 1-6.

Instructional Focus Calendar – Calendar that provides a framework for teaching and assessing identified power standards by grade level or content area.

Strategic Planning Template – A document that mirrors the State of Missouri’s ePeGs (our state data collection system) data entry screens for school improvement planning.

Power Standard – Standards selected from national, state, and local learning standards and objectives for each grade level and subject area that are enduring, leveraged, scaffolding, and assessed.

PLC (Professional Learning Community based on the work of DuFour, DuFour, and Eaker) Educators collaborating for student learning; inquiry based, collaborative; results-oriented; focused on student learning; best practices.