Our vision of equitable, student-centered learning largely comes to life through the specific student-centered teaching practices that educators use each day.
In Minnesota, the teaching practices that all new teachers must learn are called the Teacher Standards of Effective Practice (which are defined formally in Minnesota Rules 8710.2000). These standards were recently fully re-written, in a process that ran from 2019 to 2023.
Education Evolving was deeply involved in this process, working in partnership with our community of educators. Together we advocated for the standards to ask teachers to:
- Emphasize personalization, differentiation, and addressing unique student needs
- Design rigorous, hands-on learning that develops critical thinking, problem solving and other critical skills for the future
- Develop skills to reflect on race, privilege, and bias—and take action based on those reflections
- Adapt learning to students’ specific interests and identities—so that learning is relevant and engaging
- Develop deep, authentic family and community partnerships
- Support overall student wellness, especially for students with special needs
- Go beyond collaboration and emphasize true teacher leadership
The new standards have now been signed into rule, with major positive changes made in all of these areas. An archive of the blog posts we published throughout this teaching standards rewrite process are shown below.
