Our Story of High-Quality Student Work

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At Leaders we have always emphasized high-quality work and particularly rigorous, authentic final products, but in the past teachers have struggled with the competing priorities of preparing students for standardized tests and challenging them with more complex tasks that ask them to demonstrate higher-order thinking and consider multiple perspectives. PBATs have allowed teachers to raise the bar across grades and content areas and even more fully integrate EL Education's Core Practices in their long-term planning and daily instruction. 

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Literacy skills are developed and refined in every content area, and students learn to investigate and present their ideas about literature, historical events, scientific experiments, and mathematical application.

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And now all students at Leaders - regardless of their home language, family income, race/ethnicity, zip code, or learning disability - complete the same, high quality, final PBAT in every class every semester. 

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This​ has resulted in students producing complex, evidence-based work that connects to the big concepts in each discipline and requires the transference of understanding to new contexts, such as when our ninth grade history classes explore the impact of technology, disease, and agriculture on the development of civilizations by exploring the question, "Why do some have so much while others have so little?" Students create work that is accurate and beautiful, and continually refine their PBATs through feedback protocols with their peers and teachers, creating multiple drafts that demonstrate their deepening understanding and evolving perspectives. And their work is authentic, connected to real-world issues with a real-world audience, like when eleventh graders seek out and invite New York City area college professors to serve as their evaluators on their chemistry Mastery Passage presentations.

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