Standards and Assessment

All curricular activities at The Bridge School are aligned with a system of Learning Standards that are adopted by the California Department of Education. Standards describe optimal growth, development and learning for all children across content areas and define strategies for achievement, such as excellent teaching practices and well-designed educational environments.

Standards

Most states have developed learning standards to assist parents, teachers and others in establishing shared goals and expectations for what each student is capable of knowing and doing, for each grade level including preschool. These standards, also called foundations or content standards, are not checklists of everything children MUST know or do at defined points in their educational experience. Instead, they have been developed as a scope and sequence of skills, knowledge, and behaviors that students may well be capable of achieving based on research, reality and common sense. Children learn and develop at different rates, and it is not practical to develop policies and procedures that fit every child at a given age or grade level. As you will see in our lesson plans, our educational teams routinely reference appropriate grade-level content standards or Foundations when developing IEP goals and when designing grade and age-appropriate lesson plans.

Assessment

In order to provide individualized learning experiences, our teachers engage in an ongoing process of observation, documentation and assessment, reflection and planning and implementation of strategies. In this section you will see how student progress is measured and documented on a regular basis. We summarize these observations to provide written progress reports for families and school districts on a trimester basis. Additionally, our preschool students are assessed two times per year using the California Desired Results Developmental Profile Access System (DRDP-Access). Beginning in grade 3 our elementary students participate in the California Department of Education’s CASPP (California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress) testing program once per year.