Iowa Teaching Standards-- Revised?

I am working on a recommending committee charged with looking at the 8 Iowa Teaching Standards to determine if they need revision after a decade of use.  The question was posed, "Have we learned anything in the last decade that needs to be reflected in the standards?"  I think we have.

 When the Teaching Standards came out in 2001, I was electrified!  How had we ever worked without them!?!  They brought a clarity to my practice and opened my thinking about the characteristics of effective teachers. I worked for 10 years with the BEST program for Beginning Educators in Des Moines after working on the pilot program in 1999.  During that time I read 300 - 400 first year teacher's portfolios and watched them evolve as the teacher preparation programs developed using the standards.  In the past year and a half as a teacher evaluator, I've discovered new dimensions to the standards as I see how they affect our evaluation process.  In the past few years I find myself bumping up against the standards because we have grown beyond their current scope.

Where are the anchor standards for collaboration, teacher leadership, learner differences, and the teacher's ability to apply their content knowledge?  If  you look hard enough, they are in there... but they are not the focus.  A teacher could teach in the traditional style, in total isolation, with no more strategies than those commonly used in one-room schoolhouses, and meet all 8 teaching standards.

Why are our only options when evaluating teachers "meets" or "does not meet"?  What if a teacher is merely adequate in one area but truly exceptional in another?  What's the old saying?  "Only the mediocre are always at their best."  How do the Standards guide our professional development and refinement of our practice?

Someone on the recommending committee reminded everyone of the amount of work that went into the current teaching standards.  The speaker remarked that the Teaching Standards are deeply embedded in our system.  He asked, "Is the benefit that we would expect from revising or updating the standards worth the cost in time, money, and training it would take to make the switch?"  That is a wonderful question.  I guess the answer would depend on how we revised the standards.

If we reflected on what we have learned over the last ten years and we shift our thinking from the characteristics of effective teachers to the characteristics of teacher effectiveness, then ABSOLUTELY revising the standards are worth the effort.