Bristol Township's Story

Bristol Township School District (Levittown, Pennsylvania)

Bristol Township School District serves approximately 6,300 students in Levittown, Pennsylvania. The district vision for student learning is focused on building creativity and a “maker mindset” through student-centered and personalized learning. District leaders shared their belief that a “Maker Space is not a physical space but, rather, a mindset, an educational philosophy that puts learning in the hands of students, cultivating a culture where students are creators of their learning outcomes and thereby empowering students to take ownership of their education.” This focus on student-centered and authentic learning requires a shift from focusing on standardized testing and traditional assessments to more holistic and alternative measures of student growth to continue to drive personalized instruction.

District leaders noted the importance of building capacity among students, parents, teachers, and school leaders to understand how to measure student growth and use the data to improve learning, instruction, and programs. Acknowledging the challenges of measuring student learning in a personalized and flexible learning model, the district explored a range of measures, including attendance rate changes, as a way of assessing engagement; behavior patterns; choices that students were making about their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics learning pathways; and academic outcomes from project-based learning and embedded digital assessment tools. The district’s instructional coaches provide support to teachers, administrators, students, and families in understanding how the data can provide a holistic picture of student growth and inform changes to classroom instruction as well as schoolwide program improvements. This support for building stakeholder understanding of data has been a critical component of driving personalized instruction in Bristol and in creating systems for recognizing student learning and growth in ways that traditional assessment may miss.