Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards Are Here!

Ensuring that all students are ready for college and career success is no small feat. Solid standards can help. With them, students, teachers, and administrators all know where they’re trying to get in terms of skills mastery, and educators can plan for how to fulfill this mission. To that end, over the past couple of years Florida has been rolling out its Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (B.E.S.T.) Standards. Middle and high schools are now using them.

Our Florida Zinc-ers have let us know that making the transition to the new standards and preparing for the new complementary assessments is tough—and time consuming. We can help! Zinc now has the B.E.S.T. Standards live on our site. This means that when you assign Zinc texts and our accompanying comprehension quizzes, you can see how students’ practice and performance fit into the new standards. And as students complete assessments, their work will generate data that will allow you to monitor their growth and progress towards mastery. You’ll get a sense of how they’re set to fare on the new assessments and have insights for targeting instruction and practice to support individual needs.

The B.E.S.T. Standards that we focus on and offer practice in are:

• ELA.R.1.1 Literary Elements

• ELA.R.1.2 Theme

• ELA.R.1.3 Perspective and Point of View

• ELA.R.1.4 Poetry

• ELA.R.2.1 Structure

• ELA.R.2.2 Central Idea

• ELA.R.2.3 Purpose and Perspective

• ELA.R.2.4 Argument

• ELA.R.3.1 Interpreting Figurative Language

• ELA.R.3.2 Paraphrasing and Summarizing

• ELA.R.3.3 Comparative Reading

• ELA.R.3.4 Understanding Rhetoric

• ELA.V.1.3 Context and Connotation

• ELA.C.1.2 Narrative Writing

• ELA.C.1.3 Argumentative Writing

• ELA.C.1.4 Expository Writing

Want to learn more about how we align to the B.E.S.T. Standards? Contact partnerships@zinclearninglabs.com for a tour of our B.E.S.T.-aligned content.