Planning with Standards EDU 300 Newberry College Jennifer Morrison

Planning with Standards What are the current content standards for your content area and level? Why start your planning process with standards? As a teacher, how do you start the planning process with standards? By the end of class you should be able to answer these questions.

Standard A standard is a reference point. Standards are guidelines. They provide specifications and/or criteria to guide action. In education, we have standards for content (often called curriculum or academic standards), standards for teaching, standards for school facilities, and more.

Content Standards Content standards provide a curricular framework. They can be called academic standards, curriculum standards, etc. Content standards are statements of intended learning outcomes for students at each grade level and/or in specific courses. They identify agreed-upon areas of student learning considered most important for academic proficiency.

What are your content standards? SC Academic Standards Content standards defined by your professional organization National Common Core Standards Check to make certain each student has the SC Academic Standards document he/she needs to write a unit assessment plan. Which set should influence your practice?

The Structure of Standards How are they written? There will be some kind of alignment across the standards “The student will…” Overall statement and indicators

What does it mean to cherry pick standards? You read Morrison’s blog post, Cherry Picking Standards, in which she wrote in response to the development of Common Core national standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics in 2010. What does it mean to cherry pick standards? Discuss whole class. Why do teachers cherry pick? How can we start with standards in planning?

What are the benefits of using standards? They support alignment (vertical and horizontal) and curricular coherence. They give teachers a foundation for dialogue. They help us break from the past and keep us out of ruts of “our favorite things.” They give us a target around which to design instruction and assessment. Standards can also have negatives.

Remember… Standards by themselves are NOT a curriculum.

Your Unit Assessment Plan Read/Discuss the indicators you want to target. What unit topic is going to allow you to reach for those standards?

Read Chapter 2 of Diane Ravitch’s newest book to gain some insight into the history and current landscape of the standards movement in the US. For more information about Diane, check out http://www.dianeravitch.com.

What’s Due?