Understanding and Applying Standards

I must admit I was previously confused about what standards are for and how educators use them. We use the Common Core State Standards at the school where I work, integrating them with our PYP curriculum framework. I didn't usually use them in my lesson planning as my students aren't at grade level in English and I wasn't familiar enough with the standards to want to go back and find a relevant one from an earlier grade level. If I was asked to include a standard in my lesson plan, I would simply search for a standard that seemed to match the lesson I had already planned, and paste it into my lesson plan.

Unpacking Standards

Now I understand how standards are used for goal-based planning. The first stop is breaking the standard down into more useful chunks: skills and big ideas. The nouns in the standard help us identify the big ideas, while the verbs tell us the skills students will need to meet the standard. For example, in this grade 4 reading standard, we can see that students will need to refer, explain, and infer. From the nouns: text, details, examples, inferences, we can figure our big idea is going to be something about how a text is organized logically-how details and examples are used to support larger ideas.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.1
Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

Planning through Backwards Mapping

These skills and big ideas provide objectives for student success in a unit planned around this standard. Working backwards, the teacher can then plan lessons and assessments designed to help students reach the objectives. For one example, we can see that in order to develop the skill of making inferences, students will need to be able to connect ideas within and across texts. Now we have more specific skills to teach and assess.

SMART Objectives

To ensure that our objectives are serving our students, we try to make them Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Targeted.  SMART objectives for the skill above might include describe the development of an idea over the course of a text or compare and contrast two similar ideas from two different texts. Lessons should move students toward higher-order levels of thinking according to Bloom's taxonomy, and the language we use in our planning can help us remember that. If we want students to be able to analyze a text, rather than just remember "details support the main idea", we should use verbs like analyze, break down, compare, contrast, identify, and infer.

Objective-based Planning

Every lesson should have a clear, specific objective. Standards help us identify those objectives, as well as providing their context, giving us both the micro and macro view. Standards aid coherent unit and lesson planning by giving us some idea where we are trying to go and some signs to look for along the way.