Touchstone 1: Use standards to guide every learning opportunity

Standards are often seen by the outside world and many educators as an onerous abstraction and illogical extension of teaching as it has always been done. However, standards provide an essential guide to the effective educator. Teachers need a blueprint for exactly what students are expected to understand and how they are expected to demonstrate that understanding. In mathematics, I have seen many teachers, myself included, fall into the trap of, translating self-knowledge into an understanding of what and how students must learn math. The distance between this illusion and the reality of the classroom is often tremendous. Whatever preconceived notions society and the educator may have about learning, standards are essential to the foundation of student learning. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the complexity of a standard, especially when teaching at lower secondary levels. The standards often include all content that students are expected to learn by the end of their high school career, most of which will lie outside of a ninth graders curriculum. Utilizing a template for unpacking standards when planning a unit makes the task much easier. I have found the model provided by the ASCD in Unpacking Standards to be especially useful. The process starts with decomposing the standard across two dimensions: meaning (understanding and essential questions) and acquisition (knowledge and skills).

References:

Hattie, J., Fisher, D., Frey, N., Gojak, L. M., Moore, S. D., & Mellman, W. (2017). Visible learning for mathematics: What works best to optimize student learning, grades K-12. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Mathematics.

Unpacking Standards. (n.d.). Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://pdo.ascd.org/lmscourses/PD12OC002/media/CCSS_UBD_M2_Reading_Unpacking_Standards.pdf