Standards Based Teaching

Teaching the Standards

After you know what students should know, what students should do, and the lens of how you are going to present this information, all you have to do is mash them together with language goals.  This would be your unit goal.

With a unit goal in mind, use the evidence statements, or what the students should be able to do, to develop lesson ideas. 

The evidence statements already plan out what topics you should cover and the depth that you should go into each. As the teacher, it is your job to decide how you are going to present this information and develop the assessments that match the evidence statements.

The evidence statements can be combined in various ways, but it is typically not possible to cover every evidence statement in less than two weeks. 

My worst mistake before planning this way, and honestly the most common problem I see with teachers is cohesiveness. That lack of cohesiveness can be at any level. Whether the teacher doesn’t intentionally plan with cohesiveness in mind or the students just don’t see how what they are learning is connected from one day or lesson to the next without cohesiveness students will often be not able to connect the information to other situations/topics or may not be able to accurately explain the in-depth relationships. 

A unit should be cohesive, or each lesson should relate or stick to another lesson making a unit as a whole. A cohesive unit should start with a small idea and build on that same idea. This is called a learning progression. This learning progression shows the Depth of Knowledge of the same idea. Students who are doing a particular performance task are going to have to know specific words (remembering or level 1) then be able to use those words and ideas ( understanding or level 2)  and then understand enough to make bigger connections ( applying concepts or level 3). 

The standard stops here, true SBG means this is as much as you teach. 

This is because level 4 is applying the information in new ways, so you can’t teach this level if they are applying it in a new way. The challenge is giving students the opportunity on assessments or designing to show students can achieve level 4.

Every day the lessons should build on the same idea the unit started with, but build on the idea. Introduce the idea, and allow students to explore it in their own words and abilities. Then show them the scientific words or formulas to use, and the scientific ideas, and allow them practice to using them correctly. Then allow them to explore the idea more but the students must use appropriate language and make connections based on their experiences, and allow them to explore current knowledge to make more connections. This kind of combination of lessons allows for cohesiveness and depth that many combinations can not. The vocabulary needed is intended to be the same vocabulary from the standards. Additional vocabulary should be discussed, but not assessed. This gives the students experience with the increased academic vocabulary, but if it is not in the standard, then according to SBG it should not be a part of the student’s grade.