Marinating in Standards (Part 1)

Go ahead and dive in

Maybe you are like me in thinking that at this point in U.S. education, with commonly agreed upon curriculum standards in every major subject and districts spending more than $18 billion a year on resources to teach them, the stage is finally set to meet that elusive goal of providing rigorous, equitable instruction in all our K-12 schools. 

That was certainly the hope when the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and math were adopted by nearly every state in 2010, followed by the unveiling of updated national standards for science, social studies, the arts, and even physical education.

But as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, there are some major flaws in this thinking. By introducing rigorous national standards packaged with high-stakes tests and new teacher evaluations, combined with our reliance on commercial curricula, we managed to bypass the critical part where teachers who were actually doing the teaching were meant to engage with them.  

For example, did you know that the Common Core for ELA states: 

By emphasizing required achievements, the Standards leave room for teachers, curriculum developers, and states to determine how those goals should be reached and what additional topics should be addressed.  

Similarly, the Common Core for math states: 

These Standards do not dictate curriculum or teaching methods. For example, just because topic A appears before topic B in the standards for a given grade, it does not necessarily mean that topic A must be taught before topic B. A teacher might prefer to teach topic B before topic A, or might choose to highlight connections by teaching topic A and topic B at the same time. Or, a teacher might prefer to teach a topic of his or her own choosing that leads, as a byproduct, to students reaching the standards for topics A and B. 

The standards also “do not define the intervention methods or materials necessary to support students who are well below or well above grade-level expectations,”  nor do they “define the full range of supports appropriate for English language learners and for students with special needs.” 

So, engaging with standards is a must if our front-line workers (i.e. teachers) are the ones to provide the means toward these goals and the ones we rely on to spot and remediate misunderstandings in real time. Which we do.  

My colleague Dan Joseph advises teachers to “marinate” in standards as a prelude to making a plan for how they’ll reach these learning goals as intended.

I love this term, marinating. It makes the process of reading through the 70-90 pages of standards sound like going to a spa.