Teaching to the Standard

This week our TNTP training sessions have focused on how to make sure everything we teach is aligned to the state educational standards for curriculum.  In today's educational climate, a great emphasis is put on assessments and a common objection people will voice is that because of the high-stakes nature of NCLB, teachers are only 'teaching to the test'.  But the proper way to ensure student achievement on assessment exams and in school as a whole is not teaching to the test, but rather teaching to the standard.  If students know the ciriculum material in the state standards, then they will be prepared to pass the assessments as well.  The standards documents, which are publicly available for each state, include the material that will be tested and beyond, giving students a much fuller breadth of knowledge than is even being tested.

It is such a logical way to teach and design instruction, you have to wonder why aren't all teachers doing this?  Well, as I have learned the past few days, it is possible to do this but you need someone to show you how.  Looking at a copy of a state standard is confusing.  The standards themselves contain broad, over-arching ideas that are what should be covered over the course of the entire school year.  The supporting topics themselves can be hard to translate into workable units and lesson plans.  Going into my TNTP training this summer, I was pleased to learn that my school district provides a lot of guidance to teachers in terms of curriculum framwork guides that ensure all the teachers in the district who teach a particular subject (Algebra for instance) will be teaching the same topics in the same order at around the same time of the year.  This provides much needed continuity in a large school district.  The guides help with the order and pacing of the units, but do not dictate to teachers HOW they must teach, just what they must teach and when.  I know that there is often some debate about wanting to standardize curriculum while still maintaining teacher freedom to choose the teaching activities that they feel are best. As a new teacher, I am very glad that my school district does provide this level of structure and guidance.  Not all schools or school systems do so.


After two days spent wrestling with designing my own standards based unit plan as an assignment, I can see what a large undertaking this really is.  I'll end this post today with the related topic of the National 'Common Core' Standards that were developed earlier this year.  I saw an article today in Education Week that details the conclusions of a study in which each state's individual standards are compared to the Common Core.  The majority of the states were deemed to be inferior, and I was surprised that my state scored very low. Of course, the details of how the standards were judged were not given in the article.  I know that my state is one of the 33 that has agreed to adopt the new Common Core and that these changes will begin appearing over the next few years.  I will be very interested to see how those changes will appear at the district level, and what changes individual schools and teachers will see to the curriculum.