Module 5 Unit 1 Activity 3 - Reflection

My current school doesn’t use any kind of standards. We use a mishmash of AP and SAT courses and parts of the Korean curriculum, and I hadn’t realised until we started this module just what a mistake that was. As a teacher it’s easy to look at the Common Core standards and think, ‘well of course I do all that in class anyway.’ But when you get down to brass tacks and are shown how to actually unpack a standard, then you begin to realise just how much there is to the process. The thought that my fellow social studies teachers are all doing their own thing in their classrooms, just as I was doing in mine, is now faintly horrifying as opposed kind of liberating, as I previously believed. How can you ensure a high standard of tuition without any standard to aim for? You can’t, really.

The actual standard itself is just the tip of the iceberg. This needs to be broken down into its constituent parts – the main ideas or concepts, and the skills that will need to be developed to meet the standard (Digital Chalkboard, 2011). The first step is to find the ‘big ideas’ in the standard - the main concepts that will need to be covered with the students. I chose Standard E1 from the Washington DC social studies standards which reads, ‘Students understand common economic terms and concepts and economic reasoning.’  The full set of standards is available to view at the following link.

https://osse.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/osse/publication/attachments/DCPS-horiz-soc_studies.pdf

The main ideas are reasonably easy to find by looking for the nouns in the standard – economics terms/concepts and reasoning. Less easy to do is plan how to engage the students in actively thinking about those big ideas. It is not enough just to lecture and introduce the ideas through direct instruction – the teacher will have to use a variety of teaching methods and activities to ensure that students are being engaged at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. The next step is identify the skills that the students will need to develop to be able to meet the standard. This is where we can look at the verbs in the standard, such as identify or analyse, to get an understanding of what we need to do.

Once you have unpacked the standard, the real work begins. How are you going to teach the students the skills they need to know, and how are you going to engage them in actively thinking about the big ideas contained in each standard? This is where backward mapping is key, and I found Jay McTighe’s (2012) advice very useful, in that you should map backward from intended results. We learned that it is best to start with the objective or standard that you wish the students to meet, and then begin to plan how you would assess whether or not the students have indeed achieved the objective. The final step is planning the lessons and activities that will help students meet that goal.

It sounds so simple when you first encounter the idea that you once again tend to think that you operate in this fashion most of the time in the classroom anyway. For example, I always test my students at the end of each chapter to assess their understanding. Once you sit down and put pen to paper and start to go through these steps, however, you soon realise how much more methodical and logical your curriculum would be if you followed these steps at all times.

I have learned a lot from this module, but I feel less than confident about actually putting these steps in motion in my own classroom. The example I chose for this unit was the first standard on the elective economics course and it is worded very simply. I have looked at other standards, however, that make my head swim, and I could see that I would have a million questions. At my current school those questions would doubtless go unanswered, but the hope is that when I move to a better school and have to start aligning my lessons and testing with Common Core standards there will be a mentor teacher that I can lean on. That is the hope, but until that time I will try my best to put the lessons of this module into practice.


References:

Digital Chalkboard. (2011). How to unpack a standard. Retrieved January 02, 2018, from https://www.mydigitalchalkboard.org/portal/default/Content/Viewer/Content?action=2&scId=100028&sciId=829

McTighe, J. (2012). Common Core Big Idea 4: Map Backward From Intended Results. Retrieved January 02, 2018, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/common-core-map-backwards-jay-mctighe-grant-wiggins