Relating to the ASN: Behind the Scenes

Each week for the past couple of years, Joann and I have discussed how teachers can use resources from the Gateway to 21st Century Skills to successfully integrate a huge variety of topics into their classrooms. I have learned so much by researching and discovering new ways to incorporate different types of resources into classrooms throughout the world. Since Gateway resources are aligned to standards, teachers are able to easily fit the ones they want to use into the framework of their particular required standards.

The ability to find and use free, successful, standards-aligned resources is a major benefit for teachers using the Gateway. The Gateway has been a showcase of the value of the standards descriptions provided by the Achievement Standards Network (ASN). Our new column series will discuss how educators can use the ASN to improve their teaching. I am excited to see what kind of doors this powerful tool will open up for teachers!

The standards (or learning outcomes) on the Gateway are populated by the ASN, a framework and repository of standards. This behind-the-scenes repository is, perhaps, not all that interesting to educators at first glance. Although Gateway users enjoy the benefit of the standards correlations provided by the ASN, the complexity of the correlations might not be immediately clear to the teachers using the digital library to find and organize their resources. The real power of the ASN for teachers is the depth of the correlations. Each standard is described in great detail, allowing many meaningful relationships to be made with that standard.

When a teacher looks up a particular standard on the ASN, they won’t be reading that standard as part of a list of unrelated standards that need to be taught in the year. Looking up a standard will return that standard along with other standards and how they are related to the one originally searched. These related standards might be from different content areas, helping teachers connect the learning in the classroom. This cross-curricular connection helps students connect learning to the real world. Being able to discover these connections more easily during lesson planning will help more teachers bring this type of education into the classroom. Please see Joann’s column this week for an example and demonstration of this type of ASN search.

Standards on the ASN can also be related to specific resources; these resources can be related to other resources in various grade levels and subjects; and the resources and standards can be related to specific information on the Internet. Relating a single standard statement to multiple resources and methods will help teachers discover the best way to teach a particular standard to students using different methods, different media, and through the lens of different subjects. The relationships created on the ASN are going to be a huge step toward easier adaptations, more streamlined planning, and ultimately: better teaching!