Setting the Standard – Making Standards Work for You

We are teachers. We are in charge of making sure that students in our little corner of the world learn everything they need to know in our grade, our subject, or our specialty. It’s an art that can take years to perfect. The constantly changing standards, tests, infrastructure, and policies in the education world can further complicate the process. The new direction of my monthly column will take us on a journey to make sense of the best way to use open-source resources and free technology to support planning and teaching based on standards.

When standards-based education was first implemented in the United States, each state created and adopted a set of standards and chose the type of testing to use to ensure those standards were met in each grade. A statewide set of standards would help make sure that children across the state were learning the same material in each grade. Results of standardized tests would help compare the learning in different parts of the state. To encourage schools and teachers to teach the required material, funding was often tied to the improvement of these test results over time. Teachers had guidelines for what to teach and were rewarded when their students did well when they were tested on the material. It sounds pretty good, right?

Like any solution, the successes of standards-based education and the No Child Left Behind Act were followed by plenty of problems. One problem was the lack of uniformity of standards from state to state. This caused difficulties for students and teachers moving between states, teachers trying to share educational materials across state lines, and providers of standards-aligned resources. Students from different states were entering college or the workplace with vastly different skill sets. It was like these students were coming from 51 countries instead of just 1!

Currently, many states are implementing Common Core State Standards, which aim to standardize what is being taught during the K-12 years. This should help level the playing field for students, but what will these latest changes mean to you as a teacher? Some of you might be throwing your hands up in the air yelling, “Too many standards! What am I supposed to do? I was finally getting the hang of my own state standards!” Although it may seem like that now, hopefully, we can work together each month to make sense of the changes and learn how to make the most of them to be the best teachers we can be.

Stay tuned to our monthly blogs here on the Gateway for exciting news and tips on how to make sense out of all these changes and how to find free resources that are aligned to these ever-changing standards. Joann gives you a nice sneak peek into the Achievement Standards Network in her post this week. Be sure to check it out. We will bring more exciting news soon!