Reflection on Understanding and Applying Standards

  

This has been an intense and eye-opening week. It shed light on exactly how challenging, and how exciting, teaching can be. I learned important tools that will make the learning experience more relevant and engaging for my students, but will also guide and clarify the planning process for me.

To begin, we were asked to unpack standards. As a private art teacher I have never worked with standards before, so that alone was new to me. With little knowledge of standards, I used to believe them to be strict guidelines against which teachers are required to align their curriculum, and assumed them to therefore be restrictive and limiting - almost disenfranchising teachers in that they ‘tell’ teachers what to teach. What I learned, however, is that standards do not thwart a teacher’s creativity or autonomy, but actually help to empower and strengthen her teaching. We learned several processes this week, which help teachers, do just that.

Unpacking Standards

Standards provide little guidance for teachers when taken at face value, yet standards are rich with possibility, information and potential. To unearth their full character, teachers must dig deep. To fully grasp what a standard is about it is necessary to “unpack” it.  Unpacking standards requires deconstructing it’s meaning – pulling out the verbs, isolating the nouns, and deciphering the ‘big idea’. Having studied philosophy at the undergraduate and graduate levels, the exercise of deconstructing meaning from a text, a sentence or a simple word, is not new to me. What was new to me, however, was the approach of looking to the nouns, verbs and big idea as indicators of what students are expected to know and do. I found this rather simple exercise to be enormously helpful in clarifying what my role is as teacher within the framework of a standard. It confirmed the fact that, rather than being a central figure in the classroom presenting facts, it is my responsibility to ensure my students come away with the big idea, the deeper meaning and the skills necessary to take learning to the next level. Furthermore, I found that when I unpacked a standard, I actually became more creative in my teaching, since it presented an array of possibilities and interpretations to which I had to find ways to align my teaching. This exercise confirmed the fact that standards are not bare-boned directives, but rather rich with potential for meaningful student engagement, and it’s our role as teachers to identify, embrace and translate that potential into meaty lessons with sticking power. Unpacking standards helps us do just that.

Backwards Mapping

Backwards mapping is the logical next step after unpacking a standard. It is a strategy that helps teachers teach towards goals in a way that equips students with learning experiences, contexts and meaningful activities that can be applied autonomously to varied and complex situations inside and outside of school (McTighe, 2012).

In backwards mapping the curriculum is designed starting from the goal and moves backwards from there – it is essentially a ‘starting from the end’. The process helps guide the design of lessons, units and teaching techniques such that specific learning goals are reached. It allows teachers to take the learning goals, objectives and expected proficiencies outlined in a standard, and to create targeted lessons consisting of activities, assessments and learning experiences that ensure students reach desired goals through each step of a unit. This gives the student increased responsibility and autonomy as they work their way through a lesson or unit, which in turn engages them deeply with their learning and provides them with vital life-skills which will carry them towards future educational success.

I found this process to be demanding, challenging and fun. Coming up with rigorous and meaningful curricula is not easy, however, backwards mapping provided me with a systematic, step-by-step guide on how to do this. Without this strategy in place I can certainly see how teachers might lose their way, veer off-track, lose focus of the big idea, and tend toward basal teacher-centered teaching resulting in lower-level learning. I found backwards mapping to be essential to the design of an empowering student-centered curriculum.

Writing Objectives

Writing objectives is the culminating and likely the most important stage of teaching toward a standard. This is where a teacher decides with utmost precision what learning, skills, knowledge and abilities she wants her students to come away with. Objectives are written against SWBAT guidelines (Students Will Be Able To) and should be SMART (Smart, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Targeted). I found that referring to these acronyms in the simple exercise of asking myself what I want my students to be able to do proved very effective in shifting my perspective of ‘teacher doling out knowledge’ to ‘student engaged in a learning process’. Furthermore, writing SMART objectives with reference to Bloom’s Taxonomy of higher order learning domains required me to think above and beyond the lower level learning domains (remembering and understanding) and to reach for the higher order domains (apply, evaluate, analyze and create).

I was both challenged and excited about using higher order thinking terms such as demonstrate, sketch, develop, compare, defend and create when designing a 3^rd grade art lesson. I felt that using the SWBAT and SMART acronyms, together with Bloom’s Taxonomy, pushed me to develop an exceptionally rigorous lesson for my young artists, one where they are required to “critique the work of their peers against project guidelines” and “defend their design choices” and “compare the work of one artist to that of another”. These types of exercises help them develop life-skills that are widely applicable far beyond the art room while they are also observable and measurable which helps me gage student learning. I will undoubtedly be using this effective process for future lesson planning.

In conclusion, unpacking standards, backwards mapping, and writing SMART objectives are powerful strategies for designing a curriculum that is standard-aligned, student-centered, task-oriented, rigorous, measurable and exciting. Understanding how these processes work will make me a more effective teacher and my students more engaged, passionate and committed life-long learners.