Standards Through the Content

When you make your lesson plans, do you ever find yourself thinking something along these lines:

"Hmm...what do I need to teach about next week? Let's see, we just finished the European explorers, so I guess we'll start with the Conquistadors, and then compare that with French and British settlements, before getting into the 13 colonies and the three colonial regions..."

And then you remember -- your principal wants you to put the standard on the board each day. So you go to the binder where you printed out the unit analysis last year, and you flip through until you find a standard that seems to fit.

Been there, done that, got the lousy results to prove it.

But I also got good results, and some of you get truly fantastic results. How? By planning just a little bit differently:

"Hmm... we just finished looking at the factors that led to European Exploration. We should expand that this week to explain the factors that influenced the patterns of settlement and explain the roles of various ethnic and racial groups in settlement..."

Who talks like that?

A teacher who is starting from the standards. Take a look at this example, from Ms Bracey's 8th grade classroom at DBMS:

See how the I Can statement quotes the standard, and the lesson is about an economic conflict that impacted the development of the United States? Good alignment! Is it perfect? No... we can discuss that in the comments. But clearly the lesson isn't just "tell them about Mercantilism;" it's give students the information so they can explain how an economic conflict impacted the development of the United States.

Why does this matter? Because when students are learning things, not just to learn them, but to lead them to a conceptual understanding, real, lasting learning can occur. Consider also these student work samples from Mr. Gilchrist's 6th grade classes at NCIMS:

Students drew pictures of key inventions from the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia. But the standard is 

6.H.2.3 Explain how innovation and/or technology transformed civilizations, societies and regions over time

And

6.H.2.2 Compare historical and contemporary events and issues to understand continuity and change.

With those two standards in mind, Mr. Gilchrist asked his students to explain, underneath the illustration, not what the innovation was, but what it's importance was, both to the society at the time and to us today:

Keeping his eye on the standards, Mr. Gilchrist was able to push his students beyond mere DOK1 description to think more deeply about the impact and importance of the history they are studying. In this way, students don't merely know history, the understand. And when the understand, they remember and can build upon that understanding for further learning and for life.