This unit showed me that learning standards are at once more important and more helpful than I had assumed before. My basic understanding of the standards up until now is that they let us know, in a general sense, what needed to be taught in a given year. But until I completed the activities in this unit, I hadn't realized how much useful information is packed into each standard. From now on, standards will be my starting point for planning, rather than an adornment once the planning process is already well underway.
Unpacking a standard
For me, learning to unpack a standard has meant learning to slow down. In the past, I've tended to gloss over standards, picking out what seemed to be the topic statement and paying little attention to the rest. However, this unit has shown me it's worthwhile to dig a little deeper into the language of the standard; there's a hidden richness for those who are patient enough to read carefully.
I learned from the video "How to unpack a standard," from the Imperial County Office of Education, to analyze standards in terms of their verbs, concepts, and contexts. By breaking standards down in this way, I found that standards often set higher expectations for students than I have tended to. For example, the first standard in the unit I am currently planning says, "Define a simple design problem reflecting a need or a want that includes specified criteria for success and constraints on materials, time, or cost." When I broke the standard down, my attention was drawn to the standard's verb: define. In the past, I as the teacher have done the heavy lifting of defining the problems students needed to solve, including the criteria for success and the constraints. But this standard says that studnets themselves should learn to define the problem, and that realization changed how I planned the unit. Now the plan starts with a lesson on identifying design problems and describing them in detail. This lesson will prepare students to determine the criteria for success and inherent constraints in the unit's culminating activity, the egg drop challenge.
Backward mapping
Grant Wiggins, in his article "What is a big idea?" and his video lectures, makes the case that we should start the planning process by defining our big-picture goals. What do we hope students will be able to do when they finish this unit, class, school year, or when they leave our school? He points out that many teachers and educational systems seem not to know their own goals, or seem to be working from day to day without keeping the goals in mind. He gives the example of critical and creative thinking. Most educational systems hold the skills of critical and creative thinking to be among their major goals for students, but in the day-to-day classwork, students aren't often invited to practice critical and creative thinking. At most schools, you can get straight As without developing these skills, he says, and I would have to agree.
Famous proponent of "backward design," Grant Wiggins, in a lecture from 2013.
My biggest takeaway from Wiggins' work (and the work of his co-author, Jay McTighe) is always to ask myself "Why?" Instead of just covering content because it's in the standards, or doing an activity because it sounds fun, I need to ask myself, "Why this content? Why this activity?" If I start there, my planning and, consequently, my teaching will more likely focus on meaningful skills, taught in a way that enables students to transfer the skills to new situations. Wiggins offers an example of how to teach a math unit on statistical measures like mean, median, and mode, with a sense of purpose. He would start the unit with the question, "What is fair?" because it's a question students are always raising. "When you say what your Mom did wasn't fair, what do you mean?" After facilitating students' reflections on questions of fairness, he would give them scenarios that involve fairness and can be addressed through mathematics (mean, median, and mode). Students would come to see that the concepts of mean, median, and mode actually help us to answer the question, "What is fair?"
Wiggins' example struck me, because as a 4th grade teacher I've covered mean, median, and mode. I tried to make the unit fun by engaging the class in a simple ball game and keeping statistics on students' performance, and it was fun, but Wiggins' example gets closer to what kids really care about, and it means more in the end. The example showed me that a backwards design approach can lead to more meaningful lesson ideas.
In terms of understanding standards and applying them to lessons, the backwards design approach has taught me to start with the standards. Before, I started with what I thought were cool activity and project ideas and then went looking for standards that fit my ideas. In embracing backwards design, I will start with the standards, the school's educational model, and my own big-picture goals for student learning. Only after I've clearly defined the overall goals will I start generating unit and activity ideas. In this way, I'll ensure a much closer match between the standards and our daily learning experiences.
Writing objectives
To be completely honest, when I've planned lessons in the past, I've tended to use the standards as my objectives. I just listed the standards at the top of my lesson planning template and started writing the lesson. So it's a step forward for me to generate objectives for a lesson based on the standards. In this unit, I've come to understand that objectives help you define the smaller steps students need to take in order to meet the standard. The standard is complex and almost always requires multiple lessons to achieve. Writing objectives makes you stop and think, "What exactly are the steps I will need to guide my students through in order to help them reach the expected outcomes?"
For instance, in the standards for the unit I'm currently planning, students are asked to generate and compare multiple possible solutions to a problem based on criteria and constraints. In writing objectives for this standard, I realized that to compare multiple solutions to a problem, students would need to practice sharing their solutions with each other and giving feedback. They would need to develop a deep understanding of the best criteria to use to evaluate their solutions, as well as the constraints presented by the situation. A standard I might have "covered" in a single lesson before suddenly became the source for at least two, maybe three or four, lessons. The process of writing objectives showed me several intermediate steps I really ought to be teaching my students, and not just expecting them to pick up on their own.
One more thing
The video "Think alouds: unpacking standards" by Sarah Brown Wessling introduced me to Appendix B of the Common Core English/Language Arts standards. In this appendix, you can find text exemplars and sample performance tasks, including for social studies and science. These texts and performance tasks give an idea of the level of rigor expected by the CCSS, in terms of the kinds of texts students are expected to master, and the higher-level thinking that's expected of them in relation to all of their literacy activities.
Reference list
Imperial County Office of Education. (n.d.). How to unpack a standard [Online video file]. Retrieved Dec. 4, 2016, from https://www.mydigitalchalkboard.org/portal/default/Content/Viewer/Content?action=2&scId=100028&sciId=829
Wessling, S. B. (n.d.). Think alouds: unpacking the standards [Online video file]. Retrieved Dec. 11, 2016, from https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/understanding-the-common-core-standards
Wiggins, G. (2013, Feb. 28). Understanding by Design (1 of 2) [Online video file]. Retrieved Dec. 11, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4isSHf3SBuQ
Wiggins, G. (2013, Feb. 28). Understanding by Design (2 of 2). [Online video file]. Retrieved Dec. 11, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgNODvvsgxM
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