Working with Educational Standards
Tips on Applying State Education Standards in Your Lessons
Jun 13, 2008
What's the best way to go about implementing educational standards? State educational standards have their own jargons and can be initially tricky for a new teacher to understand.
The Concept of Educational Standards
The concept of educational standards is misleading. New teachers often think they need to teach towards the standards. But the situation can become tricky when you teach ELLs, (English language learners) lower performing or struggling learners. Then what happens?
Working With An Educational Curriculum
If you haven't done so already, check out the specific state standards. You can Google your state and educational standards. You can also look for general educational standards according to curriculum and subject.
If you notice, these standards provide direction towards a learning objective or goal. In order to bring all students up to a state and ultimately national standard of learning, you will need to teach enabling skills. For example, if students are expected to access information from a short text and answer questions, you will probably need to teach them how to apply reading strategies to use when they don't understand certain words or phrases. If students need to write out a laboratory report, then you might need to pre-teach them the terminology and work on practicing various measurement systems.
Diversify Instruction Using Standard Based Activities
When designing your lesson plans, take into account that your class is most likely heterogeneous, with multiple level abilities, and you’ll need to work with diversifying instruction to meet the needs of all of your students. To ensure maximizing student participation, try and incorporate as much of the following:
- A variety of practice exercises – try using advance organizers
- Small group formats
- Modeling instruction
- Lots of opportunities for coming up with the right answer using open ended questions such as opinion related questions
- Activities based on motivating topics that engage students
- Interaction using pair and group work
Assess Educational Standards
Assessment is an integral part of student and teacher accountability and standards provide the bridge towards determining whether instructional content has been delivered effectively.
Your traditional and alternative assessment will also need to be designed according to educational standards. Your objectives and content areas of assessment need to also be standard based. Make sure you assess only those objectives you taught – that way you are ensuring you have effectively covered the standards that your students are capable of achieving within that particular time framework of learning.
Achieving state educational standards may appear a big concept, but applying them is doable and should be done consistently.
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