Thoughts On Teaching » content-standards

The National Standards

Todd — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:22:10 +0000

The Common Core State Standards Initiative released draft K-12 standards, open for feedback until Friday, April 2, 2010. While you may have your concerns about the notion of moving to national standards, focus on the standards you’ve been given in your feedback. Probably nothing to say that will stem the national standards tide.

English got stuck with the same adjective-riddled, subjective descriptors. To make matters worse, these Core Standards show very little distinction between grades nine/ten and eleven/twelve. Almost all of the Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language standards are identical for nine/ten and eleven/twelve, with occasional thesaurus-aided wording keeping things from a direct cut-n-paste. Only the Reading standards vary a bit. That doesn’t say a whole lot for the usefulness of these standards.

Add to that phrases like “most relevant,” thoroughly develop,” and “effective language choices” and we’ve still got a batch of standards that mean different things to as many people as read them. What’s “thorough” to you might barely be “partial” to me. These certainly will not make testing any easier or more precise. We’ll still have lofty standards never meant to be assessed in multiple-choice format evaluated by a bubble form. Lots of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

My state’s current standards, as wishy-washy as they are and as much as I’ve railed against them in the past and likely will continue to do in the future, are better phrased than the Common Core standards. The high school English standards for Massachusetts (adopted in 2001) actually look suspiciously similar to my state’s (adopted in 1997). We should do what Massachusetts is doing and say a firm “No thank you” until those Core standards become concrete descriptions of skills students can either exhibit or not. Sadly, we’re not doing that.

So how did your subject area fare? Are these Core standards representative of standards better, worse, or equal to your current standards?Similar Posts:

Can I Get An Interpreter?

Todd — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:13:47 +0000

Instead of watching cooking and home improvement shows on PBS, I’m off to the district office. Several other department chairs and I will be working together until early afternoon. We’re creating curriculum maps, laying out all the standards that need to be covered at each grade period in English 1 and 2. I’m sure I’ll be the first to ask what skills those standards translate to and how we would go about measuring them. Should be a great time full of assumptions about and interpretations of what the standards actually mean. It’s so nice that we’re required to have objective measurements of progress on subjective standards.

What are you doing with your Saturday?

P.S. I’ll try to post our results here later. If you already have these kinds of maps, feel free to share a link in the comments.Similar Posts:

Wasting Time

Todd — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 04:40:03 +0000

I hate wasting time. As with most jobs, there are countless things teachers do every day. There’s a lot to keep track of, progress to make, skills to address, mastery to assess. So when I have to do something that wastes my time, I get angry.

Standards To Students?

One such thing is posting the standards that we are covering each day. This is not something I do, but other teachers are expressing interest in (it’s to cover bases during our looming visitation – see below – but it’s been something other teachers have expressed over the years). The furthest I go is to post the appropriate standards on assignment sheets. Even that I do begrudgingly.

The standards are for teachers, not students. I don’t mind sharing the standards with my students, as long as it has a larger purpose. Sharing standards for the sake of sharing standards… well, can you tell me the standard that addresses? Can you tell me how it helps the students be able to do any of those things?

I even support using the standards as a guideline for grades in some subjects. English and social science are *not* two such subjects (though I’ll give it a partial shot this coming grade period), but others seem quite suited to it. To post the standards you’re working on each day is a waste. Either it’s just posturing and you never draw student attention to it or you take away valuable instruction time.

Is it better for students to know what standard is being addressed or for them to begin learning the standard the teacher needs them to? Any time taken away from my students demonstrating mastery of a certain standard/skill or learning how to demonstrate same wastes time. This includes my telling the students what they are about to learn to be able to do. Skip the intro and just get to the meat of the matter: instruct the students on how to perform.

That Looming Visitation

For a certain impending visitation by a certain accreditation committee, teachers need to put together “evidence boxes,” cardboard boxes supposedly filled with full class sets of three different types of assessments collected at three different times for each prep we teach. Got it? That’s a lot of paperwork.

That’s also a lot of assignments that are not handed back to the students.

This means that I need to hang on to the assessments, making them pretty much useless. I don’t have class sets of assignments because I want my assignments to mean something to the students. I hand things back as quickly as I can and then beat myself over the head for not getting them back sooner.

But I’m supposed to assign something and then make sure that I hang on to that same type of assignment in September, November, and February? If an assessment type is important enough to be given that frequently, it would serve a much better purpose by being in the hands of the students.

I hate wasting time. I’m sorry for wasting yours, but I had to get these things out there.Similar Posts:

Interpretive Standards

Todd — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 06:19:36 +0000

If standards are there to improve the level of education delivered and to act as a kind of teacher report card once we measure student ability to perform those standards, those standards better be exact and not open to interpretation. Good for objective classes, terrible for subjective ones.

Writing Strategies, standard 1.9 says

Revise text to highlight the individual voice, improve sentence variety and style, and enhance subtlety of meaning and tone in ways that are consistent with the purpose, audience, and genre.

“and” Vs. “then he”

Sounds like a fairly straightforward request that our students be able to go back and improve their writing, keeping in mind who they are writing for and the style in which they are writing. The entire reading selection’s a bit long (download a PDF of it), so here’s the released STAR question that “assesses” student ability to perform this standard:

Which of the following is the best way to combine sentences 2 and 3?

William Herschel moved from Germany to England in 1757, then he became an organist at a chapel in Bath in 1766.

When William Herschel moved from Germany to England in 1757, he became an organist at a chapel in Bath in 1766.

William Herschel moved from Germany to England in 1757 and became an organist at a chapel in Bath in 1766.

Since William Herschel moved from Germany to England in 1757, he became an organist at a chapel in Bath in 1766.

According to the answer key, the correct answer is C. I disagree and cast my vote for A. The addition of “then he” is just a touch more sophisticated than the simplistic dropping of “and” in between the two phrases. But in the end, I hate that any of my kids or my teaching is measured based on questions like this one. Who cares? Both answers are fine; quibbling over “and” or “then he” doesn’t do anyone any good and doesn’t measure anything worth measuring.

That this kind of splitting hairs is what the STAR evaluates makes me want to turn my back on the whole thing, both the test and our state’s standards. That is a ridiculous question and there are several more like it, questions that “assess” meaningless minutiae open to interpretation.

Just the fact that the question contains the phrase “Which of the following is the best way” suggests a degree of subjectivity that everyone should be uncomfortable with having on such a high-stakes test as STAR. “Which one is the best?” Doesn’t that sound like an opinion to you? How can you judge a student whose opinion doesn’t match yours, oh mighty state test? Similar Posts:

Trouble With Standards: Part 3

Todd — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:38:10 +0000

Here’s the big one, the trouble with English standards, along with a couple of things to consider in making standards better. We need to improve the quality of public education, but we didn’t finish that fight by creating standards and more testing. Keep pushing things forward, please. Most content standards in my state were adopted in 1998. What about in your state? How old are your content standards? Should these standards ever be “old” in any sense of that word?

English Standards Too Vague

If I see that several of my students score low on STAR test questions that judge standards under the heading of Reading Comprehension, that doesn’t help me. There are many skills under that heading and it could be any one of those that my students didn’t do well on. Further, here’s an example of just one of the standards listed in that section:

Analyze both the features and the rhetorical devices of different types of public documents (e.g., policy statements, speeches, debates, platforms) and the way in which authors use those features and devices.

Is that a skill or merely a set of opinions? Further, how am I to qualify a student’s understanding of that level of discourse? Do we really believe there’s an exact process to follow to consistently reach a “correct” answer in this type of analysis? Is it just an awareness of these types of ideas we want to inculcate in students? If so, how can we test this, holding teachers and schools “accountable” for those results?

English is a subject where there are no cut-and-dry steps to follow in order to achieve a certain result. I cannot direct a student to follow a particular process in order to start thinking more profoundly, writing more maturely, reading more accurately. That singular process doesn’t exist.

The English standards are so vague and broad that they paint a nice picture, but are skills open to wide interpretation. Under response to literature, one standard is

analyze the use of imagery, language, universal themes, and unique aspects of the text.

That’s a standard that has as many correct answers as there are texts to respond to.

One of the great things about English is that there are several possible answers. It’s an art. Sorry, folks, but there’s not a reasonable way to teach kids to consistently

critique the power, validity, and truthfulness of arguments set forth in public documents.

Where one person sees a powerful, perfectly valid, and incredibly true document, another sees an absurdly weak, insanely written, and awfully bogus one. Want an example? Ask people about the Bible.

So?

Sort out funding so environment doesn’t play a role in student performance.: Students sitting in a “ghetto” school commonly look down on their own abilities and don’t care to put out the effort needed to make the school look good as a result of a system that obviously doesn’t care for their comfort.
Create standards for teachers to follow and evaluate schools on that. Figure out a way to do it because that’s what determines a teacher’s effectiveness more than student skill demonstrated on a test.: Some students are naturally adept at tests, some come to the class with high intelligence, others show up not having paid attention since 3rd grade. Those students’ results on a test like STAR are not indicative of the teacher’s ability.
Treat standards (English standards, at least) as a bare minimum and as mere guidelines for what should happen in the classroom.: Schools should respond to community desires and should be preparing students for life, not just for college. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is not a good enough reason to teach anything. If we treat standards as the final determiner of what should or should not be taught, we become automatons who are not doing our best to prepare our students for the world on the other side of the graduation stage.

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