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Utah Core Standards drive almost all teaching in the state of Utah. Standards are a way of knowing what students need to know or learn at different developmental stages of their public educational career. Teachers at my school strive to understand their content and not only do we want to understand our content better, we want to know how to help students reach the standards they need to learn. With this focus in mind, we have taken multiple Professional Development days to break down our standards. I understand my content, that's why I specialized in English; however, really diving into the standards and looking at them through the lenses of a student has not only helped me prepared better lessons for my students, but also helped my students understand what exactly they need to know or learn by the end of a lesson.
Utah Core Standards drive almost all teaching in the state of Utah. Standards are a way of knowing what students need to know or learn at different developmental stages of their public educational career. Teachers at my school strive to understand their content and not only do we want to understand our content better, we want to know how to help students reach the standards they need to learn. With this focus in mind, we have taken multiple Professional Development days to break down our standards. I understand my content, that's why I specialized in English; however, really diving into the standards and looking at them through the lenses of a student has not only helped me prepared better lessons for my students, but also helped my students understand what exactly they need to know or learn by the end of a lesson.
The first step in breaking down the standards is deciding what standards are being tested and what standards need to be mastered before the students move onto the next grade.
As an ELA department, we went through the ELA standards and made a decision on which standards we should focus on the most to help students as they are tested and as they transition into next the grade.
When I am creating my SLOs (Student Learning Objectives) for the year, I am looking at this document, as well as students' data to decide what my students need the most help on so I have a focus for the year.
The final step, is the actual break down of the standards. This is the beginning of my break down of standards. This form has changed and evolved as I worked through what exactly I felt my students needed to learn. Breaking down the standards has helped me stay focused on my students' learning and I spend less time on frivolous objectives that don't further students' comprehension of the standards. It also allowed me to strip the standards bare and see where I needed to break a standard further (as in multiple steps) or teach a standard in broader terms.
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