Estimated Completion Time: 20 minutes
Before You Begin: Think about how you deconstruct the standards ensuring all skills are accounted for, to develop a successful lesson with activities that will assist your students to grasps all concepts needed. This page will require of you to dive deep into your thoughts on the importance of deconstructing standards and what is needed in order for this process to be done with fidelity.
Take a look at the picture above. At first glance, do you see a young woman or an elderly woman? Some of you will see one or the other, while some will see both figures. In sharing this with our students, many of them struggle to see one or the other and this can lead to frustration. Some teachers experience frustration as they try to make sense of the state standards. Much like the optical illusion, teachers are given a document with state mandated standards and are expected to teach using those standards as the foundation of their lessons. It sounds simple, doesn't it? Here is the issue. In most cases, state standards are vague, broad, and in some cases, confusing due to wordiness or complexity. For these reasons, Ainsworth (2015) suggested that is is nearly impossible to thoroughly understand what students should know and be able to demonstrate if there is only a general sense of what the standard addresses.
Ainsworth (2015) identified the process of breaking down the standard as unwrapping, which is a process of identifying and deconstructing priority standards in an effort to understand specifically what students should be able to master. Nielsen (2016) purported that anyone who does not go through the process of deconstruction or unwrapping the standards will not understand them.
This module seeks to assist novice and experienced teachers with the process of standard deconstruction and be able to confidently turn the deconstructed standards into realistic learning targets for students.
Warm-Up
Task: Before you get started with the rest of the module, we would love for you to share your current thoughts about deconstructing standards. To record your responses, click here, scan the QR code, or access the Padlet below. We encourage you to interact with other participants' posts.
