EDU 330
What is Backward Design?
An Introduction to Academic Standards
ACADEMIC STANDARDS
HOW DO ACADEMIC STANDARDS HELP US "BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND"?
As teacher-designers, beginning with the end in mind requires that we define what we want our “end” to be.
Our final goal for the lesson or unit design can come from many places, including:
1. The teacher’s own goals for the students. For example, a teacher designing a lesson on growth mindset to help her students succeed academically as a whole.
2. The goals of the school. An example would be a team-building program that asks teachers to discuss the concepts of perseverance, executive functioning, etc. with students.
3. The goals of a particular curriculum or framework, for example, an I.B. Program or Experiential Learning Program, in which specific goals are outlined as part of the program.
4. State and Common Core Academic Standards.
An Introduction to Academic Standards
What Are Academic Standards?
Academic standards are a set of common expectations for students of each grade regarding content knowledge, academic skills, and performance. The Common Core State Standards outlines learning goals for Mathematics and English Language Arts and have been adopted voluntarily by 42 states (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2017). In comparison, state standards are individual to the state and include a wider range of subject areas. According to the Colorado Department of Education, “standards advance equity of outcomes for students by setting a common bar for student performance, defining the floor but not the ceiling of student learning” (2016). Here in Colorado, the state academic standards were created with the input of a diverse group of educators, policymakers, business leaders, military, librarians, parents, and the general public. This process and subsequent review processes are designed to ensure that the standards guide appropriate preparation as seen from multiple perspectives for students graduating high school and either entering the workforce or college careers.
Why Do We Use Standards?
Academic standards are helpful because they are designed to build off each other in time and space and provide a consistent end point for educators. By assigning benchmarks for each grade, teachers should have knowledge of what content their students come to them knowing and what they should know by the end of the year in order for the next teacher to build off it. This saves educators the time and effort of excessive pre-assessment and allows them to construct content knowledge and skills in an efficient and reasonable way. In our increasingly mobile society, the Common Core especially offers an opportunity to make educational results more consistent across the states, to the benefit of students that move from state to state during their K-12 years, or as they attend college or university.
The effects of using academic standards, both in general and of specific standards, can be controversial. The issues that parents and teachers have concerns about include the amount of federal involvement/incentives, the amount of testing, personal data collection, the percentage of literature vs. informative texts used, inclusion of phonics skills, and the specific difficulty levels of texts used in the classroom (Shanahan, 2015). While many critics debate how the standards should be used, few question the validity of having an academic standard at all.
What Are The Challenges in Using Standards?
When it comes to instructional design, Wiggins & McTighe point out a challenge in using the standards, which they call the “Goldilocks problem,” that some standards are written too vague and some are too specific to be useful to teachers (2005, p.61). To address these challenges, teachers are encouraged to “unpack” the standards, analyzing the expected understandings, knowledge, and skills required to meet the standard, how the standard fits in within a unit or curriculum, and even how they will fit in with a teacher’s personal pedagogy and goals for their class.
Identifying a standard as an end goal allows to teachers to work with common goals while allowing them the flexibility of how to get there, which we do through intentional instruction.
How Are Academic Standards Used?
In this example, the learning target for the lesson is “I can measure my shoe by using cubes.” This lesson supports student achievement of multiple standards in the domains of Counting & Cardinality and Measurement & Data. It is most aligned to meet CCSS Math Content Standard 1.MD.A.2:
“Express the length of an object as a whole number of length units, by laying multiple copies of a shorter object (the length unit) end to end; understand that the length measurement of an object is the number of same-size length units that span it with no gaps or overlaps.”
In this second example, the teacher has decided that students will be working on writing and composition skills, and she is familiar with the fourth grade state standards:
“CAS 3.b: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
CAS 3.b.i: Orient the reader by establishing a situation and introducing a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally.
CAS 3.b.ii: Choose planning strategies to support text structure and intended outcome.
CAS 3.b.iii: Use dialogue and description to develop experiences and events or show the responses of characters to situations.”
Students will need many skills to meet each of these writing standards, and it is not expected that they will all be taught in a single lesson. In this particular lesson, she hopes to answer the question, “How do authors hook the reader’s attention at the beginning of a narrative?” During the lesson, students learn how to write a powerful opening line for a narrative using writing hook strategies. Developing understanding of and the knowledge of how to apply a writing hook gives students yet another tool they can use to meet each of the writing standards.