![]() Thus, the purpose of wrapping the priority standards is threefold: 1) to clearly identify what knowledge, skills and dispositions all children must know and be able to do, 2) to ensure teachers clearly understand the level of cognitive demand (rigor) and the learning tasks that are expressed explicitly or implicitly in the standard, and 3) to support identification of pre-requisite skills, academic vocabulary, instructional practices, and assessment strategies, as well as identification of any opportunities for intervention and enrichment. When teams are clear on the meaning of the standard there is no ambiguity around what students must learn. The need for clarity or collective clarity, and precision it creates, necessitates everyone on the team share a common understanding of the meaning of each standard. It’s another thing to thoroughly understand what it explicitly and implicitly indicates.” – Larry Ainsworth (2015) ![]() It’s one thing to read a standard and get a general sense of what it’s about. “There is the added challenge of really understanding what the standard means. The only way to mitigate the potential for variance in the process is to unwrap the standards and identify the highest leverage learning targets contained within each standard. Interpreting the standards differently defeats the purpose of Question 1 which is to create clear, consistent, and coherent commitments among the faculty around what all students must know and be able to do. They continue, “many are so dense and convoluted that they practically guarantee teachers will interpret them in different ways.” Their point is this if teachers interpret standards differently and emphasize different aspects of the standards during instruction, it is virtually impossible to guarantee all students will have access to the same rigorous curriculum. ![]() They represent a subset of the larger list of standards and help educators distinguish between those standards students “need to know” from others that are “nice to know.”ĭoug Reeves and Larry Ainsworth, point out that standards are often written in complex ways using confusing language and nearly every standard contains multiple learning targets. Whether they are called power standards, priority standards or promise standards, these statements represent what is absolutely essential all students know and be able to do. ![]() The importance of prioritizing the standards has previously been established (January/February 2014, Vol. In order to operationalize Question 1, teams must engage in a three-step process of prioritizing the standards to identify the most essential learning outcomes unwrapping, unpacking or deconstructing the standards to pin point the highest leverage learning targets and translating the learning targets into “I can” statements written in student friendly language. Post-assessments also help teachers see which students, if any, may need additional re-teachings and/or interventions of a standard.“Unwrapping the standards will provide them with a first step to better focus instruction on the concepts and skills students need for success.” -Ainsworth, (2002), p.213Īt its core, responding to Question 1 is about creating commitment on the part of the faculty that all students will master the most essential learning outcomes. Post-assessments are used to evaluate student learning, skill acquisition, and academic achievement at the conclusion of your defined instructional period. You administer pre-assessments in order to understand what students know and are able to do before you begin instruction. Pre-assess ments play an important role in your ability to differentiate instruction. I use these assessments as pre-assessments before teaching any of the standards, and then again as a post-assessments at the conclusion of my unit or teaching of the standard. If you are interested in learning more about my Student Data Tracking Binders and the tremendous growth I have seen in my classroom, click HERE to read more about them! If you are not using my Student Data Tracking Binders, you can still easily use these assessments in your classroom. Are you using my Student Data Tracking Binders in your classroom? If yes, these assessments are aligned perfectly to use with my tracking system in your classroom.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |