searching for standards

What Will I Teach?

The curriculum--the body of knowledge and skills that students are taught in school--is never static. But since the 1980s, a number of major trends have impelled educators to make especially significant changes to the K-12 curriculum in the various subject areas.

One of these trends is the call to provide students with learning experiences that are "authentic"--that closely resemble tasks that adults perform in real life. Another major trend is the standards movement, which seeks to define and apply clear standards for both content and performance in the disciplines. A third (and related) trend is the new sense of obligation to help all students achieve at a high level, rather than settling for the traditional bell curve.

These three trends, among others, have made an impact on what students are being taught in schools today. Curriculum developers and teachers have been hard pressed to keep up with the rapid changes in philosophy and goals. As an entry level teacher it will be important for you to understand how your college course work in your major and minor fields intersects with the national and state standards which have been articulated in your discipline--in short what you will be expected to teach, and how well prepared you are to do so!

From Revitalizing the Disciplines, ed. J. O'Neill and S. Willis, ASCD 1998, pp. vii-viii. .

Allan Glatthorn in his 1995 edition of Content of the Curriculum, clarified several dimensions in which the term "curriculum" is used in the professional literature (pp. 272-3):

Recommended curriculum is that which is recommended by experts in the field.

Written curriculum is that represented in curriculum documents intended to guide what is taught; such documents are produced by state education departments, district curriculum offices, and schools. In the past, those written curriculums seem to have paid little attention to the recommendations of experts.

Taught curriculum is that delivered by the classroom teacher. Recent research indicates that teachers tend to ignore the recommended curriculum and pay only limited attention to the written curriculum, checking it occasionally to see what the district wants taught.

Teachers are influenced far more by the tested curriculum, that which is embodied in state and district tests.

The supported curriculum is embedded in textbooks and software.

Finally, there is a large gap between the taught curriculum and the learned curriculum, what students actually learn from the teacher's instruction. The learned curriculum, of course, is the bottom-line target for effective teachers.

OTHER PROFESSIONAL VOCABULARY

Content Standards -- Statements that define expectations for students in terms of knowledge and skills. They identify what students are expected to learn in the various subjects as part of a good education. Content standards provide details for more general, abstract educational goals by specifying what thinkingand performing capabilities students should master and what knowledge they should possess.

Learning Benchmarks -- Points of reference used to gauge the progress of students toward meeting content standards, usually provided in terms of a grade level. Learning benchmarks give an idea of what students are expected to learn by a certain point in their schooling, without being so specific that they ignore variations in individual student progress or in the scope and sequence of curricular offerings.

Curriculum -- The description of how and what students will actually be taught in the relevant course(s) to achieve the objectives described in the content standards. The curriculum normally includes lesson plans or outlines, primary source materials, textbooks, videos, lectures, and other sources of information.

Performance Standards -- A description of the kind of mastery students are supposed to achieve, normally given in connection with a content standard. Content standards identify something to be learned; performance standards identify how well students are supposed to learn it. Performance standards sometimes identify more than one level of achievement for a content standard, and label each level accordingly (for example, basic, proficient, advanced).

The above four definitions are excerpted from Lauren Greene's A Parent's Guide to Understanding Academic Standards, Council for Basic Education, 1998, p. 3.

The Role of Standards

Standards-based education is a rapidly growing movement within the larger movement known as "educational reform". It is intimately tied to performance assessment. How this most readily impacts your life as a teacher candidate is that the Michigan State Board of Education has adopted--or is in the process of adopting--a series of content standards and performance indicators which you will be required to demonstrate competency. This means you must show a level of acceptable knowledge and skills before you will receive official certification to teach. These standards and performance assessments were not required of entry-level teachers just a decade ago!

Standards-based education calls for a clearer identification of what students should know and be able to do. The emphasis on clearer educational goals stems from the research finding that what students are taught in a specific subject and at a specific grade level varies greatly among schools, and even among classrooms within a school.

Indeed, this was the basic finding of many of the school effectiveness studies of the 1970s. For example, Fisher and colleagues (1978) reported that one elementary school teacher who was observed for more than ninety days taught nothing about fractions, despite the state mandate to teach the topic at that grade level. When asked about the omission of this topic, the teacher responded, "I don't like fractions." Similarly, Berliner (1979) reported a range of over 4,000 minutes (a low of 5,749 minutes and a high of 9,965 minutes) in the time spent on reading instruction in four 4th grade classes. Again, teacher preference was the basic reason behind the variation.

The standards-based education movement grows out of the assumption that the only way to ensure that all students acquire specific knowledge and skills is to identify and teach to expected levels of performance for specific knowledge and skills. Schools and districts that have embraced the standards-based movement have made a concerted effort to identify critical knowledge and skills. These efforts, however, have disclosed a number of basic issues that must be confronted by anyone engaged in standards-based education:

Curriculum Standards vs. Content Standards

Clarifying the distinction between curriculum standards and content standards is a basic issue in standards-based education. Curriculum standards, sometimes referred to as program standards, are best described as the goals of classroom instruction. Content standards, also known as "discipline" standards, comprise the knowledge and skills specific to a given subject matter area.

Knowledge and Skills vs. Performance

Some theorists describe standards in terms of knowledge and skills; others describe standards in terms of performance on specific tasks. Albert Shanker (1992) and Diane Ravitch (1992) proposed that identifying a standard involves identifying specific information or skills that must be mastered to gain expertise in a given domain. For Grant Wiggins (1989), a standard is a real-world highly robust task that will, ideally, elicit or require the use of important knowledge and skills in various content domains. From this viewpoint, standards should be "based on students' performance of concrete, meaningful tasks."

As you begin to examine the content standards and related benchmarks (expected performances at various grade/developmental levels) in your discipline, be aware of the overwhelming choices which confront teachers and curriculum developers. As Kendall and Marzano (1997) point out, if a district implemented all the standards and benchmarks recommended by subject experts, a student would have to demonstrate mastery of 1,541 benchmarks embedded within 157 standards.

This is a total that represents the mastery of three benchmarks each week. Since the large number of standards and benchmarks runs counter to the oft-repeated recommendation that curriculum emphasize depth, not coverage, Kendall and Marzano propose the following guidelines: 75 benchmarks for grades K-2; 125 for grades 3-5; 150 for grades 6-8; and 250 for grades 9-12.

From Assessing Student Outcomes by R. Marzano, D Pickering, and J. McTighe, 1993 (pp. 13-14).