Intersection of Standards and Competencies in Practice

Video Transcription

Hello, everyone, and welcome. This lesson is called Intersection of Standards and Competencies in Practice.

The goal is to demonstrate how the many standards that teachers are responsible for addressing often overlap. And a well crafted lesson or unit can address more than one in an authentic and engaging way. So let's get started.

First, let's review some of the terms. When we discuss standards, there are really two main types to consider. First, we have content standards. Those tell us what the students are expected to know by the end of the year.

Then we have practice standards. Those tell us what we expect students to be able to do by the end of the year. Both are written as grade levels or spans.

For example, with the Common Core State Standards, they're written as grade levels all the way to grade eight. Then nine and 10 are combined, as are 11 and 12.

The technology standards for teachers and students are written by the International Society for Technology in Education. Those are an exception. Those standards are common to all grades.

Unlike standards, skills and competencies are smaller, discrete, and connected to the objective of the lesson. And those objectives or targets are built from the standards and competencies from individual lessons or units.

We've all heard the expression, "You have to learn how to walk before you can run." The premise behind this well-known saying is, of course, that in order to achieve an ultimate goal you need to achieve some smaller milestones along the way.

I have a former student who has always wanted to be a sports broadcaster. Living in the same town in which I teach offers me the opportunity to stay in touch with students and their families and watch them grow.

I remember as a fourth grader, he would impersonate famous baseball announcers. In middle school, he volunteered to be a PA announcer for the town's Little League games.

In high school, he was a sports anchor for the school's morning show. During the summer months, he traveled with an amateur baseball team and announced their games and recorded statistics. Today, he's a college senior and is the sideline reporter for a major university's football team.

This is more than just a story of an individual who has a goal and take steps to achieve it. In many ways, it's the perfect model for designing units and lessons as well. We start with where we want to end up, and take small steps, and measure growth along the way.

In this lesson, we'll walk through the alignment and connection between subject standards. We'll do so looking at an elementary example and then a secondary example.

In this first example, we'll look at three standards taken from the three following disciplines-- English language arts, science, and technology. The ELA standard is taken from the Common Core, the science standard is taken from the Next Generation Science Standards, and the technology standard is taken from ISTE.

We'll begin with the NGSS standard. And it's a content standard. It's something that students need to know by the end of the year.

In this case, they need to know about the behavior of parents and offspring as it relates to survival. Within that content standard, there are some performance standards as well-- things that they are expected to know how to do-- like read texts and use media. These are the areas I want my lessons to focus on.

I would be providing students with an opportunity to read texts and play with an app I discovered called Animals 360. Using these two resources, students will be asked to compare animals with their offspring, thus addressing both the Common Core State Standard for reading as well as the NGSS standard.

Teachers need to continue to practice integrating technology, as opposed to simply using technology. In this lesson, I might do so by having children-- with the help of the teachers, of course-- visit various websites for zoos and ask questions to the zookeepers.

This can be done using Twitter, Skype, email, or any number of platforms. As you can see, by simply becoming familiar with the standards, you can create opportunities that are engaging for learners and will address these standards.

Next I'll show you how this might work at the secondary level as well. For this example, I've decided to replace the ELA standard with one from the math Common Core. Feel free to pause the video here to look them over and maybe even give some thought to how you might go about planning these lessons.

I'll start once again with the content. In this case, it's about forecasting catastrophic events and developing technologies to mitigate their effects. The embedded performance standard is that students analyze and interpret data.

That brings us right to the math standard that I've chosen from the seventh grade Common Core. It asks students to find probabilities of events. Perfect.

By researching and analyzing data of natural disasters in a specified location, students may be able to draw some conclusions. But wait, we're not finished yet.

In addition to using technology to find the information, the next step could be for them to process and report the results. Again using any number of digital platforms available, thus addressing this ISTE standard for students to apply digital tools to locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a variety of sources in media-- and also process that data and report the results.

So let's quickly summarize what we did in this lesson. We started by defining our terms. And then we looked at two examples of intersection in practice-- one from grade one and one from grade seven.

Here's today's food for thought. Reflect on a lesson that you recently taught. Are there any changes or tweaks that you could make to it in order to address additional standards?

Now it's your turn to apply what you've learned in this video. The additional resources section will be super helpful. This section is designed to help you discover ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description so you can easily target the resources that you want.

As always, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.