Standards, Competencies, and Objectives

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for standards, competencies, and objectives. By the end of today's tutorial, we will be able to answer the following essential questions. What are standards, competencies, and unit objectives? How do objectives support competencies? And how to competencies support learning standards?

To begin, we're going to talk about standards. Standards are broad, overarching goals that will define the semester, the unit, or the year. It's what the teacher teaches and the students learn.

There are many national organizations that have academic standards published. These include things like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics or the National Council of Teachers of English. And these standards are often presented in grade-level bands, such as six through eight or nine through 12.

There are two main types of standards. One is a content standard, and this is the actual content that students should learn. So an example of this would be reading and comprehending grade-level material. And then, there's a process standard, and a process standard is the way that students should go about learning the content. For example, through problem solving or communicating with others.

All states have academic standards that have been published that their students must meet. Almost all states use the Common Core State Standards, or CCSS. Also important in this 21st century setting are the International Society for Technology in Education Standards, and this organization publishes standards for teachers and students. And these are essentially, what you need to know in the digital world. So they're digital knowledge and skills.

Competencies are statements of skills. And these are essentially, what the students should be able to demonstrate on an independent and long-term basis. So they're actually smaller pieces of a larger goal, and that goal is usually, the standard.

I've created a chart that shows the example. The competencies are in bold. The first competency is for a first grade level. And it is that we would make predictions about what might happen next in a story. And this is connected directly to the standard of first grade speaking and listening comprehension. And that would be a Common State Standard.

The next example is that students would be able to read and understand Shakespeare. And this connects to the standard of by the end of grade 10, students should be able to read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems at the high end of the grades nine through 10 text complexity band independently and proficiently.

Then we have unit objectives. Unit objectives are the specific knowledge or skill within that smaller time frame. And it supports the identified competency and standard. When teachers develop unit objectives, they should ask themselves the question-- what do I want my students to be able to do by the end of the unit? These unit objectives should be observable and measurable because we want to base are teaching off of data.

And a lot of times, teachers use SMART goals to create their unit objectives. SMART goals is actually an acronym for a type of goal. So the S stands for a specific-- it's a specific goal. M stands for measurable. Can I measure this and collect data from it?

A-- achievable. Is it achievable for my group of students? R-- relevant. Is it relevant to not only what I'm teaching in the classroom and the standards that I'm teaching, but to my students culturally and grade-level-wise? And time bound-- in what time frame will my students achieve this goal?

Let's look at two different sample unit objectives. The first sample unit objective reads-- after completing this unit, the students will be able to retell narrative stories in his or her own words using the language of the author and following proper sequence. This has several aspects of the SMART goal.

It is specific. It is relevant to what the students are learning. It's definitely achievable for a group of students who's working on retelling stories. It is measurable because this is something that you can actually measure-- is the student able to do it?

Another sample objective is after completing this unit, the students will be able to construct picture graphs, bar graphs, and line graphs to display the data they have collected. Again, this is specific, especially with the types of graphs that they are creating. It's measurable-- the teacher is going to be able to tell whether or not students can do it or how many students can do each graph. It's achievable. It's relevant because the students are studying graphs. And it is time bound because we know it's taking place after the completion of the unit.

Let's take a moment to talk about the relationship between standards, competencies, and objectives. We'll begin by looking at the relationship between standards and competencies. Standards and competencies are linked, and normally, a standard is like the outline of knowledge or the outline of the skills that the students should know by the end of the school year in a content area, such as the standards set forth by the National Council of English Teachers. So a teacher would use standards for an entire course, but they would use competencies at the unit level.

Moving onto standards versus objectives. Standards and objectives are less closely related than standards and competencies because standards are, again, very broad. It's the course level, and objectives are very specific. However, they both do address content and skills. Standards just address these at the course level, working towards the end of the year. And objectives do it at the lesson level. So you can see where we go standards are yearly end of course level, competencies are unit level, and objectives are lesson level.

That moves us onto objectives versus competencies. Objectives include both content and skills. And the big difference here is that competencies focus mostly on measurable skills only. So we care a little bit less about the content with a competency than we do the measurable skill.

Let's look at a unit example. So this is for grade level three, and the subject is mathematics, specifically geometry. So the standard that I've taken here is the Common Core State Standard. And this is just how a Common Core State Standard would look written out when you're writing your lesson plans.

So it says Common Core State Standard. Math is the area. The content is for grade three. And GA stands for geometry.

So the overriding standard here is that students should be able to reason with shapes and their attributes. So the competencies that I want my students to be able to walk away from this year being able to do in the long-term and independently is divide a variety of shapes into equal areas and create fractions based on shape division. The learning objective for this small unit is that students will learn to divide a square into four equal parts.

So as you can see, we start at the very high level, where it's a broad overarching standard. We narrow it down to the long-term independent action that the student can do. And then we narrow it down even further to the learning objective of, what will the student be able to do at the end of the unit? And these are just some standards competencies objectives of a larger unit.

How do standards, competencies, and objectives look in a one-to-one environment. In a one-to-one environment, students are working at their own pace. So the goals are going to be self-paced. You're also going to see a lot of technology tools used in a one-to-one environment to help the students meet these objectives and competencies and standards.

And this is actually going to provide differentiation. This might look like station rotation, where students are working in small groups. And in those small groups, the teacher might go to one group and do a little bit of direct instruction, while another group works independently, and another group does some research. And then, essentially, the teacher makes his or her way around to each group. And each group, at a different point in time, is doing a different activity to meet the objective.

It could also look like a workshop model. Or it could be self-paced where the students are learning online.

The teachers are also using digital formative assessments in a one-to-one environment where students are meeting the objectives at their own pace. For the secondary classroom, some resources to help with those digital formative assessments are Google Classroom and Schoololgy. For the elementary classroom, Google Classroom and Schoololgy are just two of many. You can also use Learnzillion, Mastery Connect, and TenMarks.

Let's reflect. Do your competencies and learning objectives reflect the definition given in this tutorial? And what set of standards do you use to guide learning and lesson planning in your classroom? Remember we talked about the ISTE Standards, the Common Core State Standards, or NCTE Standards, for example.

To review, today we answered the following a central questions-- what are standards, competencies, and unit objectives? How do objectives support competencies? And how do competencies support learning standards? To dive a little deeper and learn how to apply this information, be sure to check out the Additional Resources section associated with this video. This is where you'll find links targeted towards helping you discover more ways to apply this course material.

Thank you for joining me. And happy teaching.