Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Meeting the Standards
After creating Performance Based Task and Assessments to be taught at the secondary level and participating in a peer review of those PBTAs, you should be able to see a direct correlation among the state standards, NBPTS standards and the assessment tools you created. Your essential questions should also tie directly to your standards. Are these links necessary? Do they happen naturally for you? How can you make them more evident? More useful? What is your opinion of standards-based instruction?
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These links are neccessary because without the links you are essentially not testing your students on how they were taught. I have to confess that in math class our standards and forms of assement are relatively easy to connect. I believe it is important to have standars-based instruction; however, I believe that these should be minimums for our content areas and not absolutes. I also believe that these should change with the times and not become concrete and never change as our world progess.
The links are directly related to each essential question in order to ensure that the students are learning what they should, not just doing a flashy project. In math, the links happen very naturally. For example, the standard would say determine the surface area and volume of a rectangular prism. In my PBTA, I would hve my students find the surface area of a prism. I don't think I would be able to make the standard more evident. I think that standards-based instruction is very important in each content. It requires teachers to always be accountable for what they are teaching, shows administrators and parents what is being taught, and gives the students the instruction they need.
The links are very much necessary and without them you have no connection between what your teaching and if the student is learning what the standards require. Since I'm not a teacher yet these links are not natural and require effort on my part to make them happen and relevant. Making them more evident and useful is something I will work towards. Standards based instruction is very important and necessary as a platform to build on and not the ceiling that we stop at.
The links are necessary. They don't always happen naturally for me. It depends on what the lesson is. Most of the standards are a necessary part of music education, but there are things that get left out, in favor of supposed "more important ones" and limited time. If I have a performance coming up, I am daily teaching students about pitch, rhythm, scales, etc. I may "forget" to bring up elements of theory and history. In music, everything is performance based, which is supposedly good, but we often teach to the performance (or test), which supposedly isn't. Standards-based teaching is important; otherwise, what is the point of having standards? I do think standards should be carefully re-evaluated often, though, to be sure that each standard is still relevant.
These links are definitely necessary. The purpose behind an essential question is to make sure that your students are being tested on what they are taught. These links do not come naturally to me as I am not a classroom teacher and have not had the opportunity to practice creating them. I think that standards based instruction is a good idea as it requires teachers to be responsible and make sure that students are being taught the material necessary.
The links between PBTAs and state standards are directly related in Business Education. It is very easy to use project-based learning in business education because that is basically what Business Ed. is based on. The links between these are like a guide as to how what should be taught. The standards are like the back bone in teaching without these standards teachers could be teaching something that is not relevant to their content area. I think that Business Ed. standards should be updated more than the content areas because technology is constantly changing and so the curriculum needs to change too.
I feel that it is very important for the standards to link well and connect successfully. In my content, standards are pretty much the same so they line up well with each other. But I also feel that way too much emphasis is put on certain standards and especially in my content area it sometimes limits what I could teach if I could reach outside the standards a little more easily. I think that the standards, eventhough it would be very hard on teachers, should change with the times and make some adjustments as to open more doors of opportunity for the content areas who could really explore. I could continue on this forever because I feel the standards are based around the tests in which we are required to give and I feel that there is way too much emphasis on these tests. I think our students would be smarter if they could just be taught and not have to be taught to a test. Maybe they could create a test school somewhere and just allow these teachers to be teachers and then test these students and see how well they do compared to the students who are taught to the test.
If there is no link between the standard and the essential question, why ask? There must be a link between what you teach and what the standards say the student should be learning. The standards for science are very evident in the material and are easy to incorporate. Standards-based instruction give a great starting point for instruction and is a good guideline for what needs to be covered. But, it is important to remember that it is not all that is necessary, just a minimum.
I do believe that the links are necessary. I can see how if they don't match you may think you are teaching the necessary standards, but missing them by doing fun activities to motivate students. As for myself I feel it is a little different seeing that I deal with small elementary children on a day to day basis. I see how some of the fun activities that I use can miss the standard. However, I do think if I go back and revamp my ideas, I can make it connect. I believe that the connections are there sometimes. It is just according to what I teach. I am a young teacher and have a lot of learning to do. Some connections are easier than others. Even though music is a performance based subject, it is not so performanced based at the elementary age. I am building a foundation and sometimes all they want is the students to be able to identify a concept. This makes it harder to make it performanced based. I do beleive that standard-based instruction is important as long as the standards are up to date and applicable to all. For example, when teaching elementary students we see them a very minimum time a week. Some school systems get more times than others with their students a week. Also, many of use are responsible for way to may programs for PTO. When all this is considered,saidly, it is hard to cover all standards. I wish I saw my kids at least twice a week instead of once a week for 35 mintues. I need more time to cover the standards.
I definitely think the link between assessment and standards is essential. But, not all of the parts do not come naturally to me. Maybe it is because I am not a teacher and do not have the experience. The essential questions have been hard for me to develop. I do not ever remember having a teacher in school that told me how this was important to me and my life. But, I did have some really good teachers. I have a tendency to want to teach how I was taught and I am fighting it.
After looking closely at the Alabama course of study & the broad general standards for the national boards standards, I see how more focused the lesson plans are. When I did my student teaching I only had to relate to the state standards & after a while I got relaxed in that becuase the cooperating teacher had the course of study objective already outline for each lesson, but I was not too sure that it had been updated with the change. So I know now that correlation is a great way to conect lessons & bring a better learning atmosphere, because you know what you are trying to teach & what lasting impression you want on the students.
Standards based instruction can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing. Constantly drilling standards = Bad
Interweaving standards into enduring questions = good. Having standards that link to essential questions allows for continuity and allows students to be tested on what they learned. I think standards should be viewed as more of a guide instead of being viewed creative thinking demolisher.
I believe that these essential questions are important to the student, but they are not always an easy thing to create. I am in my fourth year of teaching and looking at the standards and what I am required to teach sometimes creates a problem because I can't always tell a student why it is important. I still fight against teaching the way I was taught. I know that I definitely need to focus on this more in my teaching.
I do believe in standards-based instruction because students need to have basic skills in order to move through today's society.
I think the links as a whole are important simply due to the element of cohesiveness they provide. With a system of public education as geographically and numerically expansive as the American system, I think it is vital to lay a basic framework for all content taught in the classroom.
However, I believe that state standards should be seen as that: a framework, not the extent of what is to be taught. While it is true that much of the material transferred in state standards is enriching to the lives of students, it is also true that enrichment comes from lessons created and taught independently by individual teachers in individual classrooms.
It is important to have that connection between lesson plan and standard, but I do not think the standards should serve as a boundary to the creativity or expectations of individual teachers working with individual classes. Teachers should have that freedom to experiment in the classroom. It is only with experimentation that new and better standards can be created.
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