Work & Academics

Standards-Based Curriculum and Instruction

In the education world, there is a slight but significant contradiction in the implementation of standards: one purpose of standards is to serve as a guide to ensure that everyone receives a comparable education—but the standards are not easily understood by all stakeholders. Perhaps most importantly, it is highly unlikely that a student given a copy of the standards for a given subject area would be able to decipher anything about what is expected of them. As there is a movement in contemporary education to adopt a practice of stating objectives clearly for students prior to a lesson this paper is an exercise in paraphrasing the third-grade writing standards for the State of California into everyday language that would be more easily understood by third-grade students. While it may be arguable that even the following can be overwhelming for third-grade students, one expected result of paraphrasing the standards in more accessible language is that students will be able to discuss the expectations more easily. The text for the original standards can be found in the appendix.

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Standards-Based Curriculum and Instruction

Communication is extremely important, especially for a busy teacher. Teachers must communicate on many levels with different stakeholders. For example, communication with administrators and colleagues are likely to look critically at the overall operations of the integrated scholastic environment including curriculum decisions or sharing procedural ideas. Communication with students may often focus on the level of comprehension of the materials. This is not only in the delivery of the instruction, but also in the non-verbal communication that can offer feedback about the direction a course is going. Parents are another group with whom teachers are likely to have regular contact. In some ways, parents are the most challenging group to have effective communication with—teachers may find that parents have inadequate information about curriculum and instruction, making it difficult to verbalize performance standards. In an era when educational reforms are taking place, “clarity” for parents may be even more confusing, but if used properly, standards can be used to help reinforce communication with parents.

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