Monday, May 10, 2010

Reflecting on Standards

There is a push towards the use of standards throughout the educational framework. At the community college level in California, we are calling this Student Learning Objectives, and may be based on campus wide goals (such as Effective Communication) or on more course-specific objectives. I personally see a need for more vertical communication and alignment around many of these standards. What competency on standards for math, language, and science should I expect my beginning students to have? Drawing from NCLB alone, I don’t come up with very clear, distinct answers.

The new bottom-up movement called the Common Core State Standards Initiative may offer a new approach. Rather than being directed from the federal level, like NCLB, these “national standards” are developed by state leaders, and individual states can adopt them and their accountability measures. My preliminary research suggests that California is “in”. I agree with Kepner (2010) that if this effort is to be effective, there is much that needs to happen before we are ready for national standards. There are a wealth of diversity and preparation issues prevalent across the United States, and I feel that it may first be critical to bring the lowest performing third of the states up closer to the mean of performance. This will require reform across the grade-levels and curriculum, teacher professional development and carefully designed accountability measures.

Like Kepner (2010), I am likewise wary of the possibility that national standards will lead to a lock-step approach. I feel that the best way to avoid this is perhaps by condensing content specific standards, and perhaps group standards around essential questions in a backward-planning approach. (Wiggins and McTighe, 2001) This should still allow some of the teaching freedom teachers typically thrive with.

Personally, I found the Key NCTM Process Standards to be worthy of posting NOW in my college classrooms. Many of my general education students struggle with these skills:
-Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
-Reason abstractly and quantitatively
-Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
-Model with mathematics
-Use appropriate tools strategically
-Attend to precision
-Look for and make use of structure
-Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning

Kepner, Henry S. 2010. Educated Opinions: A Math Perspective on the Common Core Standards Initiative. NSTA Reports Vol 21 No 9 (May 2010)

Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe. 2001. Understanding by Design. Prentice Hall.

1 comment:

Plumbago said...

Ooh - I see you've got modelling in there. Have you considered this most excellent modelling resource ...

http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/jmodels/

:-)

Only useful if you're doing global scale (or oceanic) nutrient (or carbon) cycling, but we use it here quite a lot. It should run on most computing platforms (that was the original idea!).