Understanding and Applying Standards

Engineers are trained to use a specification to guide their work. Specifications are like standards in that they are statements with some detail that define the space an engineer can move in to create a very detailed and technical design. Standards define the themes and ideas a teacher has to turn into detailed development of student abilities. The term backwards design explicitly connects to engineering as design is basically looking at the need to develop the tool that fills that need. “Understanding by Design” is basically presenting the Engineering design approach in terms that are accessible to those in education. So from my training, backwards design and unpacking standards are the natural way of working. When I first worked in a school that allowed me to choose material, I used the NCTM standards for teaching Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Geometry. The NCTM standards are similar to the Common Core High School standards and overlap significantly. Consequently, I haven’t found unpacking a standard and creating objectives to be difficult. Perhaps the linear nature of Mathematics makes it relatively easy to translate a standard into a proficiency. The term “Creating multi-step equations” in the standards I chose makes it very easy to determine the proficiencies that build up to it. Students must learn what multi-step equations look like in words, tables and graphs, then, learn how to translate these forms into equations, then, learn how to solve them, before being able to create them from different real-world situations/contexts. I don’t think other subjects like Social Studies would be so simple to turn into proficiencies. Turning these proficiencies into activities was not as simple for me as I teach a process that extends two-step equations into multi-step equations. So the activities I choose in my teaching do not make such a clear distinction between the equation types as the standard. The two-step blurs into the multi-step because I want kids to see Math as a continuum that has an upwards arc. I really believe that cutting Math up into tiny pieces makes it harder to instill a growth mindset, because seeing the small parts encourages people to only take tiny steps and miss the “lightbulb” moments that really jump-start innovative thinking. Getting kids hooked on the lightbulb moment is so vital to creating a love of the subject.

Finding an activity is not the same as adapting it to the needs of students, and the adaptation is an area of concern for me. It is time-consuming to sift through several Mb of data to find something you can adapt. I have tried to talk to colleagues about the need to organize digital resources in a database or have a standardized naming system to search through to expedite finding resources, but no one wants to do it. It is a huge task, but it is not any more time consuming than opening digital files and sifting through them one-by-one to see if they are acceptable to one’s needs throughout the school year. The difficulty for me with this assignment came with finding the activities to use for developing skills and assessments because I assess a process. I don’t see standards as discrete things I should cover, as much as they define the complexity of the problems I assign students to extend their problem-solving process. The standards for Algebra 1 define the complexity of problems I should use until students become proficient enough to move on the next course. Breaking the standards in detailed tasks didn’t align with the complex multi-layered tasks I actually use in my teaching, so I couldn’t use what I taught. I had to sift through things again to find tasks for this assignment.

My big objective for this module is to create unit plans that my administrators can understand quickly. My previous plans have proven hard for peers and administrators to understand because my teaching of a process differs greatly from the approach conventionally trained American administrators and teachers use. Teaching Math as a process seems more accepted in the UK, than in the USA as the syllabi and resources I find from the UK lend themselves to process-led teaching far more readily than American resources. Consequently, my past plans and resources have been difficult for Americans to understand. My hope is that going through this unit will make my work more accessible to my peers and administrators so that we are better able to address student needs.