First post? Sweeeeet. I learned that by engaging with the standards that govern my discipline, standards are insanely useful in directing student learning as well as teacher performance. They could be used as a guide when formulating lesson and unit plans, or they could be used as a reference during the school year; I'd imagine they are used as both in a contemporary school setting. This will influence me as a professional educator by holding me accountable as well as giving me a guided and informed direction in planning!
By doing the standards analysis, I learned that things that should be out in the open aren't always, like the authors of RIPTS. I had only glanced at the UCLA National History Standards before this and after spending some more intimate time with them, I can see myself designing units and lessons around them. I never really had a strong feeling on standards before this lesson but now, I feel that if a set is written well, takes into account all students and not just one group, and is adaptable to a classroom setting, I'd feel comfortable using them. Too often, it's easy to shun standards as just bad. As an educator, I need to be able to make judgments on my own and the only way to do that is to be informed. This analysis gave me the tools and the questions I need to ask myself when looking at standards I'll be teaching in the future.
I learned a lot about standards through conducting interviews wiht other teachers. Unfortunately, i didnt find the answers I was looking for. The importance of standards in general education was made very clear but how they fit into special education was cloudy. I couldn't get a direct answer from anyone i spoke to and felt that the website gave a lot of indirect information that still didnt answer my question. Researching the standards myself i agreed with them at least for my subject. However, i felt that there needs to be more flexibility in there use. More specifically, i felt that standards should be applied more towards functioning level instead of grade level within the special education population. I heard stories of teachers administering tests and assessments in 7th grade content to students functioning at a 3rd grade level,and how they felt that it was a complete waste of time knowing it was a guaranteed failure.
This assignment taught me that standards can be useful tools. They provide direction and can be used as a guide for teachers. After reading a few of the Next Generation Science Standards, I could see incorporating them into my classroom. They seem pretty straight forward and clear. According the Next Generation Science Standards website, science teachers did have a role in developing the standards. This information was made clearer than when we did our research on the RIPTS. Although they can be useful, when standards are linked to standardize testing, there seems to be many consequences for students. There has to be a better way to test whether students are meeting expectations. One thing in one of my science education courses we spoke about is, knowing science verses doing science. Too often school focuses on having kids read from textbooks and memorizing facts and definitions. However, students can learn just has much from actually doing science as a process. Knowing facts doesn’t really test a student’s understanding, but rather tests their memory. For example, if a test asks what makes a windup toy move and expects students to answer energy proves nothing except that the child can memorize a word. However, asking the same question, and having a child be able to respond “the sun feeds plants, which we eat, which gives us the ability to wind the toy which makes it move” shows that a child has been able to think of the process of which energy was transferred to the toy. Standardized tests and especially multiple choice questions discourage deeper thought and explanation.
I realized before we started this assignment that not only was I not really sure where I stood in regards to standards, but that I wasn’t really familiar with the standards at all. Through the research I did in preparing to write the speech, I saw a great deal of direction and purpose, at least as far as the English standards go (I didn’t do much research on the other content standards). What I found, if you had a few minutes to kill and watched my video, is that there are a lot of answers to the “why” questions you hear from students and parents. “Why are we learning this? Why does it matter? When will I ever use this?” I think that the work I did on this assignment will significantly impact me as an educator, because the standards also hold a lot of answers to the questions that I, as a teacher, would ask about curriculum: “What am I supposed to do with this curriculum? How can I use this most effectively? What do I want my students to take away from this?” I think I will find myself looking to learn even more about the standards and beginning to really dig in and start unpacking how they function as I move forward. Overall, what I had originally expected to be a fairly dry and tedious assignment, actually turned out to be quite enlightening and useful in terms of professional development.
Standards. This topic feels like such a giant mountain to climb. I'm grateful for this assignment, because it forced me to climb that beast more than I had before! The RIPTS standards seem like common sense--the kinds of things I want to learn and the things I want the people teaching my children to be able to do. That being said, the fact that I COULD NOT find the person or people who wrote them is a little un-nerving. I did appreciate seeing the people who made up the board that reviews and updates the standards, and that there are teachers, administrators, and even students on that board. The Common Core standards are a little tedious, but I very much liked the NCTE standards for English teachers. Those feel like contemporary, socially and culturally conscious goals for English teachers. I do wonder, though...will I use the standards to create a curriculum, or plan a curriculum and fit the standards to it? Do teachers meet every standard in their classrooms? Does it count as meeting a standard if not every student reaches that level of proficiency? Is growth toward one of the standards enough? I'm just not sure! I'm very happy, though, that we are looking at these now, and familiarizing ourselves with the standards to which we will be held as teachers.
Standards are a difficult topic to tackle no matter how you look at it. Of course you want your students to learn all that is required of them before moving on to the next grade or even college, but that doesn't mean you should blindly teach from the book. We need to engage with our students and understand where they're coming from before quizzing them on similes. One thing I learned from this assignment was that there are not only student standards, but teacher standards as well. The state requires teachers meet certain skills as well, such as communicating with students to open classroom discussion and creating effective learning environments. I hope that some of these will come naturally in my teaching, but I will consult these standards if I need a refresher. These standards will influence me as an educator by providing a guideline on how my classroom should be run.
While doing this assignment, I realized that standards are way more complex than I had originally thought. At the same time, I learned that standards are very useful to teachers and students. The RIPTS were easy to understand and at some points seemed to be common sense to us as future teachers. The requirements it stated are things that every teacher should strive to achieve. The history content standards also seemed similar. Looking at these standards also made me realize how challenging it will be to ensure that I am preparing my students for success in the future. These standards will influence me as a future educator by leading me in the right direction when it comes to how I should be preparing my students and helping them learn what is expected of them.
I learned a lot about standards over the course of completing this assignment, especially the standards for English/Language Arts. I was very pleasantly surprised at the goals these standards are aiming to achieve for students, and I really feel as though if these standards can be met, we will be preparing a generation of global citizens who have both the knowledge and the skills to not only be personally successful, but to also create a better world for us all.
I was completely unsure how I really felt about standards before I did this assignment. I am glad that I focused on what I really wanted to - the civics and government strand of social studies - because reading the standards made a million lesson plan ideas run through my head. It's easy for an adult like you or I to take a stance on standards after reading through them or doing the research we had to do. So, I thought it was important to take a stance FOR standards TO students. My biggest challenge was when I was proofreading it I was like "eh this sounds kind of cheesy or this sounds repetitive" and I had to remember at those instances that it is STUDENTS that are going to be reading this. I put myself in the shoes of a teacher in a classroom introducing the course to her students. I liked doing this because I made a brochure a lot more personal.. something I will perhaps even use in the future. As I explained standards to the students, I liked using the word GOALS. If you give a teenager a goal, he/she is going to WANT to achieve it. Standards sound boring, but in reality the GOALS for learning expectations that the standards create are completely achievable with the right teacher, curriculum, lesson, and drive.
This started off as what seemed to be an insurmountable task but turned out to be excellent. By no means do I feel like an expert but my toolbox has become heavier. You always hear about standards, standards, standards but not many people ever truly delve into what they are and why we have them. I personally did not research them prior to this, even as a prospective teacher. But after doing this exercise and getting my feet wet I can say that I can at least have a constructive conversation about the topic now.
The way I look at it is that standards are an agreement. They are a set of skills that many educated and respected people have collaboratively designed in order to make sure our children are all being steered in the same direction. And anyone can get active and have influence over the process if they want. Whether that is through the Dept. of Education, political avenues, or even through the R.I. board of education. Everyone and anyone can be a part of the process. From a teacher's perspective I find them very helpful also. By having standards, you keep teachers from essentially going too fast or too slow. As an educator there are now milestones you must make sure to fulfill for every student. It's a guiding light, so to speak.
Not only have the standards influenced me positively as a future teacher but this exercise has also exposed me to the national and state websites and resources that are critical to my future profession. I am now pretty comfortable in navigating through the RIDE website and also the Common Core national standards website. At first it was like reading a foreign language, but by the end of this exercise, the standards started to make more and more sense to me. Undoubtedly, the standards will help me and guide me to the critical formative and summative assessments that my students will need.
This standards analysis really motivated me to completely dive into what standards are and how effective they are. I really enjoyed learning about the RIPTS. They are a set of standards that I personally wish to fulfill as a teacher. Interestingly enough we don't know who they were developed by and that will still strike my curiosity until I find out! The NCTE standards are great. They do not limit instruction for teachers but provide them with guiding points. One pro of having national standards, is that they provide a basic framework from which teachers can work off of and with. Also, they provide a set of broad common principles to which every instructor is held responsible for. With this, its is hopeful that from east to west, every school aims towards the same general direction in this content area. A con is that not every school is the same nationwide, and the standards are not personalized for each student. They are generalized. As I further teacher I will definitely do my best to follow the RIPTS, and follow national standards.
First post? Sweeeeet. I learned that by engaging with the standards that govern my discipline, standards are insanely useful in directing student learning as well as teacher performance. They could be used as a guide when formulating lesson and unit plans, or they could be used as a reference during the school year; I'd imagine they are used as both in a contemporary school setting. This will influence me as a professional educator by holding me accountable as well as giving me a guided and informed direction in planning!
ReplyDeleteBy doing the standards analysis, I learned that things that should be out in the open aren't always, like the authors of RIPTS. I had only glanced at the UCLA National History Standards before this and after spending some more intimate time with them, I can see myself designing units and lessons around them. I never really had a strong feeling on standards before this lesson but now, I feel that if a set is written well, takes into account all students and not just one group, and is adaptable to a classroom setting, I'd feel comfortable using them. Too often, it's easy to shun standards as just bad. As an educator, I need to be able to make judgments on my own and the only way to do that is to be informed. This analysis gave me the tools and the questions I need to ask myself when looking at standards I'll be teaching in the future.
ReplyDeleteI learned a lot about standards through conducting interviews wiht other teachers. Unfortunately, i didnt find the answers I was looking for. The importance of standards in general education was made very clear but how they fit into special education was cloudy. I couldn't get a direct answer from anyone i spoke to and felt that the website gave a lot of indirect information that still didnt answer my question. Researching the standards myself i agreed with them at least for my subject. However, i felt that there needs to be more flexibility in there use. More specifically, i felt that standards should be applied more towards functioning level instead of grade level within the special education population. I heard stories of teachers administering tests and assessments in 7th grade content to students functioning at a 3rd grade level,and how they felt that it was a complete waste of time knowing it was a guaranteed failure.
ReplyDeleteThis assignment taught me that standards can be useful tools. They provide direction and can be used as a guide for teachers. After reading a few of the Next Generation Science Standards, I could see incorporating them into my classroom. They seem pretty straight forward and clear. According the Next Generation Science Standards website, science teachers did have a role in developing the standards. This information was made clearer than when we did our research on the RIPTS.
ReplyDeleteAlthough they can be useful, when standards are linked to standardize testing, there seems to be many consequences for students. There has to be a better way to test whether students are meeting expectations. One thing in one of my science education courses we spoke about is, knowing science verses doing science. Too often school focuses on having kids read from textbooks and memorizing facts and definitions. However, students can learn just has much from actually doing science as a process. Knowing facts doesn’t really test a student’s understanding, but rather tests their memory. For example, if a test asks what makes a windup toy move and expects students to answer energy proves nothing except that the child can memorize a word. However, asking the same question, and having a child be able to respond “the sun feeds plants, which we eat, which gives us the ability to wind the toy which makes it move” shows that a child has been able to think of the process of which energy was transferred to the toy. Standardized tests and especially multiple choice questions discourage deeper thought and explanation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-923fKXFy10
ReplyDeleteI realized before we started this assignment that not only was I not really sure where I stood in regards to standards, but that I wasn’t really familiar with the standards at all. Through the research I did in preparing to write the speech, I saw a great deal of direction and purpose, at least as far as the English standards go (I didn’t do much research on the other content standards). What I found, if you had a few minutes to kill and watched my video, is that there are a lot of answers to the “why” questions you hear from students and parents. “Why are we learning this? Why does it matter? When will I ever use this?”
I think that the work I did on this assignment will significantly impact me as an educator, because the standards also hold a lot of answers to the questions that I, as a teacher, would ask about curriculum: “What am I supposed to do with this curriculum? How can I use this most effectively? What do I want my students to take away from this?” I think I will find myself looking to learn even more about the standards and beginning to really dig in and start unpacking how they function as I move forward.
Overall, what I had originally expected to be a fairly dry and tedious assignment, actually turned out to be quite enlightening and useful in terms of professional development.
Standards. This topic feels like such a giant mountain to climb. I'm grateful for this assignment, because it forced me to climb that beast more than I had before! The RIPTS standards seem like common sense--the kinds of things I want to learn and the things I want the people teaching my children to be able to do. That being said, the fact that I COULD NOT find the person or people who wrote them is a little un-nerving. I did appreciate seeing the people who made up the board that reviews and updates the standards, and that there are teachers, administrators, and even students on that board. The Common Core standards are a little tedious, but I very much liked the NCTE standards for English teachers. Those feel like contemporary, socially and culturally conscious goals for English teachers. I do wonder, though...will I use the standards to create a curriculum, or plan a curriculum and fit the standards to it? Do teachers meet every standard in their classrooms? Does it count as meeting a standard if not every student reaches that level of proficiency? Is growth toward one of the standards enough? I'm just not sure! I'm very happy, though, that we are looking at these now, and familiarizing ourselves with the standards to which we will be held as teachers.
ReplyDeleteStandards are a difficult topic to tackle no matter how you look at it. Of course you want your students to learn all that is required of them before moving on to the next grade or even college, but that doesn't mean you should blindly teach from the book. We need to engage with our students and understand where they're coming from before quizzing them on similes. One thing I learned from this assignment was that there are not only student standards, but teacher standards as well. The state requires teachers meet certain skills as well, such as communicating with students to open classroom discussion and creating effective learning environments. I hope that some of these will come naturally in my teaching, but I will consult these standards if I need a refresher. These standards will influence me as an educator by providing a guideline on how my classroom should be run.
ReplyDeleteWhile doing this assignment, I realized that standards are way more complex than I had originally thought. At the same time, I learned that standards are very useful to teachers and students. The RIPTS were easy to understand and at some points seemed to be common sense to us as future teachers. The requirements it stated are things that every teacher should strive to achieve. The history content standards also seemed similar. Looking at these standards also made me realize how challenging it will be to ensure that I am preparing my students for success in the future. These standards will influence me as a future educator by leading me in the right direction when it comes to how I should be preparing my students and helping them learn what is expected of them.
ReplyDeleteI learned a lot about standards over the course of completing this assignment, especially the standards for English/Language Arts. I was very pleasantly surprised at the goals these standards are aiming to achieve for students, and I really feel as though if these standards can be met, we will be preparing a generation of global citizens who have both the knowledge and the skills to not only be personally successful, but to also create a better world for us all.
ReplyDeleteI was completely unsure how I really felt about standards before I did this assignment. I am glad that I focused on what I really wanted to - the civics and government strand of social studies - because reading the standards made a million lesson plan ideas run through my head. It's easy for an adult like you or I to take a stance on standards after reading through them or doing the research we had to do. So, I thought it was important to take a stance FOR standards TO students. My biggest challenge was when I was proofreading it I was like "eh this sounds kind of cheesy or this sounds repetitive" and I had to remember at those instances that it is STUDENTS that are going to be reading this. I put myself in the shoes of a teacher in a classroom introducing the course to her students. I liked doing this because I made a brochure a lot more personal.. something I will perhaps even use in the future. As I explained standards to the students, I liked using the word GOALS. If you give a teenager a goal, he/she is going to WANT to achieve it. Standards sound boring, but in reality the GOALS for learning expectations that the standards create are completely achievable with the right teacher, curriculum, lesson, and drive.
ReplyDeleteThis started off as what seemed to be an insurmountable task but turned out to be excellent. By no means do I feel like an expert but my toolbox has become heavier. You always hear about standards, standards, standards but not many people ever truly delve into what they are and why we have them. I personally did not research them prior to this, even as a prospective teacher. But after doing this exercise and getting my feet wet I can say that I can at least have a constructive conversation about the topic now.
ReplyDeleteThe way I look at it is that standards are an agreement. They are a set of skills that many educated and respected people have collaboratively designed in order to make sure our children are all being steered in the same direction. And anyone can get active and have influence over the process if they want. Whether that is through the Dept. of Education, political avenues, or even through the R.I. board of education. Everyone and anyone can be a part of the process. From a teacher's perspective I find them very helpful also. By having standards, you keep teachers from essentially going too fast or too slow. As an educator there are now milestones you must make sure to fulfill for every student. It's a guiding light, so to speak.
Not only have the standards influenced me positively as a future teacher but this exercise has also exposed me to the national and state websites and resources that are critical to my future profession. I am now pretty comfortable in navigating through the RIDE website and also the Common Core national standards website. At first it was like reading a foreign language, but by the end of this exercise, the standards started to make more and more sense to me. Undoubtedly, the standards will help me and guide me to the critical formative and summative assessments that my students will need.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis standards analysis really motivated me to completely dive into what standards are and how effective they are. I really enjoyed learning about the RIPTS. They are a set of standards that I personally wish to fulfill as a teacher. Interestingly enough we don't know who they were developed by and that will still strike my curiosity until I find out! The NCTE standards are great. They do not limit instruction for teachers but provide them with guiding points. One pro of having national standards, is that they provide a basic framework from which teachers can work off of and with. Also, they provide a set of broad common principles to which every instructor is held responsible for. With this, its is hopeful that from east to west, every school aims towards the same general direction in this content area. A con is that not every school is the same nationwide, and the standards are not personalized for each student. They are generalized. As I further teacher I will definitely do my best to follow the RIPTS, and follow national standards.
ReplyDelete