![]() Many of our schools are implementing power or essential standards as a way to combat the overwhelming body of standards for which teachers are responsible. That doesn’t mean you don’t teach all the standards, but by giving priority to some standards, and really providing in-depth, targeted instruction in those areas, you can support students in a way that will help them be successful as they progress through their academic career. The key, however, is prioritization, not elimination. Power standards (also called essential standards, priority standards, etc.) are a subset of the total grade level specific standards in each of the content areas that the students must know or be able to do by the end of the school year in order to be prepared for the next grade level. So I wonder – is less more? Can we look at our standards, as other countries do, and have three main essential standards in kindergarten that kids master, with the understanding that, if they master these three skills, they will continue to master more advanced concepts much more easily? Could there be essential skills identified in each grade level that would add new essential skills to the foundational part of the subject as students progress in subsequent grades? Identifying the Target But a second component is that there are foundational skills that students must have in order to build knowledge at a higher level that students just aren’t mastering because the rigor level of our standards is much too high for some children to keep up with. A big part of it, I think, is because we’re asking children to know way too many standards. I often look at other countries and wonder why we are not as successful as we could be in the area of math. So, we have extensive and ambitious collection of standards laid before us, yet we have students coming in with all kinds of backgrounds and experience levels…how do we keep up with everything? How do you figure out what is essential for the kids to know and what will be most impactful for them?Īs we’ve discussed in other blog posts, we have to take time to ask ourselves some questions as we prepare to teach our standards: What do we expect students to learn? How do we know when they’ve learned it? How do we respond when they didn’t learn it? How do we respond when they already have it? Not all kids come to school with the same academic behaviors, skills and background knowledge in place, and some students have a home life that is actually counter-productive to their academic success. In the United States, we have a set of fundamentals that students must learn at each grade level, but we don’t take into consideration that kids don’t all learn the same way or at the same speed. I feel that we have created many of our own at-risk students by asking them to be at a certain level when they’re just not prepared. And then, we wonder why kids are failing. ![]() ![]() Clearly, we’re trying to cram way too many standards into our students. According to Marzano’s research, if we really want to cover all these standards that are set before us, we would need to change from a K-12 program to a K-22 program. Unfortunately, our standards in the United States are pretty overwhelming to most people. That was my first real experience trying to interpret standards, trying to figure out what they meant and what to do about it. I remember looking at what the standards said for math in first grade, then considering the child I was working with who was cognitively impaired or learning disabled, and trying to figure out how to expose the child to all those standards. ![]() The first time I do remember standards being at the forefront of my work was during the special education part of my career when I had to create standards-based IEPs. Throughout college, I had learned about different types of skills kids needed to know and different types of frameworks, but I don’t remember the push for standards in the same vivid way, and of course, we didn’t have the state tests that assessed skills by grade level either. Thinking back on my teaching career, I vividly remember being a new teacher and getting this giant binder that I could barely hold that had all of the K-5 GLCEs from Michigan and being told that these were the standards that I was responsible for. ![]() When did standards become such a driving force in education? ![]()
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