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We want it to be like this....
Planning according to the standards.
This is something most teachers are told. This idea is sometimes called backward planning. It would make sense to design your curriculum with the standards in mind, and I would say that all teachers do. Teachers know the general idea of the standard or topic and then develop their unit or lessons based on all of the things that the teacher knows about that topic.
This is typically too broad though. I heard a teacher once say “teaching is like throwing spaghetti at the wall, you just try and see what sticks”. I find this is the common teaching method of many teachers, just load students with facts and see what they remember.
But it turns out to be more like.....
Actually planning according to standards is much more streamlined.
Actually planning according to standards is much more streamlined.
When developing your unit plan, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have your state’s standard or a copy of the NGSS standard in front of you. If you are teaching NGSS or similar 3-D teaching, then it can be extremely easy to plan.
Your goal should be a student-friendly version of the performance task that is reworded to match the phenomena that were chosen for the unit. To be clear, the performance task is not your unit goal or the goal that you tell the students, but should be a combination of the performance task, what you’re going to teach; and your phenomena, which is the lens of how you are teaching the performance task.
While looking at the standard, there are evidence statements showing what students should be able to do, to build up to the actual performance task. Use these to develop what the students should know in your plan.
Everything in the unit should be directly connected, and the phenomena; as well as the ideas starting simple and becoming more complex explanation. Every worksheet, question, reading, lecture, absolutely everything should have a direct connection, and should be taking the one simple idea and making it more and more complex.
Developing a plan
Developing a plan
Developing a plan is tricky. You have to decide on your lens first. Learning about the weather or conservation of mass can be learned in so many ways. This is an excellent place to incorporate student choice in their education. You can brainstorm the different ways you could present your topic and let students decide which to pick, or allow students to brainstorm with you.
All of these are a lens that you teach the same content. The various careers use the same knowledge in different ways. As teachers, we can identify how the information we want students to learn can be applied, and then show examples of this to grab student interest and give them experience in a real-world application as well as introduce them to careers they may not have known existed.
You may have the whole class doing the same, or you can have students pick their own to allow student choice. Another option is to have all students choose one career path, but different avenues of knowledge. For example, all meteorologists could be assigned different weather situations, and have to create and explain an example radar picture. One student shows a tornado condition for your city, while another shows snow conditions for the same city. These are simple ways to add interest and student choice to your teaching.
Weather Examples
Weather Examples
Meteorologist
Climate Scientist
Satellite Imagery Specialist
Environmental Activist
Professor
Meteorological Engineer
Forensic Meteorologist
Conservation of Mass Examples
Conservation of Mass Examples
Chemist
Pharmacist
Chemical Engineer
Professor
Chef
Concrete worker
Emissions Technician
Now you know exactly what students are supposed to learn based on the standard, then try matching it to phenomena. For some ideas of phenomena or to develop your own click the link.
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