Design Lessons for Students, not Standards
Happy Friday, all. This one was originally posted on the VIVAteachersblog. I’ll ask some students if I can feature their projects up here next week.
For more on CCSS, see previous post.
Enjoy!
NOVEMBER 14, 2013 by KIM BOLTON LEAVE A COMMENT
Design Lessons for Students, not Standards
I consider most conflicts to be problems of design. As a teacher, my first task is always to design lessons that are engaging. Some teachers do this very easily with humor, or great storytelling. I do this by prioritizing relevant and valuable ideas shared by the students in the room, and I excel at that… or so my students and their parents tell me. If my designs are off, my lessons will not be engaging and my students will not learn. And, believe me, students are quite effective at letting me know when my lessons are not engaging.
In general, learning standards are implemented as a design solution for a problem that never was. In my nine years of teaching social studies and Spanish, I have had to learn and prioritize the Illinois Learning Standards – of which there are six different sets for the social studies ‑ along with socio-emotional standards, the ACT-aligned College Readiness Standards, and now the Common Core State Standards for literacy. (There are no social studies standards for this newest set, so by default, I am directed to use the non-fiction reading and writing standards.) As part of my evaluation, all of these standards are to be accounted for in my lesson plans, as if they add value that wasn’t already there in the lessons I’ve been teaching. Please consider the value and relevance of the following lesson currently happening in my classroom.
I teach Financial Literacy as a semester-long social studies course for high school juniors in a Chicago public school. The first quarter, which just finished on October 31st, focused on professional skills; the second quarter revolves