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Great results in the area of standards alignment always follow exceptional collaboration.

One of the best parts about my job is that I get to travel all around the country and meet thousands of educators with equally as many opinions about a variety of topics. This has no doubt broadened my perspective as I have learned as much from them as I have been able to offer. Such was the case after visiting a school that needed support in the area of standards alignment.

Not long after I began laying out the steps on how to create an exceptional system for standards alignment, a young teacher sheepishly stood up with her hand raised. You could tell that she was trying to say something to help keep me from embarrassing myself. I’ve had this happen before, only to have someone tell me that my zipper was down or that they couldn’t hear me in the back of the room. This was different, though: “Mr. Lopez, I really appreciate you coming here, and I think I speak for the staff when I say that I don’t want to offend you, but you need to know that we’ve already done this.”

A little confused, I asked, “You’ve already done what?”

“We’ve already done planning around standards alignment. This really isn’t new to us.”

Wanting to dig a little deeper, I asked, “When exactly did you do this?”

She responded, “Oh, we did this like … six years ago.”

Trying to be as respectful of her as she was to me, I said, “Standards alignment is not something that you’ve done; it’s something that you do.”

When the standards movement began, many decades ago, there were many commitments that districts and schools made to jump on board. Unfortunately for some, those commitments were more about how to align standards through protocols and flow charts than they were about practical applications that teachers could put into use in their classrooms. In spite of the plethora of information and tools that we now have that can help us better align our standards, not much has changed for our most struggling schools. For those schools, it appears that educators are expected to know what the standards are, which essentially equates to them having the ability to look online on their state department of education website. Rather than beginning with the standards and shaping their lessons around them, teachers begin with what they want to do and then attempt to squeeze in a standard here or there in order to meet the expectations that their schools or districts have put on them. Sure, they write down the standard being taught with every lesson on their whiteboard each day, but is that a result of a conscious effort to let the standards drive their instruction? Don’t get me wrong; I understand why so many teachers today are more likely to embrace this form of standards alignment in their classrooms. The fact is, this is some of the hardest work that we ask our educators to participate in today. I’d even go a step further by saying that, because of the current systems being used to align our standards in schools, it’s also among the most boring.

Let’s face it—aligning your teaching to state standards lacks a sense of educational romance, if you will. In fact, it is often described as the trenches of teaching. Belaboring as it may be to some, it is critical for the overall success of a school. Unfortunately, there are those who think that aligning one’s standards is simply a matter of opening a textbook and following the pacing guide. If you are among those who think this way, please understand that the greatest joy of a teacher can never be found in the completion of mapping out the standards for any given year. It is found in the journey that allows you to discover new, better strategies to align your work as a grade level or department and hence create better results for your students on a regular basis. If the concept of standards alignment has been a source of frustration for you over the years, suspend that frustration through the rest of this chapter as I attempt to share a simple and practical exceptional system that will give standards their due attention without making it a laborious process.

WHY IS ALIGNING STANDARDS SO CRITICAL?

As professionals, we are called to participate in activities that improve our results while learning from our successes and failures. Aligning standards provides an objective framework that can guide our path. The beauty of this framework is the ability that it has to allow continuity from one grade level to the next. When we participate in such continuity, our instruction becomes more meaningful and purposeful. When every grade level follows this framework, our instruction can never be in vain. But this can happen only when it is completed with the aid of systematic collaboration. Which is exactly why standards alignment follows collaboration on the exceptional system staircase.

COMMON MISTAKES IN ALIGNING STANDARDS

Two common mistakes are made when schools attempt to align the standards at each grade level. The first is that they confuse standards alignment with standards pacing. Pacing takes place when we chart the course to ensure that we introduce and give the proper amount of time to grade level standards throughout the school year. Pacing gives us instructional consistency so that every member of our team remains on track to teach the standards. Pacing is what ensures that Mr. Smith is teaching mixed fractions at a time that is relatively similar to his colleague across the hall. The pacing of our standards is absolutely important, but it is much different from the work that we do with standards alignment. In a nutshell, standards alignment is different because it focuses on the who, what, and how of standards. It is not driven by dates or timelines, but instead by the ideas and strategies that we plan to use as we teach students the standards.

Before I go any further, let me give this disclaimer. I don’t care what state you live in—chances are that you disagree with some of the expectations that it may have related to standards. I’ll be the first to say that I believe wholeheartedly in the instincts of a classroom teacher over someone with little to no experience with instruction. That said, we live in a world of accountability. That accountability is tested according to the standards that your state has chosen. Like it or not, it is what our schools are judged by. This to me is reason enough to embrace the standards. The alternative is to ignore this accountability, risk the probability of getting terrible results, be scrutinized by your community for failing students, and shape a negative image for them about the lack of success. Doing so is an injustice to your students and yourself.

The second common mistake when it comes to standards alignment is that schools rely too much on what it is that they want to teach instead of what it is that the state requires them to teach. If you’ve been in this profession for some time, chances are that you have seen this in action on one or more occasions. For example, have you ever caught a colleague say something to the effect of, “But I don’t want to skip that lesson; I love teaching it” or “Third grade’s going on that field trip? We wanted to go there first!” These are dead giveaways for an attitude that is pervasive in some of our most struggling schools, where teachers are driven to do what is most comfortable to them. I can still hear the echoes in the hallways of schools that I’ve visited:

Owl pellets are a fourth grade science standard? Who cares? Let’s do them in second grade!—It’s October, so let’s all do a unit on bats!— Our school mascot is the bear, so let’s be sure that every grade level spends a month on teaching about the variety of bears throughout the world and post some of our favorite sayings like “Have a beary good day!” all over the campus.

The Road Map

If any of this sounds familiar, let’s work to simplify the process of aligning standards while at the same time making it highly practical. Reduced to its simplest form, aligning standards can be completed in four steps. First, we want to identify specific skills that we are expected to teach. Second, we need to secure a variety of ways that we will use assessments along the way. Next, it’s necessary for us to brainstorm instructional methods that will act as the vehicle for our teaching. Finally, we need to make a list of the resources necessary during these instructional practices. These four steps of identifying specific skills, assessments, instructional methods, and resources make up what we refer to as “The Road Map.” This process is so practical, it can work with aligning any standard at any level. Let’s take a look at each step by using the following fourth grade standard and sub-standard as an example. An example of a full “Road Map” can be found in the appendix.

IDENTIFY SPECIFIC SKILLS

There’s a reason why I included the sub-standard in this example. As you can see, standard 1.0 presents a broad commitment to teaching word analysis, fluency, and systematic development, but it is each of the sub-standards that cut to the heart of a standard. This is critical to understand, as too many educators look only at the broad standard. Doing so ignores the details that help to generate progress for individual students.

As we look at sub-standard 1.1, it is clear that the skills we are trying to focus on are that of fluency, pacing, accuracy, intonation, and expression. Identifying the specific skills is no more than framing our sub-standard and simplifying our expectations. It takes what can often be a long narrative and puts it into checklist form. This sets the stage for the steps that follow as we design our standards road map.

ASSESSMENTS

If the specific skills tell us what we will need to focus on, then the assessments will help us know if we’ve done our job. Because standards road maps should act as a resource of information for you to go to, the purpose is never to task yourself to death. The key to remember when selecting assessments is to list a variety of assessments that you can use to analyze your progress. You do not have to use all of them just because they are listed.

INSTRUCTIONAL METHODS

As we make a list of instructional methods, we want to keep these two words at the forefront: engaging and explicit. Because so many of today’s educators are constantly feeling the pressure to get through all of the standards, these two words are often abandoned from their vocabulary. We must not only bring them back into our personal lexicons, but also make them the focal point. Instruction is always best when students are involved in the conversation, partnering together, and active in their learning. It flows so much better when we’ve defined the goal before the lesson is delivered and given our students explicit expectations before we begin. A perfect example of this is in the College Readiness Literature Circles that were developed at the NEU at Rosemary Kennedy in Riverside, California.

Led by the principal, Jackie Casillas, and her support specialist, Carol Hall, this staff took the concept of literature circles to the next level. As many of you know, literature circles is a method of having a student read books with a group of students who are reading at the same level. After reading together, students then work individually on a different “job” guided by templates given to them by the teacher. NEU at Kennedy staff took those jobs and turned them into “careers.” What used to be known as the “word wizard” job is now the career of a “journalist.” What was formerly called the “character analyst” is now the “sociologist.” Included in this shift, which promotes literacy while also focusing on college readiness, was a kid-friendly PowerPoint that described each career to the class before they even began working in this format. The teachers at the NEU at Kennedy understood that their explicit introduction into this form of engaging reading instruction would be more successful if they took the time to explain the details of this model. Because they did, many of our NEU schools today have been exposed to this engaging and explicit concept.

RESOURCES

Getting the best resources is all about joining forces with those at your grade level or in your department. Without high levels of collaboration, you’ll use only what you own. Doing that will ensure that you make very little change along the way, because all you’re really fostering is self-dependence. As we discussed in the previous chapter, our collaborative efforts have to be more about students than they are about adults. When we share ideas from one class to another, ALL students benefit from those ideas. For those of you with children of your own, or those who hope to be parents one day, think about this question: Don’t you want your kids to participate in the stellar lessons and engaging units that are taking place in the classrooms next door to them? Sharing resources as part of developing a standards road map ensures that you get the answer that you want, which surely has to be “yes.”

Veteran teachers will admit that all of this is a trial and error process. That’s all right! Give yourself the freedom to make mistakes, to look back and say to yourself, “Boy, that lesson didn’t turn out too well!” Being successful every time is not the most important thing. Learning from those mistakes and improving your teaching over the years is, though. While generating the ideas for this chapter, I asked Kristie Szentesi, one of the best teachers I have worked with, to show me an example of one of her road maps. When she delivered it to me, it was covered with notes, highlight marks, and sticky notes. It looked as if it had been through battle over the last several years as it was constantly being updated. This is exactly what your goal should be as you create road maps of your own.

WHERE DO YOU BEGIN?

After taking in all this information, many schools may find themselves asking the question “Where do we begin?” For this, there are two very acceptable options. As school leaders consider both, remember that while it may be easier for you to ask your entire school to focus on the same standard, each grade level or department may have very different challenges to address. What good does it do you to have all of your teams focus on standards in geometry, when first grade’s lowest-performing area is in fluency and third grade’s is in literal comprehension? Aligning standards cannot be a process in which the principal assigns one standard and asks the staff to turn it in by the end of the week. Setting reasonable timelines for this process is absolutely fair to do as a leader, but we need to make sure that those timelines are reflective of an attitude to affect our students in a timely manner and not one driven to complete a task by a certain deadline. Allowing individual grade levels to choose starting points based on their needs shows leadership. Asking them all to do the same thing at the same time shows management. The choice is yours.

STARTING WITH THE GREATEST NEED

One path to choose as you align standards is to begin in an area of the curriculum where you display the greatest weakness. Too many schools select subject matter based on what is the easiest to begin with. This makes no sense at all. Why should a school or grade with 80 percent of students performing at levels of proficiency in math choose math to focus on, when only 30 percent are proficient in reading? Let’s take it a step further. Not only should you choose your lowest-performing subject matter, but you should also choose the standard within that subject matter where your data show the greatest need for growth.

Imagine you have a big backyard with grass, trees, and flowers throughout. As the seasons come and go, you experience a variety of issues that require your attention, the most common of which are the weeds that take root on the dirt paths throughout the yard. As you consider the areas of need in your yard, you wouldn’t first decide to up the watering on the lawn or add more fertilizer to your flowers, would you? You’d do something about the weeds! Of course, focusing on the beautiful portions of your yard is certainly more personally fulfilling, but it does nothing to improve the problematic areas that take away from the overall beauty of your backyard. Furthermore, failing to address the problems in your yard may someday wind up infecting all the other areas that you made successful. Aligning our standards has to be the same way.

STARTING WITH THE GREATEST ACCOUNTABILITY

The other possible route by which to begin your standards alignment journey is the greatest area of accountability. As an educator in California for 15 years, I watched as state standards and levels of accountability changed over the years. This was not unique to California, nor was the way that the state department of education helped weigh the standards. In fact, in many states, standards blueprints are readily available online to educators. These blueprints display the standards, tell you what percentage of the state test is made up of each standard, and give you the number of questions on the test related to that standard. As you sort through these blueprints, within moments you can see that standard 1.5 makes up 3 percent of the test and has only one question, while standard 2.7 makes up 27 percent of the test and has 9 questions. If this is the case, there is absolutely nothing wrong with schools making a list that shows the standards, weighted from highest to lowest. I know what you’re thinking right now: “But that’s just teaching to the test.” No, it’s not; it’s teaching to the standards! Some standards have been deemed more important than others at any given grade level. Giving more attention to some standards that are more significant mirrors the way we live our own lives.

Think about this for a moment. In life, there are some values that we hold as more important than others. For me, it’s more important that my six-year-old knows how to cross the street safely than it is for her to bathe every night. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a fan of dirty kids, but there’s no comparing the safety of my daughter with that of her personal cleanliness. Furthermore, holding the value of her personal safety is paramount, as it is a building block to similar values that she will find important in the future. Why is it that some standards are given the greatest attention at one level and little attention at another? It’s because they have been chosen as foundational standards that must be mastered in an effort to breed success at the next level. If state standards are reflected on high stakes state assessments and some of those standards are deemed to have more value than others at a particular grade level, there is nothing wrong with gearing your instruction to those very standards.

TWO ACTIVITIES TO GET STARTED

Before you begin the process of creating your exceptional system in standards alignment, I would suggest you introduce the four-step process that I’ve shared in this chapter by participating in a couple of practical activities. These activities are known as everyday life standards and speed mapping.

Directions for Everyday Life Standards: Make a list of activities that we as humans participate in on a daily basis. From driving a car, to feeding our kids, to changing the diaper of a baby, list these ideas individually on a template that includes this everyday life standard. Include a heading for skills, assessments, instructional methods, and resources on the template as well (see below). During a staff meeting, give individual teams a different life standard and ask them to creatively map it out within five minutes in a way that would help someone teach the concept to another person. When they are done, have them share as a team. The purpose of this activity is to ease any anxiety that educators might feel about going forward in this process by showing them how we naturally go about aligning standards in the first place. In life, we know when our kids are hungry and what to do. We’ve created strategies and sought resources for how to change diapers without even thinking about it. After much practice, aligning academic standards can be viewed the same way.

Directions for Speed Mapping: Select a state standard from any subject. Make sure that the standard has at least four sub-standards. Divide your staff into four teams. Assign a different step for each team to work on. One team will focus on skills, another on assessments, the next on instructional methods, and the last on resources. Make sure that each team focuses on only its part. Give each team a blank template with one of the sub-standards written on it (see below). For instance, team one will have sub-standard 3.1, team two will have 3.2, and so on. When you tell them to start, they will have 90 seconds to brainstorm and make a list of suggestions on their template. At the end of 90 seconds, have them rotate to the next team and focus on the next sub-standard. When you have completed four rotations, have each team share its road map. The lesson here is to show what was completed by staff members from a variety of grade levels in a matter of six minutes. What could they accomplish with their own grade level in 60 minutes if they divided and conquered? What would they be able to do in six weeks, or six months together?

The system discussed in this chapter, as well as the activities offered, should encourage a higher level of collaboration among team members. Aligning standards is tough work when done alone. When it is achieved together, however, we are far more likely to be encouraged by the results that we find along the way. And because aligning standards is not something that you’ve done and instead something that you do, it must be a lasting commitment that we make year in and year out as a staff.