Never having taught in a school, I have not had much of a reason to really study national standards. In the Digital Media course I’m taking with Dr. Grabe, we focused on national standards and discussed how they are translated into classroom activities. It was a fascinating discussion for me, in part because I was recently invited to review this website www.advanc-ed.org. As I was reading about standards, benchmarks and frameworks in the book, Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning by Grabe and Grabe, I was able to see how alignment in all of these areas would be beneficial.
Here’s something I wrote for class that I wanted to share (and is something that I applied the internalization process to before addressing – see “The Who” post):
Standards are written by national organizations such as ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) and NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education). The standards written at this level are very broad, like the one in the example, Students understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior. (Standard 5), intended to outline the “general concepts and skills student should acquire” (Grabe and Grabe, p. 23). National standards are then broken down into granular levels called benchmarks and frameworks. Benchmarks which are still quite broad, but more specifically outline what will be required by grade level. A curriculum framework, usually at a state or district level, is even more definitive and organizes the objectives for skills and knowledge to be gained. It is up to the classroom teacher to study the spirit and letter of the standard from the national level to the framework level, and construct activities, learning experiences and assessment for the students which will meet the goals originally intended when written.
Alignment is a term often used in instructional design to describe a tie between the objectives, the content and the assessment in a course; ideally these would be in sync covering the same topics. When thinking about how this ties in with national standards; I see standards as objectives that must be analyzed using a top-down approach. During the process of granulating national standards into benchmarks, frameworks and then into individual lesson plans, educators, textbook manufacturers, and administrators, etc., at each level must align their thinking and their goals to one another using the standards as tools to do so. With regard to the standard in this example, reasonable alignment would mean that a benchmark for this standard would be included for each grade level, such as “students should understand copyright issues with internet publications.” At the framework level, school districts would be more specific in saying “students must understand copyright law with regard to blogs” and a lesson plan might include, “students will be able to generate an essay that outlines three legal and ethical issues related to copyrights and blogs.” In this way objectives, content and assessment are aligned from national to individual classroom levels.
