Understanding and Applying Standards

Planning the lessons that you are going to teach is one of the most important parts of the proccess, that's why standards are so important, since they are a guide that help you know what exactly you should teach your students.

The first time I looked the standards, they were a bit complicated and confused for me, but, after unpacking them everything became easier. Usually the standards are long sentences, that can be easily understood if you break them into small parts. It is also very useful to highlight the verbs, that are the actions that the students need to be able to do at the end of the lessons. The nouns help you to know where this actions should be directed. I think that the mission of unpack a standard is to make the teacher understand what is the learning goal for this unit.

Once you know what you have to teach, you need to plan how you will do it. That's when backwards mapping comes into action. You know what is the goal, but now you have to figure out how are you going to teach the standard. It is in this part when you create the objectives, the activities and at the end the assessment to check if your students have learnt all the concepts that you have taught. Using this strategy help me so much to find the way to teach, in my case, homeostasis. This concept could be divided into several lessons, with interesting activities that catch the students' attention, helping them to learn the concepts. There is a lot of information in this unit, and could be overwhelming for students and teachers if you give all the information in a non well organize sequence.

The third part of the process is to create a SMART objective, which indicates us the concepts the students should learnt by the end of the lesson. This objectives have to be specific and measurable. Once you develop the activities you want to do through the unit, it's easier to determinate this objectives, since you know the skills the students will need to use to meet the standard.

In conclusion, this unit help me to feel more confident about the standards and how to implement them in the lessons that I will be teaching very soon.