Sunday, October 19, 2014

Colorado State Standards

I have been working on an online learning project involving four modules about fourth grade social studies. I have based my lessons in these modules on the Colorado State standards for 4th grade. The state standards for K-12 curriculum are published by the Colorado Department of Education or CDE. They can be easily found on the CDE website. http://www.cde.state.co.us/standardsandinstruction The fact that I would use state standards to guide my teaching and lessons is a given since every public school and district requires teachers to use them. Documentation from the CDE about state standards first introduces the standards in a straightforward way, i.e. “4th grade history”. Under each standard is the outcome and skills a student needs to master, i.e. “organize and sequence events to understand the concepts of chronology and cause and effect in the history of Colorado”. Then under this outcome and skills are four evidence of outcomes; inquiry questions, relevance and application, and nature of history. There are bullet points under bullet points. And this is only one state standard. Analyzing the state standards got me thinking. Who makes these standards? Why are they written as they are? How do they relate to other state’s standards? I have always assumed the state government somehow created these standards to make sure students learn at their potential and to organize the educational system, even if some of the learning points seemed a bit high for target and a little random. I wasn't too far off on the first part. The CDE website shows the history of the state standards, created in 1993, http://www.cde.state.co.us/standardsandinstruction/cas-historyanddevelopment by a house bill. Then committees were developed and meetings happened to compose the state standard documents in comparison to national and international benchmarks. There is even a Standards and Assessment Task-force and evidence of education-related action taken by the Colorado General Assembly. http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdedepcomI am glad to know that our tax dollars are hard at work and that the standards I agonize over are not dealt out arbitrarily. Thanks department of education! 

11 comments:

  1. Hi Clare! Sounds like this has been a 'win' for education! I also wonder frequently who develops these regulations... most recently with all of the news coming out of JeffCo. It is refreshing to know that there are informed experts behind the scenes making these determinations instead of random, arbitrary decision makers! Thanks for sharing the info!

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  2. Clare,

    I know that are standards are very well thought out and that the government is on top of it. However, how many of the people in the department of education are teachers? I teach math and I must say, if I taught every single standard they asked me to every year I'm suppose to, my students would be testing every other day! I still wish we would cut down our standards to focus on the most important ones to go deeper in our teaching...

    Erin

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  3. Hi Clare-
    So interesting. I love that you dug down to find out where the standards actually come from. I do think as teachers we just teach and all the new standards are coming out and we just keep plugging along without really understanding the standards as a whole. Did you find that your new social studies standards correlated with the online CMAS test given for the first time last spring? We just got our scores back and as a school we are wondering if it students use and access to the technology that was hindering their scores, or the content.

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    1. I haven't done the CMAS test. What conclusion did your school find about technology and their scores?

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  4. Hi Clare, nice post! I share your sentiments about standards. I teach high school English and often times find myself scratching my head when looking through Common Core. It seems every revision of the standards becomes more complex and expects teacher to cover a wider array of material, all the while losing more time to testing. Interestingly enough, this year my school district paid an outside consultant to come in and help rewrite curriculum to meet the Common Core expectations. What they handed out was a copy of the standards with a watered down version for students and then just jumbled all of the standards with no rationale. I asked administration what I was supposed to do with the document, and they responded that I should just follow the standards and ignore the consultants’ prepared sequencing document. It seems that even curriculum experts are a bit befuddled with what to do with all of the standards.

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    1. What a waste of money and time hiring the consultant! Stuff like that drives me nuts!

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  5. It is reassuring that our state’s standards are carefully thought through by more than one person but sometimes disturbing in the biases shown, especially in history. I have a B.A. in history and lament the political slants given to K-12 students who take the information at face value. There were many protests recently here in Colorado about history course standards in high school. The following link is a biased, but interesting, point of view: http://youtu.be/-0lAX5OuIoo.

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  6. I feel as teachers it's often easy to implement standards without giving them a second thought. For all of the steps that we need to take from reading to the standards to getting kids to master them, there's never really much time to think about why the standards are what they are. I think go to the source, the CDE was a great step. Even though it seems as though they have gone through their due diligence in creating diverse and qualified groups to create these standards, I'm still a bit hesitant to accept the standards as they are. I think that everyone has biases, intentional or otherwise, that shape how they think. I think social studies is probably the subject most susceptible to human subjectivity. As the primary consumers of these standards, teachers need to remain healthy critics of the process and outcomes of this kind of work.

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  7. Thanks, this topic is interesting, especially in light of the recent protests going down in Jeffco.
    I agree that it's good to know who develops these standards, and how they are established. But I suppose my beef is more with the amount of testing in general, and the high stakes of the outcome, especially if we don't get results until months have passed. Research shows that the best way to impact student achievement is timely frequent feedback...it drives me crazy that we don't get results until the following school year.
    I've also felt a little crazed lately about how the emphasis on testing removes a spotlight from teaching social/emotional skills. As a middle school teacher, sometimes I wonder if these three years would be more productive if we just taught pre-teens how to be good people. They are in such different places physically/developmentally...just some things that are on my mind lately! Thanks for your post.

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  8. State Standards! How we love and hate them. It's nice that the state takes some time to update the standards. I know the new rendition of standards were created by teachers who taught the subjects and grades that they are experts in. I feel like this gives them more credibility then if they were created solely by politicians, parents or private sector stakeholders. One thing that I love about the history standards is that they are pretty broad, for instance my school following the Core Knowledge curriculum for middle school history, although I have a different curriculum then most of the state, I am still able to incorporate the standards because many of them are skill based. This is a great topic and I'm glad you brought it up!

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