The Joy of Standards

How do you know if you’ve written a really great curricular aim? You are genuinely excited for students to learn it.

One of the many systemic challenges that plague educators is the feeling of being awash in more content and standards than they can reasonably teach. State and national standards ignore the reality that there is more that is useful to learn that can be taught. The pressure to “cover the standards” because everything matters creates a desperate rush where nothing matters. Curriculum experts are keenly aware of this problem and routinely note the need for individual teachers and schools to prioritize their content to insure viability.

One of my favorite experts, James Popham, makes the claim that educators ought to shoot for no more than 6 high level curricular aims as the key outcomes for their courses and to organize their assessment practices. This number will likely strike non-educators as sensible and current teachers as laughably low in comparison to what they feel the need to “cover” from their standards. In comparison, there are 25 standards just for reading in grade 5 in the Common Core and the Common Core was a strong attempt to be more judicious with standards. How would you ever narrow that down to 6?

The trick, and the fun, is that you don’t narrow, you create. The invitation to create “power standards” or “curricular aims” is the open door for teachers to reassert their own autonomy and expertise in a system that often works to undermine both. Outlining the technical process of creating these standards highlights the labor involved. Here I want to celebrate that it can truly be a labor of love.

I am currently working on Popham’s challenge of writing 6 curricular aims for a course in American Studies that I used to teach. I am working on 6 that are, in Popham’s words, “truly salient, broad, yet measurable.” I am happy to report I grabbed some right from the official standards that seemed to fit that bill with a bit of massaging:

Inquirer — Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence (Common Core Literacy 9–10.1)

In looking at the various reading standards, however, I was struggling until I wrote my own:

Reader — develop the stamina, skill, and motivation to engage in regular, effective, extended reading for a range of purposes.

I still need to work on whether or not that is salient, which I think involves immersing it in salt water, or measurable enough to be a useful curricular aim. But I do know one thing. When I wrote that I had that sense of “YES, that is what I want my kids to learn and be able to do.” THAT feeling should be the one guiding our creation of curricular aims and power standards.