How Teaching to New State Standards is Like Climbing a Mountain
Climbing to the top of Yosemite’s Half Dome and looking out over the entire Yosemite Valley is an experience that attracts people from all over the world. While only the most well-trained and well-resourced climbers access the summits of Everest, K2, and Denali, novice hikers can stand alongside the most seasoned professionals at the top of Half Dome and feel the same sense of achievement. How is this possible?
Half Dome is able to challenge the most skilled technical climber and the recreational hiker because it offers multiple paths — differing in challenge and support — to reach its summit.
Most recreational hikers take the one-day hiking path, allowing them to reach the summit and come back down in 10–12 hours, trekking a total of 16 miles with an elevation gain of 5,000 feet. Cables and stepping boards built into the curved part of the dome allow hikers with no technical climbing ability to safely scale the last 400 feet of granite.
Professional climbers often take a different path — an ascent up the vertical northwest face of Half Dome. That path requires a great deal of technical knowledge, well-trained climbing skills, and sustained motivation.
In the classroom, teachers are tasked with guiding students of all ability levels to reach the summit of academic success. At Goalbook, we aim to provide support for educators by drawing from research that has been proven to impact teacher practice and student learning.
By helping teachers reach their students through multiple means of access to rigorous learning, we believe that ALL students can succeed.
The Challenge of College and Career Readiness
The new college and career readiness standards present an entire range of mountains that our students are expected to climb. It is easy to stand at the base of just one standard and feel overwhelmed the same way a novice climber could at the foot of Half Dome. The challenge is very real.
How can educators ensure the rigorous learning objectives embedded in a standards-based curriculum, while planning for increasingly diverse classrooms, have the broad accessibility of Half Dome and not the unattainability of Everest?
The answer lies in integrating two instructional best practices that so far have developed in parallel (and sometimes in opposition of each other): standards-based instruction and Universal Design for Learning.
Standards-Based Instruction
While new college and career readiness standards like the Common Core are relatively new, standards-based instruction is not. Each state has already established its own learning standards and developed assessments aligned to those standards; while some states have adopted Common Core, others have re-aligned their standards to college and career readiness. In both cases, standards-based instruction has emerged to ensure students make systematic, measurable progress towards the statewide learning standards.
Standards-based instruction has been successful in helping educators define what is taught and how what is being taught is assessed. The standards themselves define what students should learn; the assessments aligned to those standards help educators determine how students can demonstrate mastery of the standards.
Revisiting our mountaineering metaphor, standards-based instruction helps educators clearly see the mountain their students need to climb. Furthermore, a standard helps an educator map a single pathway to the summit through backwards-planning instructional objectives that build toward mastery, as demonstrated by summative assessment.
By itself, standards-based instruction is insufficient as a guide to educators for developing students who are experts at learning6. In order to help students develop the skills to learn, experience learning, and foster a desire to learn more, educators must map out multiple pathways that account for the wide variability of individual students, so that ALL students can succeed at becoming experts at learning.
At Goalbook, we’ve developed a five-step approach to designing instruction that engages and supports every student — no matter what level of skill he or she currently has. Setting high standards and providing support to overcome learning barriers with the UDL framework will allow all students the rewarding satisfaction experienced by every hiker after reaching the summit.
