Standards-Aligned Weekly Planning at the Highest Level
Goalbook Pathways Standard Outline Pages for Reading and Math
It is no secret that purposeful lesson planning that pushes students towards success has a few critical elements:
- A clearly defined standards-aligned learning target: Teachers must have a destination in mind for their students as they plan instruction.
- A way to assess skills that build toward that learning target: Formative and summative assessments are only effective when they are created with the end in mind.
- A collection of learning experiences based on instructional best practice: The activities that students engage in should offer them the right amount of support to push them to independently master objectives.
Back in December of 2018, we announced that we would be enhancing Goalbook Pathways to optimize the instructional design experience for all users. We are now at a point where we think we can start doing that work at scale. With this release, we offer teachers more standard pages with resources that enable them to design lessons that incorporate the key elements from above by organizing resources in the most logical instructional sequence.
Logically Sequenced Objectives
Deciding when to teach one skill or objective versus another can be tricky to figure out because the text of learning standards doesn’t offer teachers “the how” and rarely do they detail all of the skills that students need in order to display mastery. The newly added formative objectives and items sections on standard pages serve to offer a roadmap for daily and weekly standards-aligned lesson design.
The pages that were selected for this round of enhancements are all foundational grade-level standards that are essential for success in college and beyond. This means they are packed with foundational skills that students will continue to reference in order to make progress. We lay them out in a simple and logical format and even number them as a suggestion for the most logical teaching sequence.
The reading pages selected for this round are all connected to the domain of reading comprehension. The texts associated with each objective are also conveniently linked on the standard page near the formative assessment items (access reading pages below). The math pages for this round are connected to critical standards in various domains that span grades 3–8 (access math pages below).
Assessment Alignment is Crucial
Another aspect of these enhancements that distinguish these pages from the previous versions is the clear headings for Formative and Summative Assessments. The assessments are short, standards-aligned, and have engaging tasks that students can complete within a short amount of time. The best part is that they are rigorous and directly aligned to the standard so teachers don’t have to worry about a lack of coherence between the assessments and level of rigor put forth by the learning objectives.
There are still scaffolded assessment items at multiple depth of knowledge levels (DOK 1- 3); the difference is that they are organized according to the sequence of objectives, and, when applicable, you can find additional item progressions at the bottom of the pages.
What we learned from teachers after our initial beta test of these pages back in December is that standards-aligned lesson planning is most effective when the body of learning objectives derived from the standard are clear and sequenced logically. This is especially true when teachers are unsure of how to teach the standard and, particularly, how to teach the skills embedded in each standard at multiple rigor levels. These new pages help teachers with doing that. Check them out now:
Use Them Now!
Math
- Understanding Multiplication with Objects (3.OA.1)
- Fractions as Sums of Unit Fractions (4.NF.3)
- Word Problems with Adding/Subtracting Fractions (5.NF.2)
- Word Problems Using Ratios and Rates (6.RP.3)
- Represent Proportional Relationships (7.RP.2)
- Properties of Exponents (8.EE.1)
- Operations Using Polynomials (HSA-APR.1)
Reading: Informational Text Standards
- Determine Main Idea (RI.3.2)
- Determine Main Idea (RI.4.2)
- Determine Multiple Main Ideas (RI.5.2)
- Evidence in Informational Text (RI.6.1)
- Evidence in Literature (RL.7.1)
- Evidence in Informational Text (RI.8.1)
Reading: Literature Standards
- Ask and Answer Questions (RL.K.1)
- Ask and Answer Questions (RL.1.1)
- Ask and Answer WH Questions (RL.2.1)
- Refer to the Text (RL.3.1)
- Referring to the Text (RL.4.1)
- Use Textual Evidence (RL.5.1)
- Evidence in Literature (RL.6.1)
- Evidence in Literature (RL.7.1)
- Evidence in Literature (RL.8.1)
- Support Inferences with Strong Evidence (RL.9–10.1)
- Strong Evidence and Uncertainty in the Text (RL.11–12.1)
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