Posting the standard every day

Why not both?

 

Every administrator has their own opinion on this. Personally, I feel like the objective or I Can statement is perfectly sufficient.

I know of some admin colleagues who require the essential question, objective, and standard. For those who teach multiple subjects (elementary teachers), that’s waaaaay too much!

 

Not at all. Because most students don't bother to email so I have emails like that once a month. Much easier than posting something daily.

 

All my notes are already uploaded. They have been since after year 1. The only new notes I have to add this year are from my Calc 3 class.

 

I make do with one. My room is actually really small. (My one biggest gripe in my district ) Any more whiteboards and we would have no room to move around. I understand your private school needs to make sure you're teaching what you're supposed to via the posting of objectives, but I'm quite glad my district treats me professionally.

 

You don't reflect on how the lesson went and update accordingly ? I change a few small things in my notes each year. Are you too lazy to do so? I find time to make these changes since I'm not spending it posting objectives.

 

I do in class. Students know to add notes in the margins and jot down footnotes, etc.

My notes are fill-in-the-blank style.

 

My school does treat me professionally. It just has higher standards for its teachers to justify the truly stellar salaries and benefits they bestow on us. And we don’t need a union. They just pay us what we’re worth because they recognize the school doesn’t exist without us. And I don’t have to deal with small classrooms (that’s not even a thing at my school) or poor conditions of any kind. We understand the importance of high quality.

 

Not if they're absent, which was your biggest reason for doing what you do.

 

That's one way to spin it

 

Those type of things are included in the originals. Sure, I add on as I see fit, but they have most of everything. Yes, they will miss certain comments or what have you, but they can do just fine with the provided notes. I literally break down each problem and write the motivations for each step. For example, “resolve the vector into its horizontal (x) and vertical (y) components because we need to sum the forces along each respective axis before we apply Newton’s 2nd Law (f = ma),” etc. I don’t leave any ambiguity in my notes, unlike some teachers I see who only show the steps and not the how and why for every part.

 

Tis the truth. Otherwise, I have total autonomy in classroom. We don’t have district-wide curricula or Common Core or other such nonsense to abide by or silly bureaucratic rules to heed to. We teach how we like so long as we teach the standards.

 

I have six white boards in my classroom (they're all on one set of tracks at the front of the room) and to be honest I use all six for various things throughout the day. And I think with the standards it's a state thing for us. MsHolyOak is in my state if I'm not mistaken, my friend who teaches in the middle of the state also has to do it. The explanation I was given when I asked because I was nosey was "It aids students to track, monitor, engage, and provide feedback about the curriculum that is being taught."

 

I am going with the page protector idea and I will be typing up all of my standards for Unit 1 this morning! Hopefully I can find a spot to the side of the board where I can pin it up.

 

We also have to submit "lesson plans" which are basically exactly what you write on the board! So I wish our admin could just look at that for the standard. It's interesting because I student taught in a school with very little support but my mentor was allowed to basically do whatever she wanted!

 

We don't have to submit lesson plans per se, but my admins will pop in unannounced from time to time and ask to see our lesson plans and things for the week. I do mine for months at the time, so I'm always ready for that. They usually look to make sure your lesson plans match up with whatever standard you claim to be teaching.

 

I can see that for science, for example, when you don't want to give away the "ending,'' but for math I want my students to see it. So I'd write something like "I can use the distributive property as a strategy to multiply.'' I could highlight the vocabulary and while it focuses students toward learning it doesn't give away the entire lesson... they'll be sitting there thinking "What is the distributive property?" But once it's been revealed, I want them going back and using that terminology. I definitely think it works better for certain subjects over others.

 

Agreed. I try to make mine has ambiguous as possible while still following the rules. In other words, like with everything, I keep one toe just over the line. Stuff like for example "Mitochondria and the Power System". But if I'm being perfectly honest, I don't think most of my students actually pay attention to it. Maybe one or two per semester that pays attention.

 

Very true. But posting them helps me as the teacher and if it even helps one -- just ONE -- student, it's worth it imo.

 

Eh. I can see the benefits for students, if they take advantage of actually looking up the education standards from the state. Personally, I don't ever really look at it for any length of time for information. I always have my master lesson plan binder up front somewhere which is what I usually refer to. Which of course it's built to the standards but. My master lesson plans has all my notes and things as well.

 

I don't post mine every day. I have 4 preps. It's just not happening. I do post them when I'm being observed. On our observation rubric according to my evaluator, it's the difference between being a 3 and a 4 (she doesn't give 5's, at least not to me.) Putting all of that text up for each of my preps would be time consuming and take up my entire board. I have limited wall space, and I'd rather use it for fun things rather than text only a handful of students will ever look at.

 

So I spent about 10 minutes typing up the standards for my first 3 units and I'll hang it somewhere from a page protector. My board will have the essential question, objective, agenda and homework..which I feel is manageable since I only have one prep! Writing the entire standard would have been too much.

 

We are supposed to put them in our lesson plans but don't have to display them.

 

My personal opinion, as an OLD teacher, is that requiring teachers to post standards and objectives and perpetually refer to them, is another example of teaching to the test.
If I am to be treated as a professional educator, I need to be trusted that I can teach the required elements of my curriculum without adding endless, almost useless, requirements that take me away from the real reason I am in the classroom.

 

Our math curriculum is very Inquiry based. Posting an objective about division, for example, would guide them far too much in solving an open-ended problem. It just wouldn’t work for us. For our instructional philosophy and curriculum, it works best to let them work through a problem using any strategy they can come up with and then introduce them to division (or whatever we’re teaching) at the end of the Inquiry period. I don’t think it’s subject-specific as much as it’s just based on instructional philosophy. Math is one of our most strongly inquiry-based subjects at my school, and it was the math coach who told me that I definitely should not be posting the objectives when I first started teaching at this school and asked about it.

 

^
What curriculum do you use?

 

We write our own curriculum. Some units are completely teacher-written. For others, we pull from published resources. We often use Cathy Fosnot’s CFLM, Investigations, and CMP. Which resources we use varies by grade-level and unit. Every unit involves teacher-made lessons.

 

Yes, thank you. I often get asked why my tests are take home and why they're just straight out of the book. It's simple: I don't teach for them to pass tests. The powers that be say I have to have tests, fine so be it. But don't expect the tests to be something I put faith or massive effort into. (Seriously I spend fifteen minutes per class grading tests zip zip done – the final is even easier to grade it goes through a scantron.) Same thing with posting the standard while I can see some benefit to some who take the initiative to take advantage, I tried to make it as easy on my self as I could. I'm very organized with everything I do. So my standards card is usually paperclipped right to the lesson plan. All I have to do is slap it up.

 

So, if you don’t have a curriculum or Common Core or “other nonsense”, what standards are you using? You have to have SOMETHING in place.

We write our own units using materials we choose. We still base them on standards.

 

We go by the California State Standards that are outlined by the State Dept. of Education. With clarification, we follow the standards, but do not implement the pedagogy as it is outlined in various texts. For example, the stupid way they want you to teach children to add and subtract or solve certain word problems. That’s not happening at my school. Ever.

 

But according to other posters, you’re teaching to the test, wasting valuable board space, not being treated professionally, etc! Didn’t you know?

 

LOL...I am with them. There's literally no point of posting a standard when it's in my lesson plan anyways AND I am already posting an objective in student friendly language. Kids won't understand the language in the standard anyways. I have no room on my whiteboard so it'll be placed to the side or something.

 

My school doesn’t make you post it so long as it is included in your lesson plan and lecture notes. This is why I include them at the beginning of each set of lecture slides and at the start of each section in the printed notes. See? Easy.

 

Sure. I just don't see the point of it. My school wants us to keep it posted up.

 

The point is that some students need to see the purpose of the lesson and what they need to know at the end of it. You may say verbally what that is, but they make forget. Later, when they review their notes, they might say, “Oh, that’s right. I was expected to know how to apply the Binomial Theorem to expand polynomials” or something. Specificity is very helpful to students. The high-level performers may not and probably don’t need it, but my low and medium students think it’s helpful, in particular, when they’re absent.

 

That's what the objective is for and I always write my objective on the whiteboard. My objective might be "SWBAT understand how place value can help us add and subtract decimals."

In addition to the objective, I also have the post the standard which might say "6.NS.2: Add and subtract decimals using the standard algorithm." I don't see why we need both and I don't believe that kids will refer to the Common Core standards in non-student friendly language. The standard I posted is somewhat readable to students but a lot of them will not make sense to the kids. It seems like it's more for the administrators.

 

Right. I would think you would be okay, so long as post the exact standard code, but can’t you paraphrase the standard? Or does it have to be copied verbatim?

I write the standard code exactly as it is stated; that is to say, I do copy and paste it, but then I modify the wording every so slightly to remove ambiguity. I still include most of the official language from the DOE website because we are encouraged to get students to utilize the academic language, but I write it in such a way that the average student can understand it.

 

^
Yes, it has to be copied verbatim in addition to the student-friendly objective. My objective is usually more focused than my standard since it takes a few days to teach one standard usually.

 

Understood. I like this idea and my notes and lessons are structured similarly.

The reason the teachers at my school are required to do this is because we have less government oversight at my private school than in public schools and so the admin need to be sure that we are teaching what we say we are, and I absolutely agree with them. We still have to abide by state and federal laws and most education laws (to stay WASC accredited) and so we have to teach all the standards as set forth by the DOE. The difference is that we are free to teach it however we want, which I like.

 

^
We are free to teach it however we want as well.