When it comes to unpacking standards and backwards mapping, while I wasn't a teacher yet, these were already concepts (if not names for them) that I was well aware of. I have been in far too many classes where there are vague standards nobody, including the teacher, seems to understand, and that doesn't benefit anyone. Sure, it makes the school look good for parents, but if nobody understands what needs to be taught or learned, what is the point?
Understanding is the goal in all things. We talk so people understand us, we write so understanding may pass on to future generations, we do experiments to broaden our understanding of the world... So it only makes sense that standards should be as understood as possible. This doesn't seem like a job for teachers but, like so many other things in the world, somehow it has fallen to teachers anyway, even in things as nigh-universal (in this country) as the Common Core State Standards (as I have to deal with in Hawaii).
The thing about standards are that they are benchmarks. They are designed to be fuzzy lines of achievement, but with real, tangible effects. I, personally, find it best to use standards as a marker of the direction students should go, hoping to cultivate a learning environment where those fuzzy lines get blown out of the water by clear pinnacles of understanding and proficiency. To do this, we have to break down the academic speak and fancy talk that looks good to politicians, lawmakers, and shareholders, and turn it into the language that everyone else speaks. What do students need to do? What do they need to know? This is, actually, precisely why I picked the standards I did for activity 1 and 2 this week. It is the one most geared towards helping everyone know how to unpack standards from their flowery academic talk to something more generally understood.
Once you know the goals, backwards mapping becomes key. You know where the student needs to end up, now all you have to do is walk them back to where they will start the year. This can be done in multiple ways, and not every single step needs to be set in stone (as many classes may grow or explore in directions you weren't expecting, but still head towards the final goal) but there should definitely be checkpoints along the way to make sure you're reaching where you need to be. Assessments and activities built in to make sure that students are, roughly, where they should be and on track to reach the finish line. But you only know the intermediate steps when you know the start and the finish: the standards of the grade before and the standards you're meant to meet this time.
The main thing this also helps you do is plan according to the grade level. The example in the video showed to the cohort was in baking a pie: while there are many ways to learn how to bake a pie, if you want to demonstrate your ability to bake one, writing an essay on the history of pies won't work. In the same way, with standards, if your final idea is to be able to speak fluently in one group and be able to write in specific contexts in a second, you shouldn't practice writing too heavily with group one or speaking too heavily with group two. While they might be useful things for each group to know, if they prove they can do the wrong thing, that gets you no closer to knowing if they have learned the standard, and them no closer to understanding the standards that have been just out of their reach.
This idea has always struck me as a relatively obvious one, but the amount of people for whom this idea is some strange, alien novelty kind of boggles my mind. It illustrates a strange stagnation we need to break free from in education, and one that will only be accomplished by creative teachers getting into the works and modifying them for the better from the inside.
In the end, these skills, while simple and obvious to myself, are vital ones that need to be drilled into all teachers, regardless of how long they may have been teaching. Teachers must understand what they are to teach before they can teach it, and students must understand what they're supposed to learn before they can learn it. You can't learn something you don't know you don't know, you can only learn information you know you don't know, solving the problem of not knowing it. Teachers must also be able to backwards map (which I always want to refer to as pamming... but this is me liking silly puns and jokes) to make sure students are engaged and learning what they need to be every step of the way towards their goal. This way, everyone is focused and unified in their efforts to teach, learn, and grow to be the people who make tomorrow the bright future it is.
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