For a long time now I’ve felt that there was something missing from state standards, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
There’s no question that in so many ways content and achievement standards are so much better than they were when national organizations and then states first started cranking them out in earnest in the late 1980s. Who still has their copy of the 1989 NCTM standards?
As states started to develop content standards, the product more often than not read like laundry list or checklist of isolated bits of knowledge and skills. One of my recurring nightmares is of attending a high school history department meeting and watching the department head and teachers assign 125 US history standards to 125 class periods across the school year (1 class per standard).
Worse still were those individual standards so packed with ands, ors, parentheticals, and conditionals that it would take a week to unpack them, forget the time needed to teach and assess them.
No, we’ve come a long way since those days.
We are much more likely now to see examples of assessment items or student work that help define what a standard means. Our ECD and alignment friends have been very helpful in that regard.
My colleagues Karin Hess and Marge Petit led the way in showing how standards connected across grade levels.
The Common Core made a valiant attempt at connecting content knowledge and skills with practices.
There is a much stronger connection now between content standards and achievement standards, or at least some thought has gone into what a student is supposed to be able to do once they have mastered all (or most) of these standards. Descriptions of proficient students and portraits of high school graduates are much more common.
Perhaps each of us always had an image of a high school graduate or proficient eighth-grader in mind but putting it on paper and sharing it with others tends to make it more real and realistic. It goes without saying, of course, that those portraits should include more than the competencies developed through academic content standards.
Speaking of competencies, I’m still not really clear on what competencies are, how they actually differ from standards, and how they are going to move the field forward (that’s the uppercase F field, curriculum, instruction, learning, etc., and not just testing), but that’s a topic for another day.
Despite all of these advances, however, I was still left with the uneasy feeling that something was missing.
Then the other day, while killing an afternoon watching Instagram reels from my favorite GBBO bakers,as one does, it hit me. What’s missing from our state content standards are directions on how to put all of these pieces together to produce the perfect student, or at least one who can be presented to polite society at an afternoon tea party.
What in the world am I talking about?
A Recipe for Disaster
After that epiphany, my mind jumped back to the computer programming class I took the summer between my junior and senior years in college as I was beginning the journey from music major to educational researcher to evaluator to assessment specialist. A young professor stood at the front of the lecture hall holding a box of Pampers and a baby doll. He began reading the directions for changing the baby’s diaper:
Step1: Place the baby on a flat surface.
He then proceeded to slam the doll face first against the wall.
A bold, but effective, instructional choice. I never forgot the importance of complete instructions.
Whether the goal is to produce a freshly diapered baby, a delicious cake, or a high school graduate, more complete directions are necessary.
Open any cookbook, or open your favorite baking website, and you will find recipes that contain three critical features:
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- An ingredient list
- A beautiful photo of the finished product
- A detailed set of directions on how to get from the ingredient list to the finished product.
Without the third element, only the most experienced baker is going to produce something resembling the desired product. Think about the technical challenges on GBBO. The rest of us are lucky to produce something edible.
Our state standards have been the equivalent of the ingredient list. Recently, as described above we’ve begun to include the beautiful photo on a more regular basis. We don’t have, and rarely even talk about, the third component; that is, how to process and combine the ingredients to produce the final product.
More Than Curriculum and Instruction
At this point, you may be thinking, as I was initially, that the missing piece is simply good curriculum and instruction. As I watched the bakers discuss the finer points of steps such as folding a mixture into the batter, the science behind the necessity of using cold butter (and also cold hands) and adding eggs one at a time, the details of timing, temperature, and so on, I realized that this level of direction was something different (above and beyond) curriculum and instruction.
On the surface, there may seem to be an overlap with curriculum in that there is a sequence of steps to follow. Curriculum, however, as I see it, still allows for choices in determining how best to approach accomplishing each of the steps, identifying what resources and tools are needed to achieve the goal, figuring out what substitutions, if any, can be made, and ensuring that those are available when needed.
Instruction, obviously, is quite different. Instruction is about learning how to accomplish each of the steps, first individually, and then with practice, in combination. Instruction may be about learning the importance of measuring ingredients in terms of weight rather than volume. If, as in my Italian/Italian-American culture, the ingredient list often is a little less then precise, instruction may involve learning how to convert “just enough flour,” “a little olive oil,” and “the right amount of salt” to actual measurements. My mother’s translation of “the right amount of salt” to add to the water when cooking pasta was to spell her name with the salt – fortunately for our tastebuds and long-term health, we knew that she went with her nickname, Peggy, and not Marguerite. Instruction may be about selecting the best ingredients. Instruction also may be about making accommodations for particular contexts and to meet the needs of particular individuals.
All of those curricular choices and instructional decisions, however, are guided by the directions in the recipe.
We need the directions.
To Get It Right, Write It Down
Like the aforementioned portraits of a high school graduate, I’m sure that given a list of ingredients or a set of state content standards, each of us can form a mental image based on theory and our own experiences of how to put them together to achieve the desired outcome. But history tells us that there is simply too much variation in those images and variance in the completeness of our individual mental images.
There is plenty of room to argue about what that final product should be. When we have made that decision, however, we cannot continue to leave it to chance that local educators or curriculum developers will know the steps necessary to get from a set of state standards (or competencies) to the desired final product.
We need the directions.
We’ve come a long way in developing state standards over the past four decades. Now it’s time to fill in the missing piece. Can we do it?
Piece of cake.
Image by Dima Dmitry from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 