Breaking Down Your Standard

When I first started teaching I didn't have a textbook, roadmap, or anything that guided me on HOW to teach my standards. All I had was a list of standards and an administration that told me to teach them and teach them well.

I attended trainings but the only thing I was told to do was look at the verbs and the nouns but we were never told what to do with them. It looked something like the image below

Does this look familiar? Frankly this was always confusing to me. Sure I could separate the nouns and verbs, but what was I suppose to do now? I usually walked away from these trainings even more confused then when I started.

I spent a lot of time in my first years of teaching trying to figure out exactly what the standards meant and how to teach them. After a lot of trial and error I came up with a way to use the nouns and verbs of the standard to create statements.

The first thing you may notice is that I still identified the nouns and verbs of each standard. However, instead of putting them in a chart I created specific statements that would help me know exactly what I was going to teach.

For example: The first verb in the standard is "Compare". I would ask "Compare what?" I am comparing whole numbers up to 100,000. I then wrote down the statement " Compare whole numbers up to 100,000" as shown above. Then I would take the next verb, "Order". I would ask "Order what?" I am "Ordering whole numbers up to 100,000 and that was my second statement.

The verbs/nouns "represent comparisons" had an extra step. First what am I representing? I am represent comparisons up to 100,000. Now I have to ask "How am I representing these comparisons?" I am representing these comparisons through the symbols <,>, =.

These 3 statements as shown above are what I need to make sure I teach the entire standard in the depth needed. .

The next step is to determine HOW you are going to teach these statements and the amount of time needed to teach them.

In the "How to Teach" section you can also add visual or strategies you would like to teach these statements.

This is just one way to break down your standards that I have found to be helpful. Let me know in the comments below if you would like to know more about this process!