Content Standards

Content standards are a clear outline of skills, knowledge, and understanding that each child must master in a given area such as language, math, and science. Benchmarks are standards to help teachers and schools determine if a child is performing in the skills and knowledge for their grade level. The purposes of these standards are to make sure that all students meet or exceed academic content so that they are prepared for continuous learning.

Before developing instructions teachers should learn about each child in their classroom. Teachers should know such things as their background, culture, interests, talents, home language, strengths and weaknesses and learning style. When teachers understand each child’s characteristics they can plan a curriculum that allows each child reach their full potential.

Learning is a process that is divided into three stages, they are (1) receiving information, (2) connecting the information to prior knowledge, (3) using the information. When students are paying attention the information is entered into their brain and stored in what is called their short term memory or working memory and is stored for a short time. Teachers can help students move the information to their long term memory by organizing information into categories, repeating information, grouping information, or using key word strategies e.g. ARITHMETIC( A, Rat, In, Toms, House, May, Eat, Toms, Ice-cream). Now the information is in the student’s long-term memory and teachers will use the information in other lessons. Teachers may link information previous learned through webbing or from the students outside of the classroom interests.

Adapting instructions allows teachers to maximize student’s independence, to maximize student’s participation in all classroom activities, and teaches students to be effective peer tutors, thus allowing students to learn from each other. Adaption is necessary to meet the success of all students in the class including children with disabilities.

There are three components of a good assessment. First the assessment provides relevant evidence, second it will measure the skills knowledge or abilities the teacher holds important, and third it will match purpose with skills assessed; ex. factual test (multiple choice, match, and fill in) with conceptual understanding us essay, short answer.

The three stages of instructional cycle are; Intended in structural outcome, Planning, and Assessment. During intended in structural outcome teachers will look at the school standards and know what skills and knowledge the students must master. Once the teacher knows what skills must be mastered they will plan a lesson around meeting those skills and they will plan what type of assessment they will perform to make sure those skills are being mastered. Finally the teacher will perform an assessment to determine if the students have met the learning outcome. The assessments can be performed during and after instructions.

In order for teachers to meet the needs of all the students they must analyze the general curriculum, know what materials they need in order for the students to reach the learner outcome, and what strategies they will need to use to have those goals met. Teachers can identify lesson topics with instructions by asking challenging questions or doing a survey before the start of the lesson to get the students interested in the lesson, discuss what you as a teacher will be doing and what they as a student will be doing to reach the learner outcome, monitor the students learning during the lesson, and close the lesson with restating the goal of the learner outcome.