District News

Essential standards reflect our collective beliefs about what is “essential” for our young people to know and do from the array of standards and all that is crucial to know within the disciplines and within the scope of the human experience.  That’s a tall order, but we are committed to the work of clarifying, understanding, and teaching our student so they can develop strong reasoning skills, habits of mind and academic foundations in preparation for their successful futures. It is important to remember that our essential standards have a direct connection to our common vision for students articulated in our Educational Vision framework.

Our curriculum contains two types of learning standards: essential and supporting. Essential standards are often complex and are usually paired with higher order thinking skills. Supporting standards are foundational to essential standards and they often contain simpler concepts and skills that make learning the essential standards possible.

MDIRSS teachers have been working in study groups since spring 2011 to “unpack” the essential standards. This process engages them in identifying and interpreting the discrete content and skills embedded in each standard. Done in a group this way, teachers develop a shared sense of what the standard means.  For planning instruction, it helps to clarify a standard’s explicit and implicit meaning along with its simple and complex elements. Though tedious, the unpacking process streamlines teachers’ work in creating appropriate assessment measures—creating a specificity that facilitates new ease in targeting the specific concepts required in learning a standard.

Progressions of learning are also a part of our essential standards. From research we know that many concepts are best learned in progression, or in sequence. Developing learning progressions provides teachers and students with a road map—complete with checkpoints along the way to fully understanding our essential standards.